  Despite limiting access to applicants from underrepresented racial and ethnic
groups, the practice of using hard or soft GRE cut-off scores in physics
graduate program admissions is still a popular method for reducing the pool of
applicants. The present study considers whether the undergraduate institutions
of applicants have any influence on the admissions process by modelling a
physics GRE cut-off score with application data from admissions offices of five
universities. Two distinct approaches based on inferential and predictive
modelling are conducted. While there is some disagreement regarding the
relative importance between features, the two approaches largely agree that
including institutional information significantly aids the analysis. Both
models identify cases where the institutional effects are comparable to factors
of known importance such as gender and undergraduate GPA. As the results are
stable across many cut-off scores, we advocate against the practice of
employing physics GRE cut-off scores in admissions.
