eliminating the gre as a doctoral admissions requirement
One of my least favorite aspects of education is the standardized nature of gate-keeping testing that privileges some and excludes many. In Massachusetts, we have the MCAS as the state-mandated, almost yearly assessment system for math, language arts, and science. For so-designated English learners, we have additional annual English proficiency assessments (the WIDA in Massachusetts, with other cognate assessments in other states). Nationwide, we have the SAT for college admission, and the GRE for graduate admissions. There is ample evidence of bias in all these assessments that functions intersectionally with race, class, language, and ability status across all these types of assessments. I always tell my students who want to study critical perspectives that there is no better entrée into understanding how systemic oppression is codified than through the assessments to which we subject people.
This was profoundly evident to me when I was directing the Curriculum & Instruction doctoral program from 2017 - 2020. We consistently ended up removing otherwise exceptional applicants from our finalist pools because of low GRE scores. And, among those removed students, U.S.-born Black and Latinx students were consistently over-represented, with implications for cohort diversity and program quality.
In response, the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society faculty approved a proposal to embark on a 3-year trial of conducting our doctoral admissions without the GRE as an admissions criterion. As of 2021, we have completed our first admissions without the GRE, and it was a successful process. We will continue to monitor the effect on applicant diversity, improving conditions for minoritized and international students once they have decided to attend our program, in the service of deciding on whether to permanently eliminate the GRE from our doctoral admissions process.
This was profoundly evident to me when I was directing the Curriculum & Instruction doctoral program from 2017 - 2020. We consistently ended up removing otherwise exceptional applicants from our finalist pools because of low GRE scores. And, among those removed students, U.S.-born Black and Latinx students were consistently over-represented, with implications for cohort diversity and program quality.
In response, the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society faculty approved a proposal to embark on a 3-year trial of conducting our doctoral admissions without the GRE as an admissions criterion. As of 2021, we have completed our first admissions without the GRE, and it was a successful process. We will continue to monitor the effect on applicant diversity, improving conditions for minoritized and international students once they have decided to attend our program, in the service of deciding on whether to permanently eliminate the GRE from our doctoral admissions process.