Academia - What should we do with the "Can I get into X program with 3.xx GPA?"

I would like to see one nice CW question asking how to get into grad school with answers that would cover low GPA, low GRE, low TOEFL, limited research experience, bad references, bad undergraduate school, etc. A single answer with subsections might be better than multiple answers, just because a lot of information would be the same. We could then close these types of questions as duplicates.

I have created the CW question and started an answer: How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?

My immediate emotional response is well summarized by Ripley's line from Aliens.

Putting things in a somewhat less inflammatory way: I think these are terrible questions and epitomize the "specific advice for a very specific situation" closing reason. The reason why they are terrible is because:

1. They are almost never generalizable (how many people are there with a 3.7 GPA from a mid-ranked Elbonian institution who double-majored in electrical engineering and llama-wrangling but did two semesters of research in an unrelated area with a nice professor who probably still remembers their name)

2. The answers pretty much always boil down to "It will probably be pretty hard, but not necessarily impossible."

Because of this, I generally vote to close these questions whenever I see them, except in the unusual circumstance that neither problem #1 nor problem #2 applies.

My concern is that are too broad or too particular.

Hmm, how can they be both too broad and too particular :) ? Honestly, I think they are neither. The first question talks about getting into any CS program with mediocre grades, the second one about getting any physics scholarship with terrible grades. Both seem not super-specific to me. The only thing that is probably "wrong" with those questions is that it is very unlikely that there is a good, objective answer to them, more than "it's unlikely, but you can always try".

I personally don't find these questions overly interesting, but there is probably a large number of students out there for which they are relevant. So I would just let these questions be.