Starting this year, the UC Berkeley Neuroscience PhD Program(link is external) will no longer require GRE (Graduate Record Examination) scores to be submitted by students applying to our program.
This decision was based on multiple factors, including 1) lack of evidence from scholarly studies that GRE scores predict student success in graduate programs like ours, 2) biases in GRE scores that reflect socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender, and 3) the financial burden on students that send GRE scores to multiple schools and/or take a GRE prep course.
Results from surveys of our faculty, current students, and student alumni showed that eliminating the GRE requirement for our program is strongly supported by all of these groups. We hope that this policy change will broaden our applicant pool and strengthen its diversity.
– Michael Silver, Berkeley Neuroscience PhD Program Director and Professor of Optometry and Vision Science and Neuroscience