Understanding Your GRE Scores

You studied, struggled, and completed the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). After hitting the submit button your test score flashes onto the screen. Do you know what that score means? For example, what does it mean to have a Verbal GRE score of 150? Students, faculty, and graduate admissions committees are used to the old GRE scoring scales. On the old GRE (administered prior to August, 2011) a Verbal score of 150 is impossible because the old GRE scores ranged from 200 to 800. The revised GRE has revamped the scale of scores to make scores more easily interpreted and to allow more distinctions among test takers.

GRE Verbal and Quantitative Scores
If you took the GRE prior to August 2011, your Verbal and Quantitative scores can range from 200 to 800 points, in 10 point increments. The Revised GRE reports Verbal and Quantitative scores on a scale from 130 to 170 points, in 1 point increments.

GRE Analytical Writing Score
The Revised GRE contains no change to the GRE Analytical Writing score. The GRE Analytical Writing score ranges from 0 to 6 in half point increments.

As of this writing (July, 2011), Educational Testing Service, the makers of the GRE, have not released information about test norms, so it is unclear what a 150, for example, means. More information on score interpretation will be available in November, 2011 after the Revised GRE has been administered beyond it's initial testing/norming phase.