Who sits on admissions committees?

[packrat]

There seems to be a lot of talk on these boards about how much sway POIs have, and as far as I can tell, the general consensus is "not much" unless they (A) sit on the admissions committee, or ( are a big name professor in the department. This has made me wonder who, exactly, sits on these committees -- are they primarily comprised of junior faculty and a grad student or two, or do most top-tier programs also include a few more seasoned professors on the committee? 

 

It won't make a difference for any of us who are applying this year, but might be helpful for future applicants to get some sense of who is reading their application. 

[catchermiscount]

We get fewer applications than a lot of other places, so our committees include only three faculty members.  This year, we had two associates and an assistant, and that seems to be a relatively representative group.  In five years, I can recall only one "more seasoned" professor working admissions.  To build on the point made above, I don't think the three-person committee discusses matters with the other faculty too much.

[Penelope Higgins]

At the department where I used to teach, where a lot of you have applied, each subfield was given the files for its candidates, and came up with a ranking. Sometimes that entailed broad input, sometimes one person read the files and made their decisions.

 

At my current department, the admissions committee is 4 faculty but in practice the DGS does nearly everything. He or she reads the files (we don't get very many) and decides which ones are 'above the bar' before sending them to representatives of each subfield for ranking.

 

General similarities, but lots of minor variation. Sometimes there are grad students on the committee but in practice they have no influence on the outcome, at least in my experience.

[AmericanQuant]

Simon Jackman has a nice description of Stanford's system in his 2005 Political Analysis piece.

 

http://jackman.stanford.edu/papers/pa04.pdf

[packrat]

 

Simon Jackman has a nice description of Stanford's system in his 2005 Political Analysis piece.

 

http://jackman.stanf...papers/pa04.pdf

 

 

Wow. Leave it to Stanford to write a nearly 50-pg report on the statistics of GRE scores! Very interesting though, thanks for sharing. 

[shundai]

Does anybody have these pdf's to upload? The links no longer work.

Thanks!

[Chausson]

Use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (also useful in general, whenever URLs break, which is super frustrating for some policy reports).

https://web.archive.org/web/20150226071939/http://jackman.stanford.edu/papers/pa04.pdf