By Professor Doom
“If I get a B in this course, I will die.”
--20+ years
ago, I’d get a student like this every semester, but it’s been years since I’ve
had even one. Mostly this is because of grade inflation—in most courses,
getting an A means you showed up, if that much.
It’s no secret
grade inflation runs rampant in higher education, and, as always, I’ll link
that to the student loan scam. The money from the student loan scam caused
tuition to inflate. Instead of paying a hundred bucks for a course, a student
now pays a few thousand: he’s going to be much happier with a better grade than
back when courses were relatively cheap. Toss in admin, paid to make sure the
students are happy, and, sure, pressure goes on the faculty to do what it takes
to make the student happy. “Easy A” is a cliché for a reason.
The student loan
scam has been flooding campuses for well over a decade now, and so now college
degrees are worth what a high school diploma was worth a generation ago: nice
to have, but not worth all that much.
Seeing their 4
year degrees are worthless, people are now flooding into graduate schools, paid
for by the same student loan scheme that made the college degree nearly
worthless. I do wish more people could connect the dots here, but that’s for
another day.
Today I want to
talk about getting into graduate school. I get regular messages from readers
asking many questions about graduate school. While the key issue is picking a
good school, the main obstacle is getting accepted. How do you get into a
graduate school?
First thing to
know: that high GPA that you thought was so precious? Like everything else paid
for by the student loan scam, it’s worthless:
One astrophysicist…said, “Grade point, most people said it doesn't affect
them very much because basically everybody in the pool -- everybody in the
final pool -- has such high GPAs that it's not meaningful.”
Yes, getting into
grad school with a 1.99 GPA probably isn’t going to happen (not for the good
schools, anyway, and I strongly advise against going to for-profits for this,
at least if you’re getting a degree thinking it’ll lead to a job), but once the
admissions committee has weeded out all the 1.99 GPA applicants, they’re
generally stuck with 50 or so applicants, all with GPAs in the 3.98 to 4.00
range. Now, some schools have A+ grades, so theoretically GPAs can go up to
4.33 now…but much like with public schools that do this sort of thing, the
actual GPA is irrelevant, once you get past 3.5 or so.
A recent book
examines how graduate school admissions committees at top schools make their decisions,
and a recent
article on Inside Higher Ed talks about this. Allow me to add some
insights:
Ph.D.
programs are one of the few parts of higher education where admissions
decisions are made without admissions professionals.
Ah, the old cry
of “we need more bureaucrats.” Admissions professionals…seriously? Look, it’s
no secret that “math people” have characteristics that you generally don’t find
in “English people” which you generally won’t find in “Arts people.” Hey look,
now the gentle reader knows everything an “admissions professional” knows.
Seriously, it seems obvious to let experts in the field determine if an
applicant has what it takes to eventually become an expert.
This isn’t an
easy job, I admit, and it’s easy to second-guess yourself. But letting an
“admissions professional” do it is just plain stupid. Hey, we’ve let admissions
professionals determine who gets into college in the first place…the end result
is everything just became “open admissions.” So, yeah, just toss that idea in
the trash, we don’t another layer of bureaucracy here.
While the article
stumbles with this first step, there are some valuable things here:
For
instance, those whose programs were not at the very top of the rankings
frequently talked about not wanting to offer a spot to someone they believed
would go to a higher-ranked program. They didn't want their department to be
the graduate equivalent of what high school students applying to college term a
safety school.
This is important
advice: if you’ve got your heart set on a certain school, realize they might
think you are too good (!) for it, and
turn you down. Make sure when you apply to let them know that you’re not
applying elsewhere, especially if you have those top scores. It might be
worthwhile to show up in person, too, just to let them know that, hey, you’re
in the area, and not likely to go somewhere else.
So, if GPA is
basically useless, what is worthwhile?
