Physics GRE - Domestic vs. International

[tiyusufaly]

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what the typical average domestic Physics GRE score is. I know in gradschoolshopper and the AIP book we see for many schools the average Physics GRE score for acceptees. However, I do not know how much higher the average is brought up by international students. Can someone maybe give a rough estimate? As in, if the average Physics GRE score for a school is 850, would it be like 800 for domestics and 900 for internationals? Or is the discrepancy usually even larger?

And would grad schools mind if I emailed them asking for this information?

[Seen]

The one place I've seen this broken out is for University of Texas. The total average is 787, but 733 for domestic students.

They also breakdown their admissions numbers: "For Fall 2006 admission we had approximately 287 Foreign applicants and only accepted 23 for admission. For US applicants there were approximately 183 applicants and 60 were admitted. A total of 83 were admitted with 32 new students enrolling, 11 International and 21 U.S. students."

[trani]

Another example I came across from http://www.aip.org/gpb/pdf_files/091.pdf ,i.e. gradschoolshopper.com for Colorado @ Boulder:

"The average GRE scores for 2008 – 09 admissions were verbal-625; quantitative-780. The average GRE advanced Physics scores for 2008 – 09 US admissions were 771. The average GRE scores for 2008 – 09 international admissions were verbal-505; quantitative-780. The average GRE advanced Physics scores for 2008 – 09 international admissions were 966."

[Imperate]

Somewhat worrying, at least I can wait until I actually have my GRE scores beforing paying any application fees.
Is Colorado @Boulder highly ranked?

[trani]

I haven't heard anything too fantastic about it in experimental HEP, which is my interest, but they might be good in other subfields. They are at #20 here:

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandr ... phy/search

I think they got CM going on, not sure...

[dsperka]

Wow, that is really interesting. I mean I think everyone knew that international students need higher PGRE scores than domestic students, but the I had no idea the selectivity was that different. Im talking about the percentage of domestic applicants accepted versus percentage of international applicants accepted. I guess i figured that they would just take the say top 20% of domestic and top 20% international, but if Texas is representative of other schools then its more like the top 30% of domestic and top 5% of international. I never considered that when looking at the numbers on gradschoolshopper. The acceptace rate for domestic students could be almost twice as high as the overall acceptance rate.

[quizivex]

Wow. 966 average for internationals, that's rough.

I just checked the updated PPPL profile: http://www.aip.org/gpb/pdf_files/286.pdf

Things can vary significantly from year to year for small programs... look at these numbers (8 accepted students- 6 domestic, 2 international), quite a bit higher than in older AIP books I saw in the past:

Verbal 90.5%
Quant 94%
Writing 39.75%
Physics 92.5%

Looks like we all got perfect on the math, and we knew a lot of vocab words, but according to ETS we dunt no how two write

Edit: WTF???? Stanford says the following: "The
average GRE scores for 2008–09 admissions were verbal–
569; quantitative–780; analytical–800;" The analytical hasn't been graded out of 800 for years. How could they report such garbage???

[Unnatural Log]

Well, if 0 students take the analytical test, I guess mathematically you can literally report the average as whatever number you want. I'm surprised Stanford didn't claim a 200000 as their average.

[cstrehl1]

I think boulder is popping off in theoretical astro and BEC's

[cato88]

Wow, that is really interesting. I mean I think everyone knew that international students need higher PGRE scores than domestic students, but the I had no idea the selectivity was that different. Im talking about the percentage of domestic applicants accepted versus percentage of international applicants accepted. I guess i figured that they would just take the say top 20% of domestic and top 20% international, but if Texas is representative of other schools then its more like the top 30% of domestic and top 5% of international. I never considered that when looking at the numbers on gradschoolshopper. The acceptace rate for domestic students could be almost twice as high as the overall acceptance rate.

E-mail a department and asks for statistics on the program because youre interested in applying and would like to see if youre competitive. I have seen statistics for programs which have a domestic acceptance rate greater than 2 times that of internationals.