What’s a Good GRE Score?
Any answer to the “what’s a good GRE score?” question should come with a disclaimer. Do you want a good GRE score for a PhD program in medieval history, or for an EMBA at your state university? Do you have weak college grades but ten years of work experience, or are you a current student with a 4.0 GPA? The real question to ask is “what’s a good GRE score for me?”—and the simple answer is, a good score is whatever score will impress the programs you’re applying to! Read more
How Much Can You Expect Your GRE Score to Go Up with Studying?
As a GRE instructor, I get this question a lot. I’ll start by just sharing what I see, and note that this is just my experience: most students go up 5-8 points with study. That said, there are also students who go up 15 points, so I don’t mean the 5-8 to be read as a cap or threshold.
Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll state the obvious, which is that every person is different. So many factors play into this question, including where you start, how much you study, and how you study. But since you already know that, I want to unpack each of these in order to answer the question more specifically to you.
Should I Cancel My GRE Score?
When you finish taking the GRE, you’ll be given an option to cancel your score. This may sound like a nice option—if you really think you did terribly, it’s not too late to pretend the whole thing never happened, right? Yes, you can cancel your GRE score. But cancelling your score is not always the best course of action.
How to Get a Perfect Score on the GRE
A perfect score on the GRE would be a 170 on each the Quant and Verbal sections and a 6.0 on the Analytical Writing Measure. Perfect scores are incredibly rare—while getting a perfect score in just one of these sections would put you in or close to the 99th percentile for that section, getting a perfect score in all three makes you a unicorn. In other words, you absolutely don’t need to get a perfect score in order to get into your program. I feel confident making that blanket statement. But for all the would-be unicorns out there, below I break down what you can do to get a perfect score in all three sections.
Why Was My Official GRE Score Lower Than My Practice Scores?
If the title of this article applies to you, I’m sorry that your official GRE score surprised you! It happens to the best of us, and you’re allowed (and even encouraged) to take the GRE twice. But before you do, you should figure out why your official GRE score wasn’t as high as your practice scores.
GRE Success Story – Christina
Few things make us instructors happier than getting that glowing email from a student who has just achieved his or her goal score. While these students tend to have certain traits in common (a reasonable timeline, diligent studying, etc.), we’ve also noticed that successful students take many different paths to reach their goals.
Recently, the MPrep Instructor Manager team set out to investigate what habits and practices lead to successful outcomes for our students, with the hope of inspiring others just setting out on their test prep journeys. We asked our instructor pool to nominate students, and then reached out to these students to conduct brief interviews.
Today, we’ll be sharing one story from a recent student, with the hope that we’ll be able to continue sharing more of these profiles in the future.