At the same time, I understand where those upthread who find the GRE useful are coming from, as I should think that as grades–and grade inflation–must vary considerably between institutions. I’m reminded of a story I once heard about the University of Toronto: it’s apparently almost impossible to get anything above a B+ as an undergrad in English there, as their grading rubric skews very low–the top students are getting mainly B+ grades and the occasional A-, which causes their students some trouble if they apply to grad or law schools who aren’t familiar with that particular Toronto quirk.

To answer Historiann’s (implied) question above, I might as well say at this point that I’m in English, not history, and it seems to be standard procedure to require the subject exam in English for applications to American graduate programs. I think Columbia is the only program I’m aware of that doesn’t require it. So, the “American half” of the subject GRE that I referenced in my previous post is all the stuff on American literature, which is half the GRE exam, from what I remember. It’s interesting to hear that history generally doesn’t require or ignores the subject test–any reason why? Is it considered too general an exam to be useful for evaluating candidates’ applications for specific fields?

I would just note that of all of the means of evaluating the applications for grad school, a student’s GPA seems to be the most democratic. Standardized tests like the SAT have been shown to reflect a student’s economic status to a great degree–I’m not sure about the GRE, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Moreover, students can get great grades just by working hard, and not have to cross snowy mountain passes in British Columbia to get to a testing center!

A few things worth noting about the above: I’m not disagreeing with you about students’ need to focus on coursework, or disagreeing about M.A. programs as being a great stepping stone for students who have sketchy undergrad pasts. (I was one of those students, for what it’s worth.) My only point is that for students who go to institutions like mine, and who have little to no family support, and who honestly believe that getting a mix of B’s and C’s means that you’re getting “good” grades…. By the time that student seeks advice for graduate school, it’s often too late for their transcript. And if they go to a certain sort of professor to talk about wanting to go to graduate school, they don’t get ANY advice about the application process: they just get congratulations and the faculty member’s agreement to write the letter.

I’m not saying that we should accept students to graduate programs (PhD or otherwise) because of these factors, but I do think that it makes sense to consider that maybe the reason that a person’s application from a top research university or an elite slac seems “stronger,” particularly in terms of academic transcript issues, often has to do with the socioeconomic background of that student’s family of origin, the level of mentorship that student receives from professors from very early on in their college career (say, from their second or third semester vs. not until their graduating semester), and just general cluelessness about what it means to be “competitive” as a candidate for grad school. Yes, it is students’ undergraduate professors who have a responsibility to help fill in those gaps, and I do what I can on my end. But the reality is that I’ve got colleagues who have been here for 30-40 years who are just as clueless about what students need for graduate school as the students are themselves. Or they’ve just stopped caring.

All I can say is that I’m glad my MA and then PhD program (both of which admitted me off the wait list) took a chance on me, with my no-name undergrad degree and my fairly lame undergrad GPA, which was accompanied by very strong GRE scores and strong writing sample and application materials. I suspect with the regulations about Pell limiting students’ financial aid to 12 semesters, more and more applicants – and not only ones from my kind of institutional background – are going to have that sort of profile, and not the profile of working 10-15 hours per week at a work study job and devoting the rest of their time to their coursework.

The following year, I was living in a small city in British Columbia when I discovered–about 2 days before the final GRE writing that would qualify me to use it for that year’s round of graduate school applications–that the only place I could write the subject exam was in Vancouver, a 250-mile winter drive from where I was living. It was too late for that year’s registration (I’d screwed up–I thought there were more writings than there were)–so my only hope was to show up at the exam place the morning of the exam, in the hope they had an extra copy, and pay an extra fee to write it with a last-minute registration. My “preparation” for that exam consisted of getting in the after work on a November Friday, driving 150 miles, getting in a minor car accident on a mountain pass with a mile-plus elevation in winter weather, driving another hundred miles on a bum tire (thereby turning a 4-hour drive into an 8-hour one), finally getting to Vancouver shortly before midnight, and getting up 5 hours later so I could get to the test centre by 6:30 and plead to take the exam if they had an extra paper. They did have an extra copy, and I was able to take the exam, though in retrospect I’m kind of amazed that I was able to do decently on an exam written in those circumstances–and no, like Dr. Crazy’s students, it would have never occurred to me that I should describe winter car-accidents and lengthy drives as “mitigating circumstances” on my grad school applications. It certainly gave me the best GRE-taking story of anyone I knew when I got here, though!

What I remember from the subject exam was that a good half of the questions were on American fields within my discipline, which I’d never studied and wasn’t planning to focus on in my PhD (in fact, I still haven’t studied the American portion of my discipline)–the test was very, very, skewed towards American students, to the point that I’m surprised that non-Americans such as myself manage consistently to do well enough on the exam that our applications aren’t tossed out on the “didn’t meet the GRE floor” standards, if the GRE is as important as it’s been characterized as being in this thread.

1. Explain why they want to study *a particular field/sub-field of history* at the graduate level, including their career goals.

2. Demonstrate that their undergraduate studies, and any other experience, have prepared them for graduate study in that area.

3. Explain why the program to which they are applying is well suited to further their goals.

4. If necessary, explain anything in their record that might give a committee pause, whether it’s a bad semester, few courses in the discipline (which might be the case for a student applying to a history Ph.D. with an interdisciplinary B.A., or vice-versa), or anything else.

What it should *not* do is explain how much they love the subject and want to keep studying it. First, we presume that someone who applies to a history Ph.D. program loves the subject; if not, heaven help them! Second, if you love *reading* history, by all means find something else to earn your keep and then read history in your spare time. You should only go to grad school in history if you love *researching and writing* history. That’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish from enjoying reading about the past. Some of the most miserable people in my graduate cohort were those who didn’t realize that grad school would not simply involve harder versions of their undergrad courses.