s1994

My biggest debate with myself when applying to Michigan is that "Ann Arbor is so cold..." lol!

Why would peers rank a program highly if none of the faculty publishes on APSR or JOP? Although research or placement are not explicitly weighed in the ranking, they are implicitly mingled in people's judgement. Prestige matters, but we also see prestigious schools with a relatively low-ranked PSC department (i.e. Penn). The ranking can be biased for sure, but serving as a starting point for students to pick schools, US News is for sure doing fine. There is no weight put on placement; that is why I said a healthy mix of ranking + placement history can be a good starting point.

US News is definitely the most popular one, although the ranking can be outdated sometimes, and it does not necessarily reflect the placement because much weight is put on faculty research, prestige, etc., instead of on student placement (i.e. two of the top 10s have not been placing well in the past 3-5 years). Thus, a healthy mix of US News ranking (and the Chronicle one as well) + placement history should be a good starting point to determine the initial list to apply to. And the list should be subject to additions and removals of departments based on your research interest matching with the faculty.

Hopefully Duke and Berkeley will release their results tomorrow! I have talked to people at Michigan -- Even though the information on their website is accurate, Michigan is probably not going to release the decisions until the end of this week.

It's pretty late of a day for Rochester to release results lol. Congrats to the people who get admitted!

I am going to take my midterms this week...

Is Duke going to release the decisions today?

Now we look at a non-top 10 (but extremely quantitative) department -- Rochester: Here are the admitted quant scores -- 170/166/165/168/163/170/159/162/163... Do we see a pattern? Is 160+ really that difficult to achieve? Do people really get a high chance of going to a top quantitative department without a high quant score? I think the answers are straightforward. **disclaimer** I am not talking about what is the *right* way to evaluate an applicant. I am talking about, if you want to go to a quantitative department, what would be a necessary (though *not* sufficient) factor that every single applicant should consider. I argue so much in this thread, not because I want to prove that who is right or wrong, but I want to make sure that the ambitious prospective students would bear in mind that if he or she wants to go to a quant department, quant score lower than 160 probably won't do you any good.

Now we look at a low-ranked top 10 -- MIT: 162/160/168/166/162/168/163/166/... Do we see a pattern? Is 160+ really that difficult to achieve? Do people really get a high chance of going to a top 10 without 330? I think the answers are straightforward. **disclaimer** I am not talking about what is the *right* way to evaluate an applicant. I am talking about, if you want to go to a top 10, what would be a necessary (though *not* sufficient) factor that every single applicant should consider. I argue so much in this thread, not because I want to prove that who is right or wrong, but I want to make sure that the ambitious prospective students would bear in mind that if he or she wants to go to a top 10, scores lower than 330 probably won't do you any good.

Just look at Berkeley. Here is the quant score of the admitted students in the past. 162/160/170/*153*/168/170/168/*800* Do we see a pattern? Is 160+ really that difficult to achieve? Do people really get a high chance of going to a top 10 without 330? I think the answers are straightforward. **disclaimer** I am not talking about what is the *right* way to evaluate an applicant. I am talking about, if you want to go to a top 10, what would be a necessary (though *not* sufficient) factor that every single applicant should consider. I argue so much in this thread, not because I want to prove that who is right or wrong, but I want to make sure that the ambitious prospective students would bear in mind that if he or she wants to go to a top 10, scores lower than 330 probably won't do you any good.

Do you know of anyone mastering a quant sequence at a top 10 who actually got 155- in quant section of GRE? I have almost *never* heard of it. Oops, I guess GRE is somewhat correlated to your performance in your coursework in grad school.

I am saying, GRE should be used to weed out weak applicants, and that's why applicants (instead of departments) should take the GRE seriously. If you can, get at least a 320. If not, people should be well prepared to hear that he or she did not get admitted into any top 10s. Hitting the 320 threshold is really not that difficult. 90 hours should be sufficient for one to get 330+. If one just wants 160+160, 20 hours would probably be really sufficient, assuming that one is not wasting his past three years in college.

I see no one arguing that AdCom should take GRE seriously. I have been constantly saying GRE is good as a screen to weed out people so that the rest of the (stronger) applicants can get more attention with faculty's limited time. It's a win-win situation. Is GRE so flawed that a top 10 department will miss tons of excellent students because of a cutoff at 320? Probably they will miss a few, but the top 10s will be doing just fine as always without these 160+155 students.

People are here to know how to cope with the system so that they can get admitted into a top program, not to know why and how AdCom is doing something wrong. GRE is awful, biased, and useless? Good to know. But you know what? No one cares. Good to hear that people are all acing your quant classes at your top notch programs currently. Congrats to you all. People like King and Imai will all be impressed by your quantitative excellence and hey, H and P will both take you with your 15x quant score.

Also, if the person is a troll who has bad intention, then he or she can also deliberately say that he or she is rejected so that people may think that they get admitted because they have not received anything. We do not know for sure. However, it does seem to be a fake report.

Since the website says so, then the school will probably release it this week. Wolverine is under maintenance right now; so it is possible that the School is updating the results.

It seems that you like California a lot...

No. None of the people who are in a top 10 PSC program has told me that "with HS algebra, one can succeed in the quant sequence at a top 10." They all told me that it's hard, and you have to be smart and to work really hard to know what you are actually doing in these classes. And they all told me that lots of people drop out of the programs. Moreover, I also do not see any grad student *in this thread* telling me that quant sequences at top 10s are so easy that with HS algebra and work ethic, everyone can succeed. I never do.

I didn't apply to NU tho. But it guess it's a good sign for you at this juncture -- you might be in a short wait list? Good luck! (I was asking that question because I was wondering if Yale has an online portal that we do not know. If not, I will suspect the credibility of that reported Yale rejection on the survey page as well.)

I will keep this quote, and we will talk about it in two years at APSA (if we are both surviving the program at that time). We will both laugh at this quote. Good luck on your applications.

1. PoliticalOrder, Maybe you should avoid personal attacks. 2. Also, "the GRE quant score does not represent one's ability to succeed in a quantitative methods sequence". Really? People who have spent 40 or 50 hours to study but still couldn't do HS algebra can master game theory, multilevel models, and Bayesian data analysis. I am convinced.

Duke and Michigan have specific online portals to check decision. Do other schools have similar online portals? Or are results updated on the same website where we filled in the application?

170/161 (331) 2/19/15 167/170 (337) 2/19/15 169/154 (323) 2/19/15 162/159 (321) 2/19/15 167/168 (335) 2/19/15 162/160 (322) 2/19/15 160/169 (329) 2/18/15 This is the stats for admitted Yale students on Grad Cafe. "people get into places like Yale and Princeton with scores throughout the 150-160 range in math" Who is giving out the misleading information? Who is demonizing GRE? I think it is pretty clear. If people spend 100+ hours AND still cannot get 160+ in quant (=HS algebra, plus a few tricky though definitely doable questions), I do not know (1) how would that person be admitted into a top 10, and (2) how can that person survive the quant sequence in the first two years. Note THE world "and" above. One can definitely be extremely awesome in everything else although having a 15x quant score. However, if someone has spent 100+ hours/tons of money on courses AND still could not get 160+, that probably indicates that he or she should not consider applying to top 10s in the first place.

What's the Yale reject about?

People are all so right.