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Contact a graduate education advisor for more information

A number of graduate faculty and administrators serve as graduate education strategic advisors with ETS. These advisors are ready to help answer your questions and learn more about the needs of your graduate programs starting with recruitment through admissions and beyond. Strategic advisors are also available to conduct webinars about holistic admissions, co-facilitate a presentation, or hold 1:1 meetings with individuals on your campus to learn about program needs. This is a service that ETS is providing at no cost to your institution as part of our mission to advance quality, equity, and diversity in education.

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Admissions practices are continually evolving. Please contact us to share your own promising practice with the wider graduate community.

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The primary source was a series of 71 interviews that ETS conducted with graduate deans and faculty involved in admissions at 58 programs across seven broad discipline areas and at the master’s and doctoral levels at a variety of public and private institutions with differing goals and levels of selectivity.
Boone, Young and Associates & Educational Testing Service (1984). Minority enrollment in graduate and professional schools: recruitment, admissions, financial assistance. A technical assistance handbook. Office for Civil rights (ED), Washington, DC.
Dawes, R. M. (1971). A case study of graduate admissions: Application of three principles of human decision making. American Psychologist, 26, 180-188.
Educational Testing Service (ETS). (2019). GRE Guide to the Use of Scores. Princeton, NJ.
Garces, L. M. (2014). Aligning diversity, quality, and equity: The implications of legal and public policy developments for promoting racial diversity in graduate studies. American Journal of Education, 120(4), 457-480.
Hodapp, T., & Sparks Woodle, K. (2017). A bridge between undergraduate and doctoral degrees. Physics Today, 70 (2), 50-56.
Kent, J. D., & McCarthy, T. M. (2016). Holistic Review in Graduate Admissions: A Report from the Council of Graduate Schools. Council of Graduate Schools. Washington, DC, Council of Graduate Schools
King, G., Bruce, J. M., & Gilligan, M. (1993). The science of political science graduate admissions. PS: Political Science and Politics, 26(4), 772-778.
Kyllonen, P. (2011). The case for noncognitive constructs and other background variables in graduate education (ETS GRE Board research report ETS GREB-00-11).
Landrum, R. E., Jeglum, E. B., & Cashin, J. R. (1994). The decision-making processes of graduate admissions committees in psychology. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 9(2), 239-248.
Michel, R. S., Belur, V., Naemi, B., & Kell, H. J. (2019). Graduate Admissions Practices: A Targeted Review of the Literature (ETS Research Report ETS RR-19-33).
Okahana, H., Augustine, R., & Zhou, E. (2018). Master’s Admissions: Transparency, Guidance, and Training. Washington, D.C.
Posselt, J.R. (2016). Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Scott, L. D., & Zerwic, J. (2015, August). Holistic review in admissions: A strategy to diversify the nursing workforce. Nursing Outlook, 63(4), 488-495.
Stassun, K.G., Sturm, S., Holley-Bockelmann, K., Burger, A., Ernst, D., & Webb, D. (2011). The Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. bridge program: Recognizing, enlisting, and cultivating unrealized or unrecognized potential in underrepresented minority students. American Journal of Physics, 79(4), 374-379.
Wilson, M.A, Odem, M.A., Walters, T., DePass, A.L, & Bean, A.J. (2019). A Model for Holistic Review in Graduate Admissions That Decouples the GRE from Race, Ethnicity, and Gender. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(1).

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