Gaiden59

I can't really provide much information for the schools you have listed, but I will say this. The top schools are at the top because they are strong in a lot of subfields. Once you get out of the top, many schools may be weak in some or most areas but can be pretty decent at some subfields. For this reason I think looking at general rankings, especially for such diverse fields as CS, can be dangerous. What really matters is how your school and professors are in your subfield. I would advise looking at the professors at the schools in your area. Where have they published? How often do they publish? What do their former students do? Once you start answer those kinds of questions, you can really get a sense of the faculty and reputation of the school in the area specific to you.

Basically it coming to the point where some of the schools I got in to, and under normal circumstances would possibly attend, are completely out of the running due to 2-body problem issues. However I still want to visit and meet people at these schools and learn about the research. So do you think it is wrong to waste a school's money to have them fly me out when I already know I won't be going?

While I have no doubt what you say is true at some schools, I know that it is not universally the case that the committee fully reviews all applicants. My research advisor told me that as a grad student she and others worked with the admit committee and their job was to read and comment on the applications. She also said that while a professor would look at their comments (multiple grad students would comment each paper) before any decision was made, the professors would remove many applicants from the pool from the comments alone before the actual committee reviewed them, and this was at a top CS school. So if there were a lot of comments like "very low GRE and GPA, but good research", I could see a professor at a top school tossing it before taking it to the committee since there will likely be a large stack of "good GRE, GPA, and research" in the pool. Obviously grad students have more knowledge as to what a good applicant should look like over a secretary or something, but they aren't quite the professors of the committee who have done this several times so for people who have less balanced profiles, it might be hard to make it through any kind of early elimination.

I don't know if a 760 would knock you out of the running, but I would say a low 700s would certainly be a red flag at any of the top schools. Consider this: some quick googling showed distributions for different intended majors, and I found statistics that said 18.6% of intended comp sci people get an 800. I don't think this number can be far off since 6% of ALL the people who take the test get an 800. The stated mean for CS is 717. So going in with a 760, you already have an entire quarter of the people who took the test in your major did better in the only section that could possibly have even the slightest bearing on your ability to perform well. Obviously other factors can carry you and it would be silly to weed people out over such a silly test, but I would not be surprised at all if a school like Stanford just auto-rejected anyone with a score below a 750.

I would say your research background seems very strong, but your GPA and GRE scores are a little on the low side, particularly for the schools you mentioned so it is hard to say how they balance out in the end. Out of the schools you mentioned, I would say Stanford is a bit of a long shot, but you could possibly get into the one of the others depending on how heavily they weigh your research and what subfield you are applying to. However, I don't think I would consider any of them safe. I don't have any advice for other schools to apply to in 2011 since I really only know schools in my subfield, but I would definitely advise taking the GRE again since the low score might really drag you down at top schools.

I got my Berkeley acceptance on Monday (maybe it was an early round or just my subfield since it only seemed to be a few people), and I didn't take the CS GRE (or any other subject GRE), but I am an American student. I think the subject GRE is much more important for international students, particularly those that didn't attend in the US for undergrad. Although I wouldn't sweat it either way at this point since what is done is done.

All the ones I know in case you or others are interested: Berkeley - March 14th/15th (Sun/Mon) University of Washington - March 16th/17th (Tues/Wed) UIUC - Feb. 25th-27th (Thurs-Sat)

It seems Berkeley has released some of its decisions for CS PhD. It seemed like several people where waiting for Berkeley last week.

Hey guys, so I am new to the website and I came across this thread so I will give you some updates. Here are the schools I applied to: UC Berkeley UCSB Washington Michigan Wisconsin UIUC UPenn I have received acceptance at UIUC (Jan 12) and UCSB (Jan 28). I also got a phone call from a professor at Berkeley who said that decisions would likely be going out next week.