<p>We all know, there are many people with a perfect gpa who get rejected by these schools. Since, none of these schools mention any minimum requirements (other than Berkley) for a gpa, I was wondering if anybody knows a low gpa that has made it to these schools.</p>
<p>urms 10char</p>
<p>I had a 3.4 and was accepted to all of those schools.</p>
<p>(Of course, GPA is just one tiny part of an application and isn’t meaningful without context, and any discussion of grad school admissions is meaningless without specifying a field/program.)</p>
<p>@ molliebatmit,</p>
<p>I understand your point. I read your other posts on this matter line by line. You are certainly very smart and articulate. Personally, I would admit you to any program even with a lower GPA. Of course, your GPA is not that bad either especially considering you did your undergraduate at MIT. To be honest with you, what I am looking for is to see whether or not these universities really mean what they say: that GPA is only one part of the whole package. I myself know only of one person from my school that made it to EECS graduate school at Stanford last year. And he had a 4.0 and sadly not much else.</p>
<p>You definitely wont get into Berkeley if you can’t spell it right.</p>
<p>I’m currently at Caltech as a grad student with only slightly over a 3.5 in undergrad. Many of my friends with similar GPAs also got into top-10 schools.</p>
<p>@ RacinReaver</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing that with us. Would you mind letting us know about your major and where you did your undergraduate?</p>
<p>I am sure molliebamit might try to discount the fact thatall GPAs are not equal, but I would point out that some programs do consider undergraduate. It would be hard to find out a public school student or anyone from a random school get into a top PhD with a 3.4. There was this kid on CC applying from graduate school with a 3.3 from Havard and he got in everywhere including top 5 programs.</p>
<p>What is important for applying to Ph.D. programs is your publication, research experience, and recommendation letter. GPA is not everything I think. I am currently a graduate student. The year when I applied to graduate school, one student didn’t get into MIT though he had 4.0 GPA, and one student whose GPA was around 3.7 or lower and wasn’t high standing academically (GPA wise) got into MIT, probably because he had good recommendation and research. It also matters who writes your recommendation letter. It would help so much if you undergraduate research adviser knows professors of your interest in the universities you are applying to.</p>
<p>
The minimum requirement for all those institutions is 3.0-3.2.</p>
<p>Don’t forget the other side of the equation. </p>
<p>No matter what your credentials, if the school, the department, the advisor, had neither the space, money, time, or alignment of interests, you will not get in.</p>
<p>i wonder if the 500 verbal cutoff is exercised… -_-</p>
<p>
You will never find me arguing that. I have made the case many times on CC that I would not be in my current graduate program had I not gone to MIT as an undergrad.</p>
<p>^ oh ok, sorry, because people tend to discount that fact a lot that ones undergraduate does not matter and its what you do in undergrad matters, when most applicants to PhD programs did great things in undergrad- yada yada yada.</p>
<p>The point is that a 3.4 would be very difficult for a student at an average or even slightly above average university to crack anywhere</p>
<p>“The point is that a 3.4 would be very difficult for a student at an average or even slightly above average university to crack anywhere”</p>
<p>agreed.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Really? It’s not that hard for me - I can think of some students from public schools who graduated with GPA’s of no more than 3.4 who were nevertheless admitted to PhD programs at Stanford and another who went to Carnegie-Mellon. </p>
<p>Of course, it should probably be said that the public school in question is Berkeley and - perhaps even more importantly - the discipline in question is chemical engineering. There are not exactly a whole lot of Berkeley ChemE’s with GPA’s higher than 3.4. {Heck, even just completing the major at all is a feat.}</p>
<p>@ sakky</p>
<p>So, is chemical engineering a more difficult field or is it a less competitive one? It does seem that admission to these top schools is greatly dependent on the department, the most difficult one being EECS.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Probably both, although more towards the former. Simply put, it is excruciatingly difficult to earn top grades in at a premier chemical engineering program such as Berkeley’s due to the grade deflation. And the few who do earn top grades often times don’t even stay in the discipline, instead opting for, say, careers in consulting, banking, law, medicine, or what have you. Hence, if chemical engineering PhD programs are to bring in a sufficient number of students, they have to admit some with relatively less impressive grades.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, I suspect that the most difficult PhD programs to enter are some of the humanities or social science programs at the top schools. Somebody who graduated with top grades in EECS, or any engineering discipline for that matter, can obviously garner a solid engineering job, and many certainly do. But honestly, what’s a guy with top grades in a humanities or social science going to do, besides perhaps go to law school? As I mentioned before, those majors are not highly marketable. True, if you attend an elite school, you can probably find a job in consulting or banking as those industries don’t really care about what you learned but rather about the brand-name of your school. But what if you didn’t go to an elite school? What if you graduated with a 3.8 GPA in English from a no-name school? You don’t really have great career options. Applying to a PhD English program is the natural next step. The problem is that there are thousands of other students at all of the English programs at all of the no-name schools who are thinking the exact same thing. </p>
<p>The root cause of the problem is then that people embarked upon unmarketable majors without any forethought as to how they would actually use them. To be fair, if you embarked upon one of these majors with a specific and actionable plan as to how you were to leverage those majors into a future career - i.e. a plan to major in a foreign language with the specific goal to become a professional translator - or were otherwise developing marketable skills on the side, then that’s perfectly reasonable. But many (probably most) students never do that. Then, approaching senior year, they realize that they don’t actually have marketable skills and then decide that they’d better then decamp to graduate school.</p>
<p>Regarding the relative value of GPAs:</p>
<p>It certainly depends on the major, as well. In engineering there is more than one public school that is quite a bit better than Harvard or even CalTech</p>
<p>@ duke3k</p>
<p>“It certainly depends on the major, as well.”</p>
<p>It seems, except EECS, it is possible to get into these schools with a GPA around 3.5.
Perhaps, EECS is either the easiest major or has a lot more exceptionally talent students. </p>
<p>“In engineering there is more than one public school that is quite a bit better than Harvard or even CalTech”</p>
<p>There is nothing better than CalTech and Harvard.</p>