the effectiveness of a graduate school admissions ultimately rests on the quality of the information collected and the decision making process that is used to arrive at a decision. admissions relies on faculty judgment combining a variety of tools including grades, test scores, letters of recommendation, interviews, and student essays to identify the best candidates. unfortunately, current practice often falls short of well established best practices leading to lower quality decisions and the possible introduction of bias. in this talk, i will make the case that improvement is urgently needed and then lay out both a short and long term place for modernizing graduate school admissions.