Predicting Graduate School AdmissionNICHOLAS GRABON ECE 539 12/13/13

DATA SOURCE Self Submitted

Physics only

Often incomplete

~500 total data points

http://www.physicsgre.com/results.php?school=berkeley

DATA PREPARATION AND METHODS

Converted binaries to -1 or 1

Eliminated Data with no acceptance information

Formatted GRE and grades

Used svmtrain and svmclassify from class

Radial basis function worked best

Chose best rate out of 1000 trials

Held out 100 points per trial

DATA ANALYSIS

Chose an average resume to investigate (my own)

Varied this with respect to

Physics GRE score

Gender

Year of Application

School Applied to

Residency

GPA

And Combinations of these

PGRE SCORE and SCHOOL

Classifier Error=16%Green is accepted, blue is denied

YEAR and PGRE SCORE

PGRE and Gender1 corresponds to female; -1 to male

2009 2011 2013

2008

PGRE and Race

2008

2009

1 denotes ethnic minority, -1 denotes ethnic majority

2011 2013

PGRE and Residence 0 indicates domestic; -1 is international

201320112009

2008

PGRE and GPA

2011 Total GPA 2011 Major GPA

Here I used Princeton to emphasize the difference

PGRE score and Verbal GRE Score

Conclusions

The PGRE seems to be the most important factor

There is a small amount of randomness but essentially predictable

Gender, ethnicity, and residence matter

General GPA matters more than the subject GPA but not as much as PGRE

The top block of schools have roughly the same criteria