The application may then be forwarded to Graduate Studies with a recommendation to deny on the basis of missing items. If an applicant has not paid the application fee, no action will be taken on their application record.
An application may be canceled due to non-payment of the application fee if the applicant has been given a deadline to submit their application fee and has not met that deadline. Graduate programs should make every effort to admit clearly desirable applicants, or reject those who are clearly unacceptable, as quickly as possible after the application package has been completed. However, all completed applications that are received prior to the program deadline must be given full consideration.
Some graduate programs prefer to consider all applications as a group. In such cases, the graduate program should inform applicants of the procedure and provide an estimated date for admission decisions.
If faculty members are reviewing applications for an extended period, the applicants should be kept aware of their application status. The Dean of Graduate Studies is responsible for notifying applicants of their admission or denial. The applicant must not be given information regarding acceptance or denial prior to formal notification by Graduate Studies.
Information regarding application status or admission decisions should not be shared with anyone except the applicant. If the volume of applications is large enough, multiple meetings might be required. This is purely my imagination I don't know how accurate this model is. Of course, I'm sure that how admissions are handled depends greatly on the school, program, and department. I'm interested in a few data points to get a rough idea of what the average is.
How much time does a typical committee spend on each application? I suspect there's a distribution. Obviously unqualified applicants will probably have their applications tossed into the reject pile pretty quickly.
Qualified applicants' applications might receive more attention. Do admissions committees look online for more information about an applicant? I've been on the grad admissions committee at my university for 30 years, and have been Dir of Grad Studies in math on two different occasions, so I have a good sample of what goes on here. First, in the last few years all our applications are electronic , so the admissions cte doesn't have to be in a little room with piles of paper any more.
This also allows much more asynchronous appraisal of files, which allows not wasting time trying to figure out common meeting times. Typically, a preliminary screening is done in a "distributed" sense, that is, obviously-not-qualified or misguided applicants are removed from the "active possibilities" queue. By this, I mean engineering or computer science students, or crackpots, who declare interest but have no documentable mathematics background, no letters of recommendation from mathematicians, no GRE subject test, no nothing.
Even after this initial filtering, we have many fewer funded as TAs or RAs spots than approximately-qualified candidates. Even though we expect maybe percent accept rate of our offers, the number of approximately-qualified candidates is still too large by a factor of 2 or 3 or more.
Candidates from small colleges in the U. This also precipitates discrepancies in GRE subject test scores. Nevertheless, we have found that this discrepancy is often very temporary, and after two years, or less, success in our program is almost completely uncorrelated with such things. Thus, many of the pretend-objective measures of prior success are of very limited value. The applicant, to a linguistics Ph. The committee then spent more time discussing details of the applicant's GRE scores and background -- high GRE scores, homeschooled -- than it did with some other candidates.
Other committee members defended her, but didn't challenge the assumptions made by skeptics. One noted that the college had a good reputation in the humanities. And another said that her personal statement indicated intellectual independence from her college and good critical thinking. At the end of this discussion, the committee moved the applicant ahead to the next round but rejected her there. When Posselt probed on diversity, she found that many professors said they felt an obligation to diversify their graduate student bodies and thus -- eventually -- the collective faculty of their fields.
In some fields, there was discussion about seeking more women, not just underrepresented minority groups. For example, Posselt found this to be the case in philosophy, a field that has of late been struggling with a perception many say reality of being hostile to women.
Many faculty members, however, appeared more comfortable considering race and ethnicity as a slight tip among otherwise equal candidates who had advanced to a finalist round. I try to admit students that are the best in my intellect with no regard for gender and race.
Black -- we get fewer blacks. It's true. But we do try -- in the past we've tried to attract them. But then they get the same attractive offers from Columbia and Yale and Stanford and Berkeley and so forth. So it's a small group typically who get a lot of attention. Many graduate departments -- particularly in science fields -- rely on international students. The departments observed by Posselt appear to practice a form of affirmative action for everyone who is not an international Asian student in that professors de-emphasize the typically extremely high GRE scores of such applicants to avoid admitting what they would consider to be too many of them.
This is in contrast to the attitudes of many professors with regard to considering American applicants of various ethnicities -- and who insisted on a single high standard there.
So you can basically throw that out as a discriminator. They're all doing 90th percentile and above. The domestic students are all over the place so there was actually some spread, some dispersion … so you could use that more as one of the quantifiers. Many professors also expressed fears that Chinese applicants are also inflating test scores through cheating. The faculty members on admissions committees pay a lot of attention to this issue, and report feeling burned in the past by applicants whose scores indicated proficiency but who arrived in the United States with very poor English skills.
This research experience is something that graduate programs in those fields are looking for in applicants. But the same is not true in other fields. In Mathematics or Physics, for example, it takes a few years of coursework at the graduate level before students can be expected to understand the concepts necessary to participate in original research.
Above all, the people making the selection decisions want to bring only the most agreeable people, and those who will cause the least amount of trouble, into their fold. They are looking for the best people, not just the best credentials. This can be a difficult notion for students to appreciate, for it is widely assumed that the competition for entry into graduate school is ultimately rational and fair, and therefore, that it must be based solely on objective criteria, such as grades or test scores.
Of course, grades are important, but there is a great deal at stake both for the graduate program as a whole and for the faculty members who supervise graduate students. It is important to them that they admit people who possess certain other non-objective credentials and positive personality traits. It does not work that way. The members of the admissions committee have a vested interest in ensuring that they only allow mature, polite, and generally agreeable people into their program.
They may spend hundreds of hours in relative proximity to graduate students, so it is only reasonable that they would avoid people who are unpleasant or annoying. Character and personality will be even more important to prospective supervisors, because they know they will have a great deal of interaction with any new graduate student over the next few years.
Students also need to understand some of the things that are at stake for the prospective supervisor. Many students fail to consider something that should really be quite obvious: People will agree to supervise a graduate student only if there is something in it for them.
Supervisors may be looking for evidence that you possess special qualities or skills that will help them with their own research. Everyone has specific needs, and that includes faculty members who supervise graduate students and allow them to participate in ongoing research or other scholarly work. The graduate school applicant must determine the needs of the prospective supervisor and address them at every step of the way through the application process.
0コメント