- Faculty & Staff, Message from the Dean
- June 20, 2019
Dear Colleagues,
BUSPH aims to recruit and retain a diverse student body for all of its programs. Fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion is essential to fulfilling our mission as an academic public health institution; a mission firmly rooted in social justice. Diversity of all kinds enhances our classrooms and our community. It is fundamental to a rewarding educational experience, and our community benefits from the school’s robust, complex mix of backgrounds and perspectives. The school aims to remove any structural barriers that interfere with recruitment and retention of diverse students. One such barrier is the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), currently a required component for admission to BUSPH degree programs.
It is becoming increasingly clear in a range of scholarship that the GRE is costly, biased, and is a poor predictor of academic success.
First, the GRE is a financially burdensome hurdle to many test takers. The current cost of the general examination is $205, and it costs an additional $27 per school or program to send scores. Additionally, GRE preparation courses can cost thousands of dollars. This clearly represents a hurdle, particularly for potential students from under-privileged backgrounds who we wish to include in our community. The GRE is also a barrier, both financially and psychologically, for working professionals who we would like to welcome into our programs.
Second, the GRE has been shown to disadvantage women and minority students, particularly in STEM fields. Standardized tests in general, including the GRE, have been shown to be systematically biased, with test scores associated with socioeconomic status, race, and gender. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the exam, reports that women score on average 80 points lower than men, African Americans some 200 points lower than whites.
Third, and importantly, the correlation between GRE scores and academic success in graduate school is weak. A meta-analysis of over 1,700 studies reported negative or weak correlations between GRE scores and measures of success in graduate programs. Boston University’s Molecular Biology, Cell Biology & Biochemistry Program dropped the GRE last year, citing its lack of correlation with student success. Other BU schools are currently contemplating dropping the GRE for the coming admission cycle for similar reasons. Analysis of data from our own MPH students showed no significant differences in mean GRE component scores between first-year students who failed to achieve an overall 3.0 GPA and those who did not.
I have been thinking about this issue for some time, and have consulted widely about it with the Governing Council, program directors, and in particular with our Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion, Yvette Cozier, and Associate Dean for Education, Lisa Sullivan. The above read of the literature and these consultations have led us to a decision to drop the GRE as an admission requirement for BUSPH graduate programs for a pilot period of three years. Over the three-year pilot period, we will evaluate quality of applications received and application trends at BUSPH as compared to peer schools. We will additionally track outcomes for graduates to ensure that we continue to meet our employment goals. During this pilot period, we will also add program-specific questions to our applications to ensure that faculty on admissions committees have sufficient data to select the right students for the right programs.
I realize always that a break with how we have done things in the past gives pause. And yet, on this, the burden of the evidence and the overwhelming support for this idea among a large number of members of our community with whom I have discussed this gives confidence that this is the right move at the right time. We shall, as I note above, do this carefully, with a close eye to evaluation and, as with all, be open to change course if data suggest we should do otherwise.
I thank all of you for your thoughtful conversations and input around this. I am every day grateful to be part of a community that cares so deeply about doing right by our students—past, present, and future—and by our mission.
Warmly,
Sandro
Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor
sgalea@bu.edu