resource

I think that would be a fair assumption. I kind of think about it as a normal distribution around the midpoint with a standard deviation of 20 points. So, with a range of 600-700, you have a 68% chance of scoring within 630-670.

I've been doing some speculating and thinking on what the revised GRE score ranges actually mean. I am going to propose a simple hypothesis I've been rolling around in my head, and I'm curious to see what flaws/improvements others can see. After all, we need something to occupy our minds until November. Given what we know, the revised GRE has been spitting out 100 point ranges for those not bounded by 800 (i.e. 580-680) and smaller ranges for those bounded by 800 (i.e. 720-800). We also know that the highest possible score at this point is 750-800. Based on the information provided by ETS concerning the score ranges, the scoring practices on PowerPrep II, and the scoring table in ETS' book, I am going to make the assumption that these scores are raw scores based on the scoring rubric of the old GRE prior to weighting for difficulty of questions. This implies that the score is computed rather simplistically (i.e. # wrong on the quantitative section equals some single-valued score for that section). Then, ETS runs their algorithms to weight each question for the exam by the percentages of people who get certain questions right/wrong. This obviously cannot be performed consistently until enough people have taken the exam -- hence, making us wait until November for scores and dropping the price to encourage more people to take the exam. This leads me to believe that they haven't weighted the unofficial score ranges yet, whatsoever. Further, I am going to suggest that the score ranges are centered on the single-value of the raw, unweighted score. The ranges, then, should be interpreted at the midpoint with 50 points on either side to account for the difficulty of the exam. Thus, a 650-750 on a difficult test might reflect a true score greater than 700. Conversely, a 500-600 on an easy test might reflect a true score less than 550. Additionally, the 750-800 range is more realistically 750-850, thus the lower half of the 100 point range reflects the possibility that an 800 was achieved on a relatively easier test and would be subject to deflation. I think this theory accounts for the improved precision as the range moves towards 800. I guess the real benefit of this, if it holds any water, is that we can assign some subjective belief about how difficult our individual exam was (relative to PowerPrep as a baseline), to determine where our actual score will fall within the range we were given. A note of caution: I am hesitant to speculate on how this will map to percentiles. The entire argument above is based on the assumption that the score ranges (out of 800) can be estimated by the raw score (number of questions right/wrong) obtained. Thus, the percentiles are determined largely independent of the raw score -- which has historically been the case. And then, depending on how ETS wants to shape the distribution of new scaled scores (out of 170), they'll assign these scores according to the percentiles they want to represent. Thoughts? Comments?

The Barron's, ETS, and Kaplan's books all have a lot of overlap, so I think any one of them individually is good. Also, there are a lot of free word lists on the internet. They are easy enough to copy/paste into excel to study. Lastly, I downloaded the Kaplan GRE vocab app for my droid (I think there are others available for iPhones). It had 500 words, and worked great. I was able to study whenever there was downtime and I had my phone on me. I would definitely recommend an app like this.

It is.

I'll add some more details on my testing experience to inform those who have yet to take the new GRE. I scored 730-800 on the verbal. I found the verbal to be significantly more difficult than Powerprep. My first verbal section was tough, with difficult vocab (which I had been acing on practice exams), and the second verbal section was equally as difficult, if not harder. This leads me to believe that the section was weighted a little bit since I was uncertain on 4-5 questions and probably got some of those (and likely more) wrong. I scored 750-800 on the quantitative section (3 parts). It was pretty straight-forward. It was about the same difficulty as Powerprep, with no big surprises. My data interpretation questions were very easy, and there wasn't anything that I would deem a "hard to very hard" question. That said, I usually make 2-3 careless mistakes, but barring that, I felt well prepared from studying the ETS, Barrons, and PR books.

Hi all, I found this forum as I've been scouring the internet for help deciphering my revised GRE ranges. Thanks for sharing all of this analysis. I'll add to the practice test scores so we all have a little more information that might help us relax until November. Revised GRE: Quant: 750-800 Verbal: 730-800 Powerprep II: Quant 750-800 (6 wrong, 2 on first section) Verbal: 750-800 (4 wrong, 1 on first section) Princeton Review Online Tests: Test 3 Quant: 162 (8 wrong) Verbal: 166 (4 wrong) Test 6 Quant: 161 (9 wrong) Verbal: 157 (11 wrong) Test 7 Quant: 163 (5 wrong) Verbal: 157 (11 wrong) Test 8 Quant: 160 (8 wrong) Verbal: 159 (8 wrong) I also did the practice test in the ETS book and scored: Quant: 750-800 Verbal: 680-780 Old GRE (three years ago -- only studied for quant): Quant: 760 Verbal: 540 AWA: 4.5 In the Barron's and Princeton Review books, I would consistently get 2-6 questions wrong on both sections, but the scoring metrics were not ideal -- I usually translated them with ETS' scoring scale for an estimate. Also, I found a lot of errors on the PR online tests and in the book. Specifically on the PR online tests, the functionality of the program was subpar. The "highlight a sentence" questions never worked, occasionally images wouldn't load, and some answers to questions were flat out wrong. So, I would take the PR score estimates as a lower bound to what you are capable of. Despite the errors, the PR tests are great practice for simulating the real testing environment and time constraints.