GRE percentiles on official score report not matching percentiles on ETS website?

[hkcool]

On the ETS website, my score percentiles are 89% for quantitative, 92% verbal, and 93% writing. One of the schools I applied to manually entered my scores into the computer after receiving the official report, and the raw scores match up, but not the percentiles, which are 92% Q, 91% V, 92% W. I'm going to call the school tomorrow to see what's going on, but I'm just nervous if thi means I reported the percentiles incorrectly to my other schools.

Has this happened to anyone before? Any idea if it's possible for the official percentiles to be different from what you see on the website?

[Wackstrom]

They might have automatically generated the numbers based on some percentile table. They can change from year to year, so who knows? They might've used an old one.

But rest assured, I HIGHLY doubt this will make an inkling of a difference as long as the scores match up.

[caffeinatedK]

2 hours ago, hkcool said:

On the ETS website, my score percentiles are 89% for quantitative, 92% verbal, and 93% writing. One of the schools I applied to manually entered my scores into the computer after receiving the official report, and the raw scores match up, but not the percentiles, which are 92% Q, 91% V, 92% W. I'm going to call the school tomorrow to see what's going on, but I'm just nervous if thi means I reported the percentiles incorrectly to my other schools.

Has this happened to anyone before? Any idea if it's possible for the official percentiles to be different from what you see on the website?

Same thing happened to me. The raw scores were same but not the percentiles, which are Quant: 73% Verbal: 98% (writing is the same). On the website, my verbal percentiles are Quant: 76% Verbal: 99%. I guess it's because official scores are calculated by comparing my raw scores with those of everyone who took that test?

[TakeruK]

The percentile scores are calculated based on how your scaled scores (out of 170) compare with everyone who took the test in the last 3 years at the time of score submission, not the time of your test. This is a rolling 3 year period window, which means the percentile scores are updated every year. 

There are at least two possibilities:

1. Maybe you took this test before the percentile update (happens in July I think) and you also sent the score report prior to July so the version of the score report received by the school is last year percentile rank conversions. Or, maybe it's the reverse---the online score report you're viewing is from the old conversion table and the school has the new ones now.

2. Or, as @Wackstrom suggested, the school only inputs the scaled scores from the ETS report and uses a computer program to calculate the percentile scores. Their data might be outdated.

Either way, it shouldn't be a big deal as most schools care more about scaled score than percentile (after all, they care about how you compare with the applicants to their program, not every single test taker in the last 3 years). Also, if the problem is #2, then everyone else is scaled the same way so your relative rankings are still the same.