Which of those pesky tests to take?

In general, I think our testing policy is pretty straightforward.  Native English speakers, or non-native speakers whose undergraduate education was in English, should submit a GRE or GMAT.  (GMAT for MIB.  GRE (generally) for PhD.  Both are equally fine for the MALD or MA programs.)

Applicants who don’t fall into one of those two groups (native English speaker, or educated in English) need to submit a TOEFL or IELTS score.  This is the one area where we have a firm cut-off:  100 on the Internet-based TOEFL (or 600 on the paper test), and 7 on the IELTS.  Any admitted student with a score that falls slightly short of the minimum will be asked to pursue an intensive English language program in the summer.  Even admitted students whose scores are close to the cut-off may be asked to pursue an English program to boost their skills.  After all, you’re just not going to succeed here at Fletcher if you don’t have the language skills to get you through the piles of reading, as well as the many social situations that require fluency.

What about an applicant who’s required to take the TOEFL/IELTS, but who also wants to show quantitative strength?  Submit a GRE or GMAT, too.  We won’t focus on your verbal score.  Ideally we’d see a score for a quantitative test from all applicants, but we’ve held off changing our policy because of the expense of the tests for our applicants.  Still, if you’re taking a GRE because another of your schools requires it, send it along to Fletcher!

Here’s one exception to everything I wrote above:  LLM applicants who are non-native speakers also need to submit a TOEFL or IELTS score, but the GRE/GMAT is optional for all LLM applicants.

Those few paragraphs cover virtually all of our applicants.  Still, we occasionally we hear from someone who doesn’t quite match either description.  For example, someone whose country has more than one official language, or someone who moved around a lot.  In these cases, it’s best to contact us, so we can consider your situation on an individual basis.  We don’t want anyone to do more testing than necessary, but we do want to see the relevant test results.