پروسه اپلاي استاد يا اداره پذيرش؟؟!!

من با اجازه کریم جان متنش رو اینجا می ذارم برای اونایی که نمی تونن لینک رو ببینن. البته کامنتها خیلی زیاده و بهتره اینجا کپی نشه:

In the past month or two, I have written many, many letters of
recommendation. I am very happy to write letters for my postdocs and
grad students, who are variously looking for jobs or postdoc
appointments. I know these people well, so it is no problem to write
detailed and meaningful letters. I also like writing letters for my
summer undergrad researchers who are now applying to graduate school.
However, I also get a lot of requests from undegrads whom I only know as
someone who took one course with me and got a good grade. Usually I
tell such students that they should ask someone who knows them better
for a letter, but often these students have never really engaged in
research with anyone or only have one such detailed letter and simply
need more. I do write letters for such students if they insist and if
they got an A in my class, but these letters tend to sound generic and
probably don't do justice to some of these kids, who are likely very
smart; it's just that I don't know them at all outside of our
interactions in class, and I try ot make it clear in the letter.

But, this is not a post about recommendation letters.
What
I find interesting is where people apply to grad school, what it says
about the applicant, and whether (and to what degree) we as professors
should interfere and offer unsolicited advice on the students' graduate
school choices. (I am assuming here that "graduate school" means the
students are predominantly entering PhD programs or perhaps MS programs,
not that they are going to professional schools, like law or medicine.)

Among
this year's graduating seniors, there is a former undergraduate
researcher of mine, a wickedly smart kid with a nearly perfect
undergraduate GPA (I think his only grades that weren't A's were a
couple of AB's), excellent GRE scores, and undergraduate research
experience that resulted in publications. He was going to apply to a
small number of big state schools in the neighboring states, some of
which are quite highly ranked, but he was not planning to try for any of
the elite private universities in our field. He's very laid back and
doesn't take himself very seriously, which are some of his greatest
qualities. However, I was really surprised that he planned on applying
to so few schools (only 3 or 4, and I don't think it's money shortage
preventing him from applying to more) and wasn't trying for a single
elite one. This is the best student I have had in several years, and if
anyone has a good chance to get into a top school, it's him. So I
strongly encouraged him to try for the top schools, and he did end up
applying to two.

On the other hand, I have several students with
GPA's in the low to mid 3's applying to every single school in the top
25-30. Middling GPA, middling GREs, no research experience, so I presume
lukewarm letters of recommendation from all professors. I have spent
extraordinary amounts of time just filling out recommendation forms and
uploading letters for them. I know that their chances of getting into
top 10 (maybe even top 15) schools are rather slim, but I didn't say
anything. Perhaps I should have.

It's interesting that even
people with really so-so records will typically try for the big league
schools. I would say sure, if it's a couple of schools, certainly go for
it, but these applications are expensive so I think it usually makes
sense to send most of your applications to schools that are likely a
good match both for your interests and your record -- in other words,
schools that may actually want you.

The advice I had received
when I was applying to grad schools was that you should apply to a mix
of elites (top 10), good (not top 10 but top 20 or top 30), and perhaps
some lower-ranked schools. What the mix should be really depends of your
undergrad institution (a.k.a. pedigree), GPA, test results (GRE general
and subject, if applicable; TOEFL for foreign applicants), and the
overall record. (Different things carry different weights for the US and
international applicants.) Applying indiscriminatly to the 20 or 30 top
schools really strikes me as overkill; my feeling has always been that
applying to more than 8--10 schools is too many; I find that foreign
applicants generally apply to fewer schools total, mostly due to the
cost of the whole endeavor). I am curious if the total number of
applications sent by a student (on average) varies with discipline.

I
think everyone would agree that we should encourage excellent students,
who may be selling themselves short when applying to grad school, to
shoot for the stars. But, what about the oppostite situation: should you
ever talk to a student who is shooting too high, and tell them they
will strike out and that the schools more aligned with their background
are not as highly ranked? Does your answer differ if you know the
student well versus if you don't really know them?

Beyond Scores

I have written before about how hard it is to recruit good students (e.g. here and here).
My department is ranked in the top 15 or so, therefore it's quite a
good place but we don't routinely bring in superstar student candidates.

However, I believe that if we are a bit clever in how we recruit, we can
find some true gems among students who get passed up by more highly
ranked schools because there is something a bit off with their record.

