>But paper authorship in undergrad has NO correlation with your actual scientific skills!
This seems like a bad take because the goal of PhDs in the US is to produce people who can publish a lot of papers, whether that's a good ideal or not. So having produced papers as an undergrad gives you a powerful signal that you are such a person.
>Here’s the kicker - every institution explicitly said they will NOT consider these scores as part of admission process.
I know in my field, Physics, the subject GRE was very important for admissions and outside of the recent changes due to Covid I believe every top program explicitly requires the Physics GRE for admissions and its not until you get to much lower ranked programs that it becomes optional or not used at all.
This seems like a bad take because the goal of PhDs in the US is to produce people who can publish a lot of papers, whether that's a good ideal or not. So having produced papers as an undergrad gives you a powerful signal that you are such a person.
>Here’s the kicker - every institution explicitly said they will NOT consider these scores as part of admission process.
I know in my field, Physics, the subject GRE was very important for admissions and outside of the recent changes due to Covid I believe every top program explicitly requires the Physics GRE for admissions and its not until you get to much lower ranked programs that it becomes optional or not used at all.