Taking the GRE has been one of the many necessary evils for getting into graduate school for decades. Not only do these tests usually take away time and energy from your more relevant studies, they’re actually a very poor indicator of how well you’re going to do in a graduate program. Luckily an increasing number of schools and specific programs are limiting or eliminating their GRE and GMAT requirements to remove an unnecessary hurdle for prospective students. Here are a few strategies you can employ to minimize the chances that you’ll be required to take those awful standardized tests.

Be a High Achiever

More and more schools are starting to use the GRE as a qualifying mark for students that don’t otherwise meet their requirements. They do this by only requiring applicants whose undergraduate GPAs are below a certain level to take the GRE or the GMAT as a part of their application process. Even better, these aren’t provincial no-name schools. George Washington University waives the requirement at a GPA of 3.0 for their political management and public relations programs, and Northeastern places the cutoff at 3.2 in their tax program. The higher your GPA is the less likely it is that you’ll be required to hand in test scores.

Go To Business School

Yea, I know this sounds exactly like the advice your dad has been giving you for 10 years. A lot of business schools have simply eliminated the GRE and GMAT requirements, either entirely, or by making them “recommended”. Many of these are very prestigious schools like Boston University, Pepperdine, and Northwestern, so don’t attribute think that these are just schools that are trying to fleece low achieving students for tuition dollars. Presumably, being business schools (and therefore working with a high volume of business people that are improving their credentials), they’ve decided to streamline their application processes to make it easier for working professionals to go back to school and get that MBA.

Choose A High Demand Field

Business is a high volume major largely because of high student demand; other fields, like IT and healthcare, have a very high demand for workers and are putting pressure on schools to attract more students. Retiring baby boomers are stressing the US healthcare system to its breaking point, and the growth in demand for IT experts is being pushed both by accelerating innovation in the tech sector, and a surprising flare-up in cybercrime over the last decade.

As a result, a lot of schools in these fields are also cutting their GRE requirements. Programs like Health Informatics (both IT and healthcare at once!) often have no GRE requirement at all. Others, like Ohio University’s nursing program, waive the requirement for high achieving applicants, but not for students in other fields.

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3 Ways To Get Into Grad School Without Taking The GRE