Help: huge difference between the "unofficial" scores and the official scores

[mogadishu]

Greetings y'all,

Both me and my wife recently took the computer-based GRE, and my wife got the "unofficial" score of V164/Q146 by the end of her testing day. One week later, after checking her online score report, my wife was shocked that her "official" scores displayed on the ETS website are significantly lower than her "unofficial" scores: her "official" verbal score dropped 2 points to 162, and her official quantitative score dropped 6 points to 140! I've talked to many of my friends who took the GRE before and all of them told me that their "official" scores are the same as their "unofficial" test-day scores.

I'm extremely perplexed by such extraordinary discrepancy, as I was convinced that the unofficial scores we receive on the test day should be the same as the official ones. At most, I thought the official score may deviate no more than 1 point from the unofficial ones, but 6 points? Does anyone know the possible reason for such extreme discrepancy? Did anyone else experienced similar problem with the official score report? Any input will be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[pemdas]

do you want reinstate unofficial score? what is your plan?

[aberrant]

As far as I know, the scores that you get at the end were never absolute, and certainly there must be some uncertainty that lie within the score you read from the monitor after the exam.

My guess is that from time to time, ETS adjusts the score (and percentile) based on the performance of other exam takers on a specific set of an exam. I supposed ETS created multiple versions of test/exams (both verbal and quant), therefore, when your wife saw that V = 164, Q = 146, it might means:

1. That V = 164, Q = 146 are estimated scores based on the average performance of all the exams (all different versions.) E.g. if you got 25 out of 30 questions right in verbal, you should get roughly 1XX points. But the problem here is that it includes the results from other exam versions, which, supposedly, have completely different questions. The final scores should be an indication on how one performed in that particular version/set of exam(s) by comparing to other students who also took the same version of exam, with exactly the same questions.

2. That V = 164, Q = 146 are estimated scores based on the average performance of the exam (of the same version), but ETS decided to update their database and estimation every time when there is a new batch of students took the same version.

Edited September 3, 2012 by aberrant

[pemdas]

these are all theories

why we need to elaborate on whatever we don't know but assume groundless

the scores from online account are valid not the scores from monitor. Some people wait 6 weeks for their scores to be accessible - these people are not lucky enough and take paper based exams

no need to question as to why unoff. score is different from offic.? it's meaningless

[chaetzli]

I am very sorry to hear your story. It is very unusual that this happens. Did you call ETS to ask for an explanation? There must be a good reason why it changed so dramatically and I'm sure ETS can tell you more about it. As soon as you receive the official score report you may also want to use the diagnostic tool. If you can see sth. very unusual there (let's say that there were only super easy questions) this may also explain why they could have adjusted the scores.

[pemdas]

del.

Edited September 3, 2012 by pemdas