Graduate student leaders advocate for dropping GRE requirements in admissions

Graduate student leaders are proposing to eliminate standardized testing as an entrance requirement for UCLA graduate programs.

A proposal written by graduate student representatives asked the Academic Senate to recommend that graduate departments eliminate the GRE as a prerequisite for entering programs. The proposal was presented to the senate Feb. 26.

The GRE is a standardized test required for admission to many graduate programs in the United States. It has three sections covering quantitative reasoning, verbal reasoning and analytical writing. Each section is scored separately, on a range of 130 to 170 for quantitative and verbal reasoning and zero to six for analytical writing.

Steven Moran, an electrical and computer engineering doctoral student who presented the proposal to the senate, said the senate was divided after hearing the presentation.

While some members sympathized with the cause, many believed there needed to be more evidence on how the GRE is a poor determiner for postgraduate success, especially concerning humanities programs, Moran said.

The senate decided not to vote on recommending the removal of the GRE but asked Moran to create a document to outline ways the GRE is discriminatory against low-income and underrepresented applicants, he said.

Moran said in a March 30 emailed statement that he submitted a draft of the response to the Academic Senate’s Graduate Council, which will review the letter and consider its approval at an April 9 meeting.

Moran added in the phone interview that graduate students will now have to take the initiative to the UC Board of Regents to ask for a broader, systemwide removal of the GRE.

“I think the dominoes are starting to fall,” Moran said. “But I think people are realizing there is no really good evidence towards the fact that this doesn’t necessarily help ensure that students that are admitted are going to achieve higher academic performance.”

The GRE limits success for underrepresented and lower-income students, who have less access to the test, Moran said. The GRE costs $205 to take. Students have to pay an additional $27 to send scores to a graduate program.

However, the Educational Testing Service – the organization that offers GREs – provides fee reduction vouchers to those who are unemployed or have financial need.

The Academic Senate is the representative body for UCLA faculty and administrators. Although the senate’s recommendations do not have enforcement power, Moran said the senate can persuade individual departments to change their admissions policies.

This price also does not factor in the money and time students have to put into preparing for the exam, he added.

“You can pay anywhere between $450 to $2,300 for an exam prep course where you’re learning exactly what’s on the exam,” Moran said. “But not everyone has the time to study for it, nor the ability to pay up to $2,300 for Kaplan or Princeton Review course.”

These constraints eventually limit diversity in graduate programs, Moran said. A 2014 Nature study, using GRE scores at a time when the scale was from 200 to 800, found that only a little over a quarter of women in physical sciences score above the 700 points on the quantitative section of the GRE, as opposed to almost three-quarters of men. The study also found that while 83% of white and Asian test-takers score above 700 points, only 5.2% of students from other racial groups score equally as well.

Additionally, Moran argued that the knowledge being tested on the GRE is too general to be a good predictor of performance in any particular graduate program.

The GRE primarily tests students on math topics such as pre-algebra, which does not help departments such as math and engineering measure how well the students will do in more complex math topics, Moran said.

At least 695 university graduate programs have eliminated the GRE as an admissions requirement. Almost half of molecular biology programs and around a third of neuroscience programs in the U.S. have chosen to eliminate the test requirement.

Several studies have shown that there is a negative correlation between success in the quantitative section of the GRE and the completion of STEM doctoral programs. Out of the 133 graduate programs at UCLA, at least 60 do not require applicants to provide GRE scores, according to a March letter from graduate student leaders to graduate program chairs.

The UC system has already removed both the SAT and the ACT as requirements for applying to their undergraduate schools in May 2020. This policy may have contributed to the record number of applications UCLA received in the 2021-2022 school year. The university received almost 139,500 applications, a 28% increase from 2020.

Kirie Stromberg, an archeology doctoral student, said the GRE’s impact on the admissions process varies across departments. People who spend thousands of dollars to prepare for the GRE may be overestimating the impact the test has on graduate program admissions, Stromberg said.

“Every department uses different criteria to select their graduate students,” Stromberg said. “In my case, I spoke to enough students to know that I didn’t have to worry about the GRE, but that might be different in a different department.”

John Richardson, an information studies professor emeritus who has served on UCLA graduate school admission committees, said that although the GRE is not the best tool to determine success in graduate programs, it is the best tool graduate admission officers have.

Richardson said graduate programs only have a few components to look at when admitting graduate students, such as interviews, resumes, letters of recommendation and GPAs.

Until graduate schools can find a more equitable way to test students, the GRE should stay, he said.

“We’ve got an imperfect system and this is the best that we’ve got,” Richardson said.