Sending bad GRE scores to demonstrate improvement

[samman1994]

Hello everyone,

The question is the same as the topic. I took the GRE 2 months ago and received a score of 155V/149Q/4.5AW. I decided to retake it to try and get a better quant score and got 155V/156Q/AW not graded yet. I've decided to send the better score, but should I send my previous score as well? I know my 2nd score isn't amazing, but I definitely think a 7 point improvement is good, but that would also be at the expense of showing that I got a 149Q on my first GRE, which is abysmal. Is it worth spending the extra money to send? Would it actually be determinental because it demonstrates how low my first score actually was? Or does it really not matter that much because my scores aren't that great, and its not that amazing of an improvement? Any feedback would be appreciated. Happy Halloween and thank you!

[TakeruK]

No, don't do it.

I would say that if you already sent in the first set of scores to schools (free reports) then I wouldn't worry that the school can see both scores. But there's no need to spend extra money to send the first set of scores to schools that already received the second. 

As you can probably guess, all metrics come with some sort of measurement error or variance. Your test score is just another metric/measurement so it's not immune to variance either. ETS reports their estimate of test score variance to everyone (test takers and schools). Table 5 of this publication (https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide.pdf) tells you their reported standard error of measurements for various scores. For the Q score, it's 2.1 for an individual measurement and 3.0 for score differences (you may remember from your lab courses that adding/subtracting two measurements results in adding the errors in quadrature). So, a 6 point difference is an actual improvement, but it's helpful to remember that there are going to be natural variations in your score (i.e. I wouldn't say that your first score was so much lower than the second).

[samman1994]

Ok thank you!