In the physical sciences, American students have multiple fellowship
opportunities available to them and they are therefore (on average)
easier to fund than international students. This is part of the reason
why good American students are very attractive to hire and they
routinely get snatched by places more highly ranked than mine. So, in
order to find some good talent willing to come here I typically look
hard at international student applications. I generally give a lot of
weight to the quality of the undergrad institution, grades in math and
physics, letters of recommendation, research experience and papers (if
the student has any), as well as my previous experiences with students
from the same school. As for tests, I look at TOEFL scores for
international students and GRE Quantitative but not at Verbal or
Analytic. Unfortunately, there are several countries that produce
students who have very high Verbal scores, but when they come to the US
it turns out they don't speak English fluently at all and have trouble
following classes. The Analytic part, since they changed it to
"Analytical Writing" is -- in my humble opinion -- completely useless
for selection in my field. These are essaysscored by humans; being able to write persuasively in essay format in
English is not a skill most international students have when they take
the GRE test, even if they speak the language well and have decent
listening comprehension. The average quality of English instruction and
the availability of resources for test preparation vary greatly from
nation to nation and should be taken it into account when looking at
test scores. Also, in many countries the GRE and TOEFL tests aren't
offered very often, may still be paper-based, and taking the tests more
than once may be prohibitively costly for the student.

My best two students came in with really mediocre test scores. However,
they were from countries with selective admissions processes at the
undergraduate levels and had very good grades in math and physics and
some research experience. So this year I was going to bring in another
student from the same university from which I recruited good students
before; even spectacular students from this country tend to do so-so in
the GRE. The new candidate has excellent math and physics grades,
stellar letters of recommendation, even published a paper in a reputable
journal. GRE Quantitative maximal, he even took a GRE Subject test (not
necessary for admission to this program, which is in engineering) and
received a very good score. We have been in contact and I was sure he
would get formally admitted without a problem.

The student contacted me a few days ago, very upset, saying he was
rejected. I was stunned. I inquired around a bit with our admissions
committee, and apparently the person who looked at the student's file
thought his GRE Analytical Writing Score of 3 was too low and that was
what got the student nixed. For comparison, my two excellent
American-born and -educated undergrad researchers, who both went on to
top-5 places for their PhDs, received 4's on their GRE Analytical
Writing; I think holding international students to the same standard is
pretty ridiculous. The colleague who examined the student's file
appeared defensive about the decision, which leads me to believe he
hadn't even examined the rest of the student's file carefully.

Anyway, I had to make a stink about it (thank God for tenure that
enables me to do this) and the student's file will be reconsidered. But
this leaves a bad taste in the mouth -- that a good student can be
dismissed based on a pretty irrelevant test score. I know people on
admissions committees work hard, there are a number of applications to
go through, and it's very time-consuming as far as service roles go.
Picking cut-offs to streamline the process seems like a must. But, I
have been less than happy with the quality of the average graduate
student admitted in my department ever since I started my job here; I
feel we admit too many poorly prepared or insufficiently motivated
candidates, but most importantly -- too many candidates who don't have
the background for the type of research that the faculty in this
department do. I generally hand-pick students on my own before the
selection is made and then make comments to the committee, but this time
I didn't get to the student's file before the formal decision was made.
It looks like it's time for me to get more involved in the admissions
process at the department and university levels and push for giving
admissions criteria at my place a big-picture do-over.

Having formally high and inflexible selection criteria may seem to
convey that we are a top-notch, hard-core place. We are, in the sense
that there is very good science being done here, but let's not kid
ourselves. We are not a top-5 place, we are not a magnet school to which
everybody applies and everybody wants to go, so we do not have our
pick among the cream of the crop. We need to be smarter than inflexible
admissions and test scores, accounting for the fact that the obviously
superb students won't come here. We need to be more efficient at
identifying and attracting the not-so-obviously superb students who will
be interested in coming here. All this seems obvious, but is
surprisingly hard to implement, especially at a level higher than a
research group (department, college, university) where the different
stages of the admission process are decoupled from one another.

How is the graduate admissions process handled at your school? If you
are a faculty, are you happy with the process? Do you pick from admitted
applicants or pre-select on your own? Please tell us also what your
area (broadly) is and how highly ranked the department is, and anything
else that you deem pertinent for the successes or failures of graduate
admissions at your school.

And Happy New Year everyone
!