The Consequences of Requiring a Minimum Physics GRE Score for Graduate School: A case study at UT Austin.
Jennifer L. W. Siders, Physics Department, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712

Five years ago the Physics Department at the University of Texas at Austin began requiring a 700 on the Physics GRE for admission to Ph.D. Candidacy. This requirement eventually led the admissions committee to use an unofficial requirement of 600 because of the difficulty students had bringing up their scores. Shortly thereafter we noticed a dramatic drop in the number of women graduate students at UT. Three years worth of data from American applicants to the UT Physics department was analyzed (31 women, 363 men). The 600 cutoff eliminated 55% of the female applicants and 24% of male applicants. Only 10% of the women applicants had over a 700 while 47% of the male applicants had already achieved a score higher than 700. The average Physics GRE score for male applicants was 100 points higher than the average female applicants score. The correlation between undergraduate GPA and Physics GRE score is very small. 97% of the female applicants and 90% of the male applicants had GPA's over a 3.00. We will discuss our results and the changes that were made at UT.

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