Abstract
As systematic inequities in higher education and society have been brought to the forefront, graduate programs are interested in increasing the diversity of their applicants and enrollees. Yet, structures in place to evaluate applicants may not support such aims. One potential solution to support those aims is rubric-based holistic review. Starting in 2018, our physics department implemented a rubric-based holistic review process for all applicants to our graduate program. The rubric assessed applicants on 18 metrics covering their grades, test scores, research experiences, noncognitive competencies, and fit with the program. We then compared faculty’s ratings of applicants by admission status, sex, and undergraduate program over a three-year period. We find that the rubric scores show statistically significant differences between admitted and nonadmitted students as hoped. We also find that differences in rubric scores based on sex or undergraduate program reflected known systematic inequities such as applicants from smaller and less prestigious undergraduate universities scoring lower on the physics GRE and women performing more volunteer work in academia. Our results then suggest rubric-based holistic review as a possible route to making graduate admissions in physics more equitable.
- Received 8 October 2021
- Revised 7 September 2022
- Accepted 20 October 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.020140
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
synopsis
A Holistic Approach to Graduate Admissions
Published 30 November 2022
Physics-education researchers have found that a rubric-based evaluation method is an easy and practical way to help fight inequities in the physics-graduate-admissions process.
See more in Physics