There's been a couple of questions along the lines of "Can I get into X program with x.xx GPA?"
Is it possible to get into a good masters program in computer science with a 3-3.5 GPA?
Can I get a scholarship from graduate school in physics if my GPA below 3?
Should these questions be allowed? My concern is that are too broad or too particular. Thoughts?
I would like to see one nice CW question asking how to get into grad school with answers that would cover low GPA, low GRE, low TOEFL, limited research experience, bad references, bad undergraduate school, etc. A single answer with subsections might be better than multiple answers, just because a lot of information would be the same. We could then close these types of questions as duplicates.
I have created the CW question and started an answer: How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?
My immediate emotional response is well summarized by Ripley's line from Aliens.
Putting things in a somewhat less inflammatory way: I think these are terrible questions and epitomize the "specific advice for a very specific situation" closing reason. The reason why they are terrible is because:
They are almost never generalizable (how many people are there with a 3.7 GPA from a mid-ranked Elbonian institution who double-majored in electrical engineering and llama-wrangling but did two semesters of research in an unrelated area with a nice professor who probably still remembers their name)
The answers pretty much always boil down to "It will probably be pretty hard, but not necessarily impossible."
Because of this, I generally vote to close these questions whenever I see them, except in the unusual circumstance that neither problem #1 nor problem #2 applies.
My concern is that are too broad or too particular.
Hmm, how can they be both too broad and too particular :) ? Honestly, I think they are neither. The first question talks about getting into any CS program with mediocre grades, the second one about getting any physics scholarship with terrible grades. Both seem not super-specific to me. The only thing that is probably "wrong" with those questions is that it is very unlikely that there is a good, objective answer to them, more than "it's unlikely, but you can always try".
I personally don't find these questions overly interesting, but there is probably a large number of students out there for which they are relevant. So I would just let these questions be.
I think these questions should be closed due to the fact that there are now such varying types of graduate/masters programs in these fields (e.g., Computer Science, the MBA, Law, MSIS (MBA + CS), etc).
At some schools it is implicitly known that the masters program is much more like the bachelors program, and at other schools, this may be explicitly made known (along with some requirement that remediary courses be taken the first year exclusively). While at others still, the curriculum may be designed to be totally soul-crushing from the beginning. There is a wide-range of hand-holding from 0-100 at institutions, and it hasn't really been quantified anywhere.
Thus these kinds of questions aren't really apples to apples unfortunately.
I have taken the liberty of adding a generic question and answer for the questions we get regarding the GRE level required for entry to programs. There were a lot of these questions and they were very specific to the student, so I have tried to give a general answer that allows students to assess any GRE score against the data on their cohort. This could be a useful question to link to as a duplicate for questions of this kind. Hopefully that contributes something to this issue.
