"This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least."
Is this really true? (honest question). I can imagine GRE scores not being important, but I always thought that good grades were a kind of baseline for admission. As a thought experiment, do people with terrible grades,(but good research backgrounds, say) get into a good PhD program in CS?
As someone that just went through the grad school app process, I can say that most schools have GRE minimum scores, except for the top schools (everyone that MIT admits is in the top 10%, so it's not really a good indicator for them). So really you need good GRE scores to not be disqualified, but they don't actually get you in anywhere.
Well, for both grades and GRE scores, the assumption is that you're going to do at least decently: if you had truly terrible grades, then that would raise a lot of questions about your work ethic / interest in the subject / etc (those questions might be addressed if you had strong letters of recommendation from well-known professors who explained why you did badly, for example).
But certainly the top schools don't simply take the students with the best GRE scores or marks: there are many rejected applicants with perfect GPAs and great GRE scores, but no research experience.
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"This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least."
Is this really true? (honest question). I can imagine GRE scores not being important, but I always thought that good grades were a kind of baseline for admission. As a thought experiment, do people with terrible grades,(but good research backgrounds, say) get into a good PhD program in CS?
As someone that just went through the grad school app process, I can say that most schools have GRE minimum scores, except for the top schools (everyone that MIT admits is in the top 10%, so it's not really a good indicator for them). So really you need good GRE scores to not be disqualified, but they don't actually get you in anywhere.
Well, for both grades and GRE scores, the assumption is that you're going to do at least decently: if you had truly terrible grades, then that would raise a lot of questions about your work ethic / interest in the subject / etc (those questions might be addressed if you had strong letters of recommendation from well-known professors who explained why you did badly, for example).
But certainly the top schools don't simply take the students with the best GRE scores or marks: there are many rejected applicants with perfect GPAs and great GRE scores, but no research experience.