We look at applications holistically, evaluating the full range of criteria including scores, grades, personal statements, letters, fields of interest, rank within class, our past experience with students from your program, and personal attributes. We try to build a balanced, diverse and high quality class, accounting for likelihood of enrolling, that can contribute importantly to our mission as a department.
We thus do not have cutoff scores for considering your application. We also cannot assess your probability of acceptance based on any one or two criteria. We also will not try to do evaluations of more detailed information except as part of the normal application process.
However, to give you some guidance on these issues we present below graphs of the cumulative distribution of GRE scores (quantitative, verbal, and written) among applicants as well as those who are accepted for the class starting in 2020. Overall we had about 750 applications and admitted about 60. So the ratio of the point on green curve to the point on the orange curve at any score X times 60/750 represents the proportion of people below that score who were admitted in the past year. So that means that overall we admit about 8% of applicants but, for example, for we only admitted about 4% of those with a score below 165.


