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[2nd_career]

So, knowing that the GRE can be used to award various types of funding, my question is this:

What scores or percentiles does your university look for?

For example, I found at The Ohio State University the Dean’s Distinguished University Fellowship has the following requirements:

3.6/4.0 GPA
75th average percentile:  (V+Q) / 2
4.0 AW

My thought is that these being minima, in practice they have some number of fellowships and offer them to the admitted graduates with the highest combination of those criteria.

So... Is OSU typical? How far above the minima, on average, are those who score this sort of fellowship? Are the factors equally weighted?

What sayeth the wisdom of the fora?

[pink_]

At my alma mater, these criteria were the bare minimum.  Individual depts nominated candidates whom they felt would be competitive for whatever reason, and the U would choose between dept. nominations.  Basically, these fellowships were used as recruiting tools for highly desirable candidates, but what makes a candidate 'highy desirable' is rather hard to pin-down.  Sometimes it had to do with minority status or family background.  sometimes it had to do with undergrad degrees or standardized test-scores.  Usually it was some combination of these, but because the awards are university-wide, there would be no way to measure averages or typical criteria.  what would make an outstanding candidate in the humanities, is obviously nnot what might make an outstanding candidate in the hard sciences.

That's probably not super-helpful.

[seniorscholar]

We have minima provided by the graduate school (for both GRE scores and undergrad GPA), but the graduate director of a department (who is limited to submitting three names for the top fellowship) is free to write a strong and convincing argument explaining why student A has been nominated instead of student B, and why student C is an outstanding choice among English department applicants even though the math GRE is at the 40th percentile. This now almost always works, no doubt because the graduate school has forced us to do the real ranking (we can't submit ten names even if there are ten applicants well above the minima) and because the graduate dean understands that we do the job reasonably well. A previous grad-school dean, mathematically inclined, would look at the spreadsheet listing all applicants to our department by GRE and GPA and insist on giving fellowships to the ones at top, even when we explained that we don't actually have anyone in the field that applicant wants to work on to supervise the work, that it's thus just a shot in the dark by an applicant who has confused us with the  other big university in this city, and that the applicant would surely turn down the fellowship when it was too late to award it to someone else.