Comprehensive List of PhD's that Require Subject Test

[ThirdSpace]

Hi All, 

Does anyone have a comprehensive list of top schools that require the subject test? There are some websites where they make it almost impossible to know in a concise fashion what you need. For example, for Princeton English, do you need the subject test? 

Thanks,

ThirdSpace

 

[Dr. Old Bill]

I have yet to see a comprehensive list, though there have been many threads here at GradCafe that give a pretty good overview of programs that do and do not require the subject test. Most of the very top schools according to USNews (Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Stanford etc.) require it. Your best bet, however, is to just do due diligence in researching programs that would be great fits for you, and note which ones require the subject test in the process. Once you have a healthy list of potential programs, do the math on how many require the subject test, then figure out whether you can comfortably get through the cycle without having to take it.

It is admittedly a shitty test, and if you CAN effectively avoid it, you should...but it really comes down to how many programs (and POIs) are doing what you want to do. If many of those programs require the GRE lit test, it's in your own best interest to bite the bullet and give $150, three hours, and a chunk of your soul to ETS.

[ThirdSpace]

That is very disheartening, but I am glad you were direct with me. Do you know how much your score counts compared to the GRE? I'm trying to shoot for all the schools you listed (depending on who does Poco or not....I'm sure you can tell from my username!!) and I believe I have the GRE (164V/ 165Q). 

Also - it seems that I need to know a lot of 16 or 17C British Lit, but that's not my research focus at all and I actually do not enjoy what people would traditionally assume is the English canon (Milton/ Shakespeare....). What do you, or others, advise here?

[poliscar]

7 hours ago, ThirdSpace said:

That is very disheartening, but I am glad you were direct with me. Do you know how much your score counts compared to the GRE? I'm trying to shoot for all the schools you listed (depending on who does Poco or not....I'm sure you can tell from my username!!) and I believe I have the GRE (164V/ 165Q). 

Also - it seems that I need to know a lot of 16 or 17C British Lit, but that's not my research focus at all and I actually do not enjoy what people would traditionally assume is the English canon (Milton/ Shakespeare....). What do you, or others, advise here?

Skim it, learn character names, plot-lines, details regarding meter & poetics, etc. You don't need to read in detail to succeed on the Lit GRE; the identification questions are generally quite shallow. 

That being said, I am a little puzzled as to why you're applying to English programs. Whether you feel the material is worthwhile or not, all of the programs you seem to be interested in will also require you take to graduate coursework in pre-modern lit. Princeton, for example, only allows you to opt out of a single period from Medieval - Modern lit. Likewise, the program at Berkeley has all PhD students take a graduate course on Shakespeare. If the cursory knowledge required by the GRE is potentially a deal-breaker for you, are you going to be ok with working with the material at a more advanced level? 

I also have to say that I think you're doing yourself a disfavour by avoiding Shakespeare/Milton/etc. To play the devil's advocate, I'd point out that Homi Bhabha has written on Milton. In the same vein, you'd be hard-pressed to avoid The Tempest in Postcolonial & Critical Race studies. There's also a lot of imporant recent scholarship that continues to draw on this work—Feisel Mohamed's Milton and the Post-Secular Present, for example, or Fred Moten's reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in In the Break. Whether you enjoy it or not is really beside the point, because you're going to have a hard time getting away from it, even if it isn't your primary research focus. 

Edited August 5, 2016 by poliscar

[toasterazzi]

6 hours ago, ThirdSpace said:

That is very disheartening, but I am glad you were direct with me. Do you know how much your score counts compared to the GRE? I'm trying to shoot for all the schools you listed (depending on who does Poco or not....I'm sure you can tell from my username!!) and I believe I have the GRE (164V/ 165Q). 

Also - it seems that I need to know a lot of 16 or 17C British Lit, but that's not my research focus at all and I actually do not enjoy what people would traditionally assume is the English canon (Milton/ Shakespeare....). What do you, or others, advise here?

