P | GRE Online Prep
Step 1: List Your Schools
The first thing to do is list your programs of interest along the left side of the chart.
Step 2: Find Information
Next, we’ll look up all of the available GRE score information available for your
programs of interest. If this information is available, you can usually find this
somewhere in the web page for prospective program applicants—either right in the
section about test scores or in the FAQ (questions like “What’s the minimum GRE
score for admission?” often provide this information).
We’ll work our way down the list of programs and note down the information we
can find online in the second column. Then in the third and fourth columns we’ll
note what GRE score that information corresponds to. So if a school says “
T he
minimum for acceptance is 60th percentile in Quantitative and 25th percentile in
Verbal,” we’d write that down in the second column. Then, after looking up what
scores those percentiles correspond to, we’d note down “145+” for Verbal and
“155+” for Quant in the third and fourth columns.
Step 3: Determine Your Goal Score
Once you have all of your information from your programs noted down in your
chart, look to find the highest scores in each column. Then a im for 2 points higher
than that score — this is high enough to put you squarely in the acceptable score
range for that school (even if the number given is a minimum), but not so high that
you’ll be wasting energy trying to get an unnecessarily high score when you could
use that energy on other parts of your application. (Remember, a GRE score is
mostly to get you in the door—a super-high score won’t necessarily be a huge
additional boost to your application).
This is what we consider your Good GRE Score. This is the score YOU need to get
into the schools of your choice. That’s why everyone has a different good GRE score
target!