GRE Score,Scoring, etc. Please Help

[lowfive1715]

I'm applying to Grad School at the moment. For admittance into the program, I will need a 275 on the GRE. The university that I am applying to combines the scores of quantitative and the verbal to come up with the end percentage. My questions are the following :

1) Is a score of 275 on the GRE that difficult to obtain? I've looked at the "new scoring" vs "old scoring" and it equates a 275 to around an 820 or so. Are these high scores? Should I jump ship now?

2) How much room does this give me for era on the GRE?

3) Sadly, I've read the GRE grading procedures multiple times but do not fully understand how this process works. Any light on this subject?

Thank you to anyone who reads this and has something to offer.

[trina]

I took the GRE in 2010 under the old format, and from what I know, a score of 1000 was about average. I'm guessing 820 should not be too difficult to obtain. So to answer your question #1, it is not a high score.

You might want to check out some GRE books for sample tests and questions to gauge where you stand. It might be easier to understand how the GRE works and how it is graded if you had access to sample tests.

[LawlQuals]

I also took it in the old format, where each section (verbal and quantitative) were each worth 800 points. If you only need a score of 820 total, that is only 51.25%. It is a low score to obtain, but it does not mean you only need to get that many questions right since the grading is more careful. If English is your native language, and while it is dangerous to say this out loud, you could get above 820 without studying. In colleges of engineering, people tend to cite 1300 as being an agreeable lower bound for doing well enough, and to still be competitive for fellowships. You can get into places like MIT with a score as low as 1300 in engineering (I had friends who did, but certainly it depends on your field).

The grading process is harder to follow, I never bothered with it, you just need to know what it does. The older test was computer adaptive by question. The way it used to work was that if you get a question right, it might ask you a harder question, if you get a question wrong they might ask you a slightly easier question. The idea is to eventually converges on your overall competency (measured by the score you receive). *How* that happens and how it is mapped to a score I do not know exactly, and it never really mattered. You do not have to get every question right to get a perfect score, you just have to get enough of them right so you converge on that level.

However, "Currently, the GRE revised General Test allows the test-taker to move forth and back, and change answers within a section, and thus the questions in a given section are not adaptive. While questions within each section are not adaptive, performance on the first Verbal and Quantitative section influences the difficulty in the second section of the same topic." [Wiki]. So, the convergence and changing of difficulty happens by section, not per question now. If you do well in one section, the next section will be harder, if you do poorly the next section will be easier, and so on. As noted before, you do not need to get every question right to get a perfect score, it is about what level you converge at, not how many questions you get right in the sense of a strict percentage for your score. This is really all that matters to know as a test taker, the general way the scoring aims to work.

[vonLipwig]

I am surprised by the number - 275 seems like a ridiculously low score. Is it obtained by just adding up the verbal and quantitative scores? If so, the top 93% of test-takers would pass this requirement (probably more - 93% is assuming that the people scoring worst in one section also score worst in the other, etc). What do you mean by calling it a percentage?

See the following link for details: http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table1a.pdf

As for the scoring, you just answer the questions as well as you can. Don't worry about how they calculate your score - as far as I know, that's not public information. You'll get a score between 130 and 170 for each of Verbal and Quantitative, and a score between 0.0 and 6.0 for Analytical Writing. You'll also get told what percentiles these scores correspond to. For example, if you got a Verbal score of 153, you'd be told that you'd got a higher score than 62% of test-takers.

[lowfive1715]

Thank you Trina, LawlQuals, and vonLipwig for taking the time to answer my questions.

vonLipwig, in response to your question of how it is possible to receive such a low score this may help:

Admission to the MAT program requires applicants to:

A minimum score of 1,100 is required on the formula: GPA on last 60 undergraduate hours times 200, plus the GRE General Test score (taken before August 1, 2011). A minimum score of 335 is required on the formula: GPA on last 60 undergraduate hours times 20, plus the GRE General Test score (taken after August 1, 2011).

The university adds the Quantitative and the Verbal section to come up with the score to be used in the formula.

Due to that my the GPA of my final 60 hours of undergraduate was high; it allows for me to have a lower score on the GRE.

Edited January 23, 2012 by lowfive1715

[nikhilshelke]

The revised GRE scoring is now as follows:

1. Verbal Section: 130 to 170 score scale

2. Quant Section: 130 to 170 score scale

3. AWA: 6 point scale

For more information on revised GRE scoring, click on this link: http://revisedgrecracked.blogspot.com/2012/01/revised-gre-scoring-system.html

[Darth.Vegan]

Well 130 is the lowest score you can get. You essentially get 130 for showing up. That would mean you could get a combined score of 260 if you got every single question wrong. Thus a 275 would probably only require getting 1-2 questions right on each section. Even if you just filled in bubbles at random you could get a 275. Now what I would really like to know is what my quant score will be if I miss 4 questions on each section.

[Chris C.]

If anyone knows, I'm trying to go from 'percent correct' to 'percentile'. I've signed up for Kaplan's GRE On-Demand program and in the program there's a Quiz Bank that allows its users to create their own quizzes, say of a section (quant. or verbal) that they'd like to be tested on. The problem with this option is once you've completed the section and get your SmartReport it will tell you the percent you answered correctly but not how this score would be scored out of 170 points. I realize that the scoring methodology for the new GRE is adaptive but if someone has an idea how to go from 'percent correct' to 'percentile' I can even provide the level of difficulty for each question in the quiz I took. Thank so much.