So my undergrad degree is English Education & my MA is in English & American Literature. But my actual areas of interest are TV, Film, & Pop Culture. Now there are a lot of different programs in which a person can do such work, including a lot of English programs. Because of my background, I applied to mostly English programs. And part of why I picked Ohio State is because it is such a huge program that values of variety of fields, including TV/Film/Pop Culture. Though I do love reading, I have found myself pretty adverse to the canon over the years, so I feel you there. I did have to take some lit classes for my MA, many of which were in British literature (which is about as far away from my reading interests as you can get), and some of those classes were enjoyable while others were...er...they were classes that I took haha. I didn't have to really take much in the way of required lit classes for my PhD because all of my reqs were met by my MA.

But back to the test. OSU does not require the subject test. In fact, I didn't apply to any schools that did require the subject test. Some of them said you could send the score optionally, and I just opted right on out of that. It's true that a fair amount of the higher ranked schools do require the subject test, but rank wasn't ever one of my top priorities. I focused more on finding schools that aligned with my interests, and I got lucky enough that I apply to six of those without having to take an extra test. Everything I've heard about the subject test makes it sound like a pricey hassle, so if it can be avoided, I'd do so. That being said, from what I've read on the board here over the years, there seems to be a lot of variety in terms of whether people think the test score really helped or hindered them. So I guess if you find that you do have to take it, do what you have to do, but maybe try not to dwell on it too much?

[Dr. Old Bill]

7 hours ago, ThirdSpace said:

That is very disheartening, but I am glad you were direct with me. Do you know how much your score counts compared to the GRE? I'm trying to shoot for all the schools you listed (depending on who does Poco or not....I'm sure you can tell from my username!!) and I believe I have the GRE (164V/ 165Q). 

Also - it seems that I need to know a lot of 16 or 17C British Lit, but that's not my research focus at all and I actually do not enjoy what people would traditionally assume is the English canon (Milton/ Shakespeare....). What do you, or others, advise here?

Yes, your GRE general should be perfectly fine for almost any program, so long as your other materials are strong.

As for your second comment, to add my two cents to @poliscar, I firmly believe that until you can prove your academic chops at the graduate level, you simply can't avoid the canon. You can certainly have opinions on it (there was a great, long thread on GradCafe from two or three years back about revising the canon...it's worth looking up), but you'll have to have a functional acceptance of it, at least. There are simply too many scholars in virtually ALL good graduate programs who work in canonical fields for you to get by without having some sort of engagement with the canon...at the outset, at least. I'm not at all saying that this is the case with you -- just that you might not enjoy it (and I really don't blame you), but you have to accept it. Incidentally, I'm not a fan of high theory or symptomatic reading, but that hasn't stopped me from dropping Foucault etc. into my work from time to time.

[unræd]

14 hours ago, poliscar said:

Likewise, the program at Berkeley has all PhD students take a graduate course on Shakespeare. 

This is a very minor thing in an otherwise excellent post about the necessary (in the logical sense) importance of canonical works to theoretical positions that engage the concept of hegemonic canonicity, but I just wanted to correct this bit for anyone thinking of applying to UCB. The program requires that you have a Shakespeare course, but not necessarily a graduate one -- it can be an upper-division undergraduate class, so most students enter the program already having fulfilled the requirement with a course taken at their undergraduate institution. (It's also worth noting that there's been a lot of recent talk about how odd it is that we're one of the last holdouts for a specific author requirement at the graduate level, and I'd not be surprised if the req were gone in a couple years.)

