Will top universities accept me to their Graduate Program?

How can I determine if a graduate program will accept me?

• I'm interested in a list or metrics to help filter out schools that won't accept me based on immutable facts (such as GPA, time out of school). How can I best determine which schools will reject me out of hand, and which ones are worth researching or visiting?

• Answer:

  1. "Graduate school" is a pretty broad category. Are you talking about masters or Ph.D.? Engineering, public policy, fine arts, physics, social work, MBA, etc? These different programs will all judge by very different standards. In one case, taking significant time off of school will be a benefit (MBA, if you were working) and other times it will be a point of concern or curiosity (physics). You need to be more specific for people to be able to help you. 2. There are no strict rules. Admissions are rarely done by formula   Try to figure out how selective the program is. If you're going into a Ph.D. program out of undergrad, you can look at various websites where people will post their grades, GRE scores, etc and fret to no end about their admissions chances: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/.