GRE Admissions Study

Design research into the potential unintended consequences of an admissions policy change -- to reinstate the GRE as a mandatory requirement for applications.

My program at Harvard GSD, the Masters of Design, is founded on a philosophy of interdisciplinarity. We have a core value that diverse perspectives make our design work stronger. The program attracts professionals from dozens of different fields and brings them together to chart their own course for two years.

But in 2024, Harvard's GSD changed their policy for incoming applicants to the Masters of Design program by requiring them to take the GRE. The GRE is a standardized test that has been shown to have few correlations with academic outcomes, and has little overlap with much of the material covered in the program. It was intended to be used by the admissions team as one additional data point for applicants, but my concern was that there may be unintended consequences on the student body -- that it would largely make the program less diverse by filtering out the very applicants who made the program strong.

So I collected data. I created a two-question survey and sent it to everyone currently in the program.

I asked all current MDes students: “Would you have applied to MDes if the GRE was required?”

A second question asked about what skills and work they do.

Real-world results

I wrote a one-page whitepaper and brought it to the heads of the program who care deeply about fostering a diverse group of interdisciplinary designers who come from a broad range of backgrounds and have an equally broad range of proclivities. My study suggested that there may be unintended effects of re-introducing the GRE requirement, by effectively prohibiting important members of the community from applying.

The heads of the program discussed internally and reversed their decision two days later.