[poliscar]

1 hour ago, unræd said:

This is a very minor thing in an otherwise excellent post about the necessary (in the logical sense) importance of canonical works to theoretical positions that engage the concept of hegemonic canonicity, but I just wanted to correct this bit for anyone thinking of applying to UCB. The program requires that you have a Shakespeare course, but not necessarily a graduate one -- it can be an upper-division undergraduate class, so most students enter the program already having fulfilled the requirement with a course taken at their undergraduate institution. (It's also worth noting that there's been a lot of recent talk about how odd it is that we're one of the last holdouts for a specific author requirement at the graduate level, and I'd not be surprised if the req were gone in a couple years.)

Ah! I stand corrected

[ThirdSpace]

On 8/4/2016 at 8:28 PM, poliscar said:

Skim it, learn character names, plot-lines, details regarding meter & poetics, etc. You don't need to read in detail to succeed on the Lit GRE; the identification questions are generally quite shallow. 

That being said, I am a little puzzled as to why you're applying to English programs. Whether you feel the material is worthwhile or not, all of the programs you seem to be interested in will also require you take to graduate coursework in pre-modern lit. Princeton, for example, only allows you to opt out of a single period from Medieval - Modern lit. Likewise, the program at Berkeley has all PhD students take a graduate course on Shakespeare. If the cursory knowledge required by the GRE is potentially a deal-breaker for you, are you going to be ok with working with the material at a more advanced level? 
I also have to say that I think you're doing yourself a disfavour by avoiding Shakespeare/Milton/etc. To play the devil's advocate, I'd point out that Homi Bhabha has written on Milton. In the same vein, you'd be hard-pressed to avoid The Tempest in Postcolonial & Critical Race studies. There's also a lot of imporant recent scholarship that continues to draw on this work—Feisel Mohamed's Milton and the Post-Secular Present, for example, or Fred Moten's reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in In the Break. Whether you enjoy it or not is really beside the point, because you're going to have a hard time getting away from it, even if it isn't your primary research focus. 

Wow I'm sorry for my absence! I think you raised an honest point because the research that I would like to do is quite interdisciplinary (read: it's not focused yet), and I have yet to hone in on a thesis topic. Of course, English programs in general are not a good fit. But there are specific programs such as Princeton, Columbia, UCLA, among others, that do have a strong poco department that try to pull in area studies/comparative literature. With that being said, here is my question: what do I make of comp lit? Spivak spelled its death as everyone knows, and I feel as though a lot of Comp Lit programs are being absorbed by English programs. For example, at Columbia, those departments are pushed together. I privately ask myself if doing a PhD in English, rather than in Comp Lit or Area Studies, will be a 'safer' decision in the sense that I have anticipated that those departments might not exist anymore, or that they do exist, but not as they did in the past (less funding or 'winding down'). I also feel that I need to take advantage of my interests in a way as well. If I am interested in post-colonial theory, then nursing that interest in an English department versus Comp Lit might be the more 'responsible' career choice (am I a grown up now for using that word?). 

I should make myself more clear. It's not that I despise Keats or other Romantic Poets, it's just that I would rather be reading Hafiz as I find that it does more for me. Thank you guys! 

Edited August 21, 2016 by ThirdSpace

[ThirdSpace]

On 8/4/2016 at 9:21 PM, Wyatt's Terps said:

Yes, your GRE general should be perfectly fine for almost any program, so long as your other materials are strong.

As for your second comment, to add my two cents to @poliscar, I firmly believe that until you can prove your academic chops at the graduate level, you simply can't avoid the canon. You can certainly have opinions on it (there was a great, long thread on GradCafe from two or three years back about revising the canon...it's worth looking up), but you'll have to have a functional acceptance of it, at least. There are simply too many scholars in virtually ALL good graduate programs who work in canonical fields for you to get by without having some sort of engagement with the canon...at the outset, at least. I'm not at all saying that this is the case with you -- just that you might not enjoy it (and I really don't blame you), but you have to accept it. Incidentally, I'm not a fan of high theory or symptomatic reading, but that hasn't stopped me from dropping Foucault etc. into my work from time to time.

This was incredibly helpful. "Functional" is a good word and I'm going to carry that with me.