Recently myself, Rachel Bezanson, and Grant Tremblay conducted an information email questionnaire of astronomy prize postdoctoral fellows to gather data on the scores that they had received on the Physics GRE. We sent it to 271 people who had held U.S. prize fellowships (Hubble, Einstein, Sagan, Jansky, and/or NSF) between 2010-2015, and 149 people responded and reported Physics GRE scores.

The results of that study are now available here (arXiv:1512.03709). Our work was independent from, but wound up coinciding with, a statement from AAS president Meg Urry on the use of the General and Physics GRE in astronomy graduate admissions.

An AstroBetter post on our findings is available here.

Above: The number of prize fellowship winners in our sample that would be eliminated from a graduate school’s applicant pool if the admissions committee instituted a hard cutoff threshold in Physics GRE performance.