This is late, so I doubt you’ll revisit the blog in order to read my response. But I’ll respond anyway.

You’re right. The GPA and GRE scores are probably worth being concerned about. But there are a few optimistic things that can be said:

1. Sometimes, if your current professors think that your GPA and/or GRE scores are not an accurate reflection of your philosophical aptitude, they might send emails to some of the higher-ranked departments to which you’ve applied to say something like, “Hey, don’t overlook Maya So-and-so’s application. She’s got a 3.4 GPA, but trust me, that has nothing to do with her ability to do philosophy. Give her sample a read.” Now, I don’t know what your relationship is like with your letter-writers, but this may be something to ask about … especially if there are good reasons for thinking that the numbers are not indicative of the sort of graduate student that you’d be.

2. And speaking of “good reasons for thinking that the numbers are not indicative of the sort of graduate student that you’d be,” if there are any such things, you’d be well-served to mention them in your statement of purpose. For instance, depending on your situation, you might say, “My grades in philosophy classes started off poor because I was unsure that philosophy was something that I’d be interested in doing. But ever since I began taking my philosophical studies seriously, I’ve been making nothing but A’s.” Or, “I’ve always been the sort of person that performed exceptionally well on tasks when I was given some time to reflect, but since standardized tests like the GRE don’t allow for much reflection, I’ve generally done just ‘average’ on those sorts of tasks.”

3. This is only my relatively uninformed opinion, but … I’d imagine that the numbers are really only a concern with respect to your chances at Brown (and maybe UMCP). I can’t imagine that your numbers would automatically exclude you from consideration at any of the other programs you list, including the M.A. programs.

For the record, I think Georgetown’s awesome. Personally, I think it’s head-and-shoulders above every single program you list, except Brown. If you get into Tufts or UW-Milwaukee, they might work as a springboard into a higher-ranked Ph.D. program, but … an acceptance from Georgetown would be tough to turn down (assuming, of course, that you’re not so lucky with Brown).

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Here’s my tentative list of schools, by Philosophical Gourmet ranking (different for PhD’s and MA’s):
PhD
-Brown (16)
-University of Maryland, College Park (29)
-Georgetown (40)
-Arizona State (44)
-Boston University (50)
-Northwestern (53)
-Emory (54)
-Boston College (unranked)
MA
-Tufts (1)
-Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (5)
-California State University, Los Angeles (9)

Anything I should just cut off the list as hopeless? I would’ve written off Brown as impossible, but the admissions committee member I contacted said that students with a similar profile had been accepted before… (though he won’t be on the AC this year). Georgetown and Maryland have been particularly encouraging to me in email correspondences.

Any ideas?

I wish I could say something more concrete than this, but the sense that I get is that the importance of GRE scores varies from place to place. Generally speaking, I think that most admissions committees have a kind of “low score limit,” which allows them to shave off a large number of applications almost immediately. And of course, this limit is going to depend on the committee. So while a top-5 program might set their limit at, say, 1400, a program ranked in the 40’s might set it 1100 (or perhaps even a bit lower).

Now, of course, there are special circumstances in which these numbers are almost completely meaningless, but having spoken with a few former admissions committee members, I get the sense that this is more-or-less a standard procedure. (See this post on John Basl’s blog for some further confirmation.)

The other way in which your GRE scores might affect your application is somewhat more positive. Once you’ve been admitted to a program, if your GRE scores are high enough, you might get extra fellowship money (provided that the rest of your application is equally as impressive). When admissions committees appeal to the school for grants and fellowship money, it’s a lot easier for them to brag about your scores on a standardized test than to try to explain how well you seem to understand Leibniz’s Monadology.

For what it’s worth, due to some really, really bad advice I was given on how to study for it, I did relatively poorly on the GRE.