I was wondering if anyone else has done both the GMAT and GRE and could speak to how performance correlated between these for you, versus the comparison tools online.
In a kind of impulsive move, I put in a last minute application to an MBA program including taking a "cold" GMAT. Since I hadn't done math since highschool and am about 8 years out of undergrad, I predictably did pretty poorly on the quantitative section, landing at about 38th percentile and pulling my overall down to 620 (I had about 89th percentile in verbal).
Since I'm interested in Public Policy or a joint MBA/MPP, I took a baseline GRE after revisiting the core math subjects for a few weeks. Although it is not exactly fluent yet, I'd been doing much better on practice tests for both (interestingly, although I keep hearing that the GMAT math is harder, I've found it the other way around...). My GRE quant came back this time at the 68th percentile.
Yet it's kind of surprising that when I plug my results into the ETS conversion calculator, I've barely moved the needle–a V95%/Q68% GRE equates to a 640. When I redid a GMAT practice test, my estimated score was 690-730. And oddly if I shift to the equivalent scores on the 800-point scale, the estimated GMAT indeed goes up to 690.
The comparison just seems awfully murky, and seems to disproportionately weight the GMAT math difficulty. It doesn't really matter at this point, but I'm curious if anyone else has data points on this, or if actual comparative performance data has been reported anywhere.