viviandarkbloom

I had a similar query - just found a thing on the Harvard website that said they consider a 'high' score to be 650. So I reckon yours ought to be good enough to have the desired effect. As for sending the scores, it seems like unless you specified the school as one of your recipients when you took the test, you have to pay extra. Personally I'm reluctant to bother sending mine to anywhere that doesn't specifically require it because I feel I've already been fleeced enough by the awful parasites at ETS.

So, some of the schools to which I'm applying that say that the GRE English Lit test is 'recommended but not required', and that a strong score may help your application, but not submitting score will not adversely effect it. What I've inferred that to mean is, 'only send us the score if you've done pretty well'. The question is, what do people reckon a top school would consider to be an impressive score on the english lit gre? If I were to send in an ok-but-not-amazing score would it be worse than just not bothering?

You're probably right, that was kind of what I'd originally presumed. An American lit professor told me not to worry about the gre. So I took him at his word, didn't get round to doing any prep, but then got nervous that I was a bit too blase once I started reading things about cut-offs for combined scores and the like. Guess I'll have to count on other lit people being similarly numerically challenged!

Ok thanks, that sounds vaguely reassuring. Was just slightly concerned that if there is an arbitrary cut off based on a combined score then mine would be a bit on the low side. I guess I'm not the only lit student with a profound inability to count...

Hi all, I'd be grateful if someone could give me a quick bit of advice about the GRE - I'm not from the US so it's all a bit of a mystery to me. I took the test yesterday. I scored 170 on the verbal and 142 on the quant - which from what I gather is abysmally low. I haven't taken a maths class since I was 16, and was terrible at it then... The question is whether this is an issue for English Lit programs. Do they even look at the quant score? Should I be concerned? I'm not sure I really have time to retake in any case but would be nice to get a view from someone who knows a bit more about this than I do. Thanks.