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.
There are three reasons that your official GRE score might have been lower. These reasons are pretty broad, and all of them might apply to you, to various degrees. Here they are:
- You underperformed on test day.
- You overperformed on your practice tests.
- You just had bad luck.
Why does test day underperformance happen?
GRE test day isn’t easy. If you underperformed on the real test, it could have been due to unfamiliarity with and discomfort in the testing environment. (Sometimes, something just goes completely wrong on test day: maybe you had the flu, or your neighbor threw a loud party the night before, or a fire alarm went off in the middle of your test.) If that’s the case, you’ll probably do better by simply taking the test again. The evidence: this 2014 infographic from the ETS, suggesting that about 60% of test takers do better on the Verbal section when taking the GRE again, and that the same is true for the Quant section.
Underperformance can also have more insidious causes. A lot of people experience anxiety in the GRE environment. That can be true even if you didn’t feel anxious while taking practice tests at home (and if you did feel anxious during your practice tests, going to an unfamiliar place to take the test under more pressure can turn the anxiety up to 11.) Symptoms of anxiety-related underperformance: feeling jittery or overly nervous; feeling like you ‘froze’ or like your mind went blank during the test; feeling distracted by worries about your performance or about the previous sections of the test.
If that describes you on test day, you’ll need to address the anxiety before going in to retake the GRE. Start with this article. Meditation can help. So can negative visualization, also known as “worry time.”
Underperformance can also happen when you try something new on test day. For instance, you may have gone into your practice tests with a more relaxed and casual mindset, being willing to skip tough questions (“I can always try it again when I review!”) But test day can feel higher-stakes, and you may find yourself not wanting to skip questions. A lot of people struggle to use “back of the napkin” math strategies like estimation on test day, since the test-day pressure makes you feel like you want to “do everything the right way.”
When you go in for your next test, treat it exactly how you treated your most successful practice test. Remind yourself that if you’ve been doing well on practice tests, the exact same behaviors will earn you a good score on the real GRE. If you got a strong practice test score without getting the super hard ones right, you can do the same on the real thing. And one of the best ways to get a weak score on the real GRE is to “punch above your weight”: to waste all of your time attempting every single hard question, so that you’re forced to guess on the easier ones you could have gotten right.
Why does practice test overperformance happen?
Unfortunately, we have to consider the opposite scenario, even though it’s a blow to the ego. Maybe your official test was a good representation of your GRE skills, but your practice test scores were unrealistically high. That doesn’t mean you can’t improve your score, but it means you may need to change how you’re approaching your practice tests.
The best way to take a practice test is as similarly to the real thing as possible. The biggest mistakes that people make here relate to timing and attention span. Don’t ever pause the timer during a practice test! If you absolutely have to pause, be aware that your score may end up inflated. When you take a practice test, part of what you’re doing is practicing test-day behaviors. Don’t let yourself get away with bad timing behavior you won’t be able to reproduce on the real GRE. When you take practice tests, strictly time your breaks, and don’t do anything you wouldn’t be allowed to do on test day (like browsing Facebook or making a phone call). Test day is sort of boring, to be honest, and it’s a strain on your attention span. Don’t do anything that will help you focus during the practice test, either, like listening to music or eating or drinking. You may even want to go somewhere other than your home to do your practice tests: a public library is a good choice.
Another major mistake is not practicing the essays. It’s not that you need a ton of practice to do well on the GRE essays. However, the two essays represent a whole hour of work you’ll have to do before you even get to see a single Quant or Verbal section. If you ignore that when you practice, your Quant and Verbal scores will likely be higher than they would otherwise. If you’re really pressed for time and need to use every minute efficiently, you can ignore the essays, but do some other type of GRE practice during the hour before your practice test instead, to simulate the effect the essays have on your energy level.
If you did these things during your practice tests, it’s okay! The practice was still valuable, and you still learned what you needed to learn about your strengths and weaknesses. But your score may very well have been inflated, which can explain why your official test score was surprisingly low.
Does bad luck happen on the GRE?
If your official GRE score was surprisingly low, you may be wondering, completely reasonably, whether the test was wrong about you. Did you just get questions that played to your weaknesses? Was your GRE somehow unusually tough?
The ETS acknowledges that the GRE isn’t perfect. So, let’s do a thought exercise to understand exactly how imperfect it is, and how likely it is that you’ll have an unlucky test day.
In theory, if you took the GRE a million times (assuming you didn’t study in between attempts, and you could keep taking the test without ever getting hungry or tired), your scores would average out to particular values. Let’s call those values your “real Quant score” and your “real Verbal score.”
The “standard error of measurement” is a shorthand way of expressing how consistent a test is. If a test has an SEM of 0, then your score will be the same as your “real score” every single time you take it, no matter what. If a test has a low SEM, then your score will usually be pretty close to your “real score.” The higher the SEM is, the more likely it is that a single attempt at the test will result in a “weird” score.
Assuming that you didn’t have any reason for overperforming or underperforming on test day, it’s about equally likely that you’ll score higher than your “real score,” or lower than your “real score.” In fact, your attempts at the GRE should give you scores that are normally distributed around your real scores. The SEM is the standard deviation of this distribution.
Therefore, 68% of your actual Verbal attempts will give you a score within 1 SEM of your “real Verbal score.” Roughly 95% of your attempts will give you a score within 2 SEMs of your real score. And more than 99% of attempts will give you a score within 3 SEMs of your real score.
In 2018, the GRE Verbal section had a SEM of 2.4 points, and the GRE Quant section had a SEM of 2.1 points. Suppose that you scored a 160 on Verbal. The odds are 68% that this result was within 1 SEM of your real score—that is, the score that you’d average out to if you took the GRE a million times. Therefore, there’s a 68% chance that your real Verbal score is currently between 157.6 and 162.4. Similarly, the odds are 95% that your real Verbal score is between 155.2 and 164.8.
Since you’re probably interested in the odds of getting a higher score, here’s the rundown:
- The odds that you scored 2.4 or more points below your real Verbal score are about 16%.
- The odds that you scored 4.8 or more points below your real Verbal score are about 2%.
- The odds that you scored 2.1 or more points below your real Quant score are about 16%.
- The odds that you scored 4.2 or more points below your real Quant score are about 2%.
But that isn’t the whole story. First of all, those odds are assuming that your real score will never change (which it will, since people learn and grow)! They’re also assuming that nothing else in this article (such as overperformance or underperformance) is affecting you. Right now, we’re assuming that your real score is stable, and that any difference between your real score and the score you got is a matter of pure random chance. Which is an oversimplification, to say the least.
Also, just because the odds suggest that your real score could be higher than the score you got, doesn’t imply that you’ll earn that score next time. You’re just as likely to score below your “real score” on your retake as you are to score above it. Your “real score” isn’t a real score at all: it’s a theoretical average score that you’re never guaranteed to earn on any one specific GRE.
The takeaway is that bad luck can happen on the GRE, and really bad luck can happen from time to time as well. From 2015 to 2018, about 2 million people took the test. Statistically, about 2,500 of those 2 million scored more than 6 points below their “real Quant score,” and about the same number scored more than 7 points below their “real Verbal score.” In the scheme of things, that’s a very small number of people, and it’s extremely unlikely that your luck was that bad. However, it’s not an impossibility. Consider the first two possibilities first: either you underperformed on test day, or overperformed on your practice tests. But if you can’t find any issues to address in either of those two categories, there’s no reason not to take the GRE again anyways. Maybe you’ll end up lucky!
KEEP READING: Everything You Need to Know About GRE Time Management
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Chelsey Cooley
is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington. Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170Q/170V on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.