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To get into college, each of us took a standardized entrance exam, either the ACT or SAT. Getting into graduate school requires much the same process.
Graduate schools in the United States require applying undergraduate students to have taken a standardized exam, which the school uses to determine which students to admit.
Unlike the general-knowledge ACT and SAT exams, graduate school entrance exams are field specific. For those applying to law school, there is the LSAT; for medical students, the MCAT; for business students, the GMAT; and for most other disciplines, the versatile GRE. More specific medical fields, such as dentistry, pharmacology and optometry, have their own standardized tests for entrance into field-specific schools.
Getting into graduate school depends on doing well on the entrance exam, though the schools do consider other factors, such as undergraduate GPA, work experience and other academic activities.
A high exam score is essential, however, to get into the best graduate schools. Incoming students at Yale Law School, for example, have an average LSAT score between 168 and 175, while the national average is 151, according to Arizona State University’s advising center. Yale was recently ranked the best law school in America by U.S. News and World Report.
Top-ranked medical schools show a similar gap between the average MCAT scores of incoming students and the national average. Harvard Medical School, ranked by U.S. News as the top research medical school, shows an average MCAT of 11.7, compared to the national average of 8.
Amy Labaugh, general advising supervisor in the BYU-Idaho Career and Academic Advising Center, suggested that students who wish to perform well on their entrance exams should take as many practice tests as they can. Practice tests are available online and in books in the Career and Advising Center. Some campus academic societies, such as the Pre-law Society, also do organized practice tests.
