More on GPAs for CS PhD admission

[Originaly posted to Quora in 2023]

Every top computer science graduate school regularly admits applicants with 3.6 GPAs. Your GPA definitely won’t get you into a top computer science graduate school, because that’s not how anyone gets in, but it won’t keep you out either.

Here’s some real data from my own CS department, which has been ranked #5 in the country by US News for more than 20 years. We received more than 1450 applicants for Fall 2023 admission to our PhD program. I sorted these by normalized undergraduate GPA—breaking ties randomly—and partitioned them into 100-student cohorts. Here are GPA ranges and numbers of admission offers for the top 12 cohorts, plus a 13th “cohort” for all lower GPAs. (Yes, we got more than 100 applications with perfect 4.00 GPAs, and yes, we rejected most of them.)

1. 4.00 ≤ GPA ≤ 4.00 — 30 admission offers

2. 3.95 ≤ GPA ≤ 4.00 — 31 admission offers

3. 3.92 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.95 — 28 admission offers

4. 3.88 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.92 — 20 admission offers

5. 3.82 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.88 — 19 admission offers

6. 3.77 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.82 — 22 admission offers

7. 3.72 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.77 — 19 admission offers

8. 3.65 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.72 — 13 admission offers

9. 3.59 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.65 — 14 admission offers

10. 3.53 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.59 — 13 admission offers

11. 3.46 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.53 — 13 admission offers

12. 3.38 ≤ GPA ≤ 3.46 — 13 admission offers

13. GPA ≤ 3.38 — >20 admission offers (out of >250 applicants)

All else being equal, a typical applicant with a 3.6 GPA had about 13% chance of admission. For comparison, our overall PhD admission rate this year was about 17%.

But of course, not all else is equal. Admissions committees are looking primarily for concrete evidence of research potential. Your research experience should increase your chances, especially if your statement or purpose describes your research efforts in the fluent technical language of active researchers (as opposed to starry-eyed but uninformed “passion”), and you have supportive letters of recommendation that describe your research efforts in credible, technical, and personal detail. The fact that your experience is all in “applying CS to other topics” is not a problem; with the right spin, your expertise outside CS could be sold as a significant advantage.