<i>If you can&#x27;t pull at lease a 75th percentile on your subject GRE, you probably shouldn&#x27;t be trying to get a PhD in it.</i><p>Depends on your subject. The subject GRE for English lit, for example, is an incredible crapshoot: Much of it concerns passage identification, and if you happen to recognize that this one is from <i>Billy Budd</i> and this one is from <i>Gulliver&#x27;s Travels</i>, great. If not, you can lose a lot of points in ways that are unlikely to reflect what lit profs are really judged by in the academic market: their ability to write peer-reviewed articles and books.