Which biology graduate programs still require the GRE?

In the past, most biology graduate programs (M.S. and Ph.D.) in the United States required GRE scores from everyone who applied, so everyone who was planning to apply to grad schools took the GRE. Recently, however, more and more programs have become aware of the extensive evidence that higher GRE scores do not predict success in grad school, and the GRE exam has substantial economic, racial, and gender bias. For those reasons, many programs have either made submitting GRE scores optional as part of their application, or stopped considering GRE scores altogether.

In April 2021, I made a list of biology graduate programs in the United States, everything from Ph.D. programs at major research universities to M.S.-only programs at smaller schools. I then searched their websites to find out whether they required the GRE, followed up with emails to graduate program directors and department chairs, and compiled the results in the table below. I have most recently updated the list in October 2023.

What I found

As you can see below, very few biology graduate programs (6%) require the GRE. This is true for both M.S. programs (7%) and Ph.D. programs (4%).

What this means for applicants

If you're thinking about applying to grad school in biology and haven't taken the GRE yet, look up the schools you're interested in. If none of them require the GRE, hooray! You can save a lot of money, time, and anxiety by not taking the exam. If only one or two of the schools you're interested in require the GRE, email their graduate director. Maybe they've changed their policy, but they just haven't updated their web page yet (I've found a lot of programs that have outdated information on their application web pages). Or maybe, if enough potential applicants email them and say "I've got a list of 10 schools I was thinking about, and you're the only one that requires the GRE, so I'm not going to apply to your school," they'll come to their senses and drop the requirement.

WARNING: Before you decide not to take the GRE, please go to the application website for every school on your list and double-check their requirements. Some schools that I've listed as "no" make the GRE "optional" or "recommended," and if you're someone who does really well on standardized tests, you may improve your chances by submitting your scores to those schools. In addition, I can't guarantee that the information in this table is 100% accurate; I got the information from programs' web pages, then double-checked by emailing graduate program directors, but I never heard back from some despite multiple emails. If you find an error, please email me!

What this means for graduate program directors

A large majority of biology graduate programs do not require the GRE. This is true for prestigious Ph.D. programs with multiple Nobel Prize winners, M.S.-only programs at smaller regional schools, and everything in between. The number of programs who don't require the GRE is snowballing; dozens have permanently dropped the requirement in the two years since I first put this list together.

As more and more programs drop their GRE requirement, many potential applicants to your program will find that you're the only school on their list that requires the GRE. If they're smart (and you want smart applicants, right?), they'll just cross you off their list instead of taking the GRE just to apply to your one program, and you'll get fewer and fewer applicants.

Of course, if the information about your program here is incorrect, or if you change your requirement, please email me:

John H. McDonald, Research Associate
Biology Department, Western Washington University
mcdona44@wwu.edu

About the table

This table is organized by state, university, and "program." Most universities organize their faculty into departments, and each department has its own graduate program. Some places, however, have a mishmash of programs or tracks or fields or committees that subdivide a single department or span multiple departments, sometimes in rather confusing ways. At most universities, the individual program decides whether to require the GRE for admission, so I have tried to list each biology-related program at each university, but I may have missed some. I also had to make subjective decisions about which programs to include in "biology" (I excluded entomology, environmental studies, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and neuroscience, included some plant science programs but not others, etc.).

I linked the name of each program to the web page that shows whether it requires the GRE. In most cases, this is a straightforward "How to apply" page with the information presented clearly, but the information is kind of buried in others and you might have to look for the right tab or drop-down menu to click on. Many institutions update their web pages infrequently, so the pages I've linked may be outdated; email the program if the information is critically important (if, for example, the listed GRE requirement at just one school is the only reason you would take the exam).

If you click on a link and it brings you back here, the program's web page is incorrect, and I've used an email from the grad program director as my source of information.

In the "GRE required?" column, "no" includes programs that say that the GRE is "optional" or "recommended," because they don't actually require the exam.

A few schools require that some applicants (international applicants, those with undergrad GPA less than 3.0, etc.) submit the GRE, and other applicants don't have to. I've counted those as "yes" with a note in the table.

I have listed the degrees offered (M.S. or Ph.D.) in each program. I have only included master's degrees that require a research-based thesis, not 4+1 programs (in which a student earns a B.S. and M.S. simultaneously) or non-thesis M.S. degrees. I have included a few programs that call their master's degree an M.A.

Who am I?

I was chair of the graduate affairs committee in biological sciences at the University of Delaware for about 20 years. There, I saw first-hand how little correlation there was between GRE scores and the success or failure of our grad students. I am therefore glad to document the trend that fewer and fewer graduate programs are using it, and I hope this information will be useful both for applicants deciding whether they need to take the GRE, and graduate programs deciding whether to continue requiring it.