…a priority
on GRE scores that extends beyond what most department would admit (or that
creators of the test would advise)…
The GRE is the
Graduate Record Examination, it’s like the SAT, except you take it after
college, to get into grad school. Well, to get into good graduate schools,
anyway. There are plenty of huckster schools out there that don’t require a GRE
(in fact, every Education and Administration Graduate program I applied to didn’t
care about GRE, all they wanted was a credit card number…), but this is what
the top schools use instead of the GPA.
Why? Well, grade
inflation has made GPA useless, and there are just so many bogus schools and
departments (Hi, Education and Administration!) out there that you can’t
determine if a student knows anything by looking at the GPA. Even the “Why I
Want To Go To Graduate School” essay can be ghost-written easily enough (plenty
of sites offer this service). But the GRE is administered, not by a government
organization (hence, by nature, corrupt), but by a private company, Educational
Testing Service, which charges people to take the GRE. If ETS becomes known as
corrupted, then the GRE becomes worthless and nobody will pay to take it…and ETS
goes out of business.
In short, GRE,
unlike GPA, has integrity in it, and so is useful. Just one more example of why
we really need to put integrity back into higher education, and soon, before it
gets wiped out.
Further,
she noted, the Educational Testing Service, which produces the GRE, has never
suggested that departments use cutoffs the way departments routinely do.
The simple fact is
these committees have a huge stack of applicants to consider…there’s only one
honest measure around. How can you blame committees for using that honest
measure?
‘If it's
not over 700, I won't read anything.’ And that cuts usually two-thirds of
applicants.”
--if you’re
looking to get into a good grad school, there’s your target number. STUDY
TOWARDS THIS GOAL AT A MINIMUM!
The book seems to
have an agenda (thus the emphasis on “lack of admissions professionals” as
relevant), and talks much of bias, discrimination, and “lack of diversity” as
perceived problems, to the point of complaining about:
White males
“dominated” the admissions committees, and Posselt writes that chairs cite
diversity as a value in appointing members in only two of the 10 departments
she studied.
To these
complaints I must respond: “Whatever.” Graduate study isn’t about skin color or
social justice warfare…it’s about academic ability. That said, there is one
discrimination complaint that is worth addressing:
Referring to international applicants, one scientist told Posselt, “The scores on the standardized tests are just out of sight, just off the charts. So you can basically throw that out as a discriminator. They're all doing 90th percentile and above.
GPAs are tossed,
in part, because all students have about the same GPA. For Asian students (hi,
China! At some point I might discuss “The China Problem”, but just so many fish
to fry in higher ed…) all have the same high scores on the GRE, and so, to a
lesser extent, those scores aren’t meaningful.
The gentle reader
(and grad school applicant) needs to understand, studying for tests is an
important part of Asian academic culture. When it was time for me to take the
GRE, I was told “You should take the GRE, fill out this form, the test is in
two months.” I wasn’t given preparation, or any guidance past that. I was on my
own, and my options were look at my textbooks, or maybe buy a sample test to
work on.
On the other side
of the world, here’s how preparation for the GRE goes: “The GRE is 24 months away.
You need to start studying! You need to enroll in a cram school for Tuesday,
Wednesday, and Thursday, and since you only scored in the 85th
percentile on the practice test, you should enroll in the remedial cram school
for Friday, Saturday, and Monday night.”
I exaggerate about
the second cram school (I think), but the point is, the Asian students really
study hard…and they end up getting discriminated against, as their high scores
don’t count as much as a high score for a “native” student.
The Asian student
response to this discrimination isn’t to go on marches and throw rocks. No, the
Asian student response is simple: study harder.
But for my
readers that are asking how to get into a good school, please, please,
consider: all you have to do is study as
hard as the Asians, and you’ll have an “unfair” advantage. Please, use the
big secret for getting into grad school that I just told you.
There is
more in the article, including a discussion of cheating (when it comes to
English as a Foreign Language demonstrations, which are subject to corruption),
but the takeaway here is clear:
GPA is now so
corrupted that it means nothing. Thanks, student loan scam!
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