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Michael W. Kraus @mwkraus.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I'm back! In this experiment we had 39 participants choose between 8 different PhD programs which varied in terms of region, application materials, prestige, and fees. Importantly, two of the programs had a GRE requirement and two were equivalent but did not:

This is a graph showing which PhD programs people decided to apply to in terms of frequency counts. Participants chose to apply to four schools of the eight in total and overwhelmingly chose the non-GRE required schools even when they were equivalent on all other descriptive characteristics to the GRE schools. Picture shows a graph with frequency of reported intention to apply to schools.

Michael W. Kraus@mwkraus.bsky.social

We are doing a pilot survey about how prospective PhD students in PSYCHOLOGY make decisions about applying to grad programs. If you are thinking of applying to a program in the future, and have 2-5 minutes to spare, could you take this survey? 🫶 northwestern.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

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Michael W. Kraus @mwkraus.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

A detailed report on the pilot experiment is here: drive.google.com/file/d/1IEG6... The majority of our sample comes from marginalized backgrounds, where the cost of prepping, taking, and sending GRE scores would have the most impact in terms of time and cost. Here is a Likert scale result:

This is a chart showing school preferences for PhD programs. Participants answered whether "I would apply to this school" describes them with higher scores indicating it describes them better. In this chart, all non-GRE schools score higher than the GRE required schools on this item. GRE schools had significantly lower preferences than non-GRE schools matched on all other characteristics.

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