UNDERSTANDING SCORES ON GRE

Understanding Scores on GRE

Students attempting the GRE get three separate scores for their performance on Analytical Writing Assessment, Verbal Reasoning, and a Quantitative Reasoning.

• an Analytical Writing score reported on a 0–6 score scale, in half-point increments.
• a Verbal Reasoning score reported on a 130–170 score scale, in 1-point increments.
• a Quantitative Reasoning score reported on a 130–170 score scale, in 1-point increments.

Analytical Writing section - For the Analytical Writing section, each essay receives a score from at least one trained reader, using a six-point holistic scale. In holistic scoring, readers are trained to assign scores on the basis of the overall quality of an essay in response to the assigned task. The essay score is then reviewed by e-rater®, a computerized program developed by ETS, which is used to monitor the human reader. If the e-rater evaluation and the human score agree, the human score is used as the final score. If they disagree by a certain amount, a second human score is obtained, and the final score is the average of the two human scores.

The final scores on the two essays are then averaged and rounded to the nearest half-point interval on the 0–6 score scale. A single score is reported for the Analytical Writing measure. The primary emphasis in scoring the Analytical Writing section is on your critical thinking and analytical writing skills rather than on grammar and mechanics. During the scoring process, your essay responses on the Analytical Writing section will be reviewed by ETS essay-similarity-detection software and by experienced essay readers.

Independent Intellectual Activity 

Your essay responses on the Analytical Writing section will be reviewed by ETS essay-similarity-detection software and by experienced essay readers during the scoring process. In light of the high value placed on independent intellectual activity within graduate schools and universities, your essay response should represent your original work. ETS reserves the right to cancel test scores of any test taker when an essay response includes any of the following:

1. text that is unusually similar to that found in one or more other GRE essay responses;
2. quoting or paraphrasing, without attribution, language that appears in any published or unpublished sources, including sources from the Internet and/or sources provided by any third party;
3. unacknowledged use of work that has been produced through collaboration with others without citation of the contribution of others;
4. essays submitted as work of the test taker that appear to have been borrowed in whole or in part from elsewhere or prepared by another person.

When one or more of the above circumstances occurs, ETS may conclude, in its professional judgment, that the essay response does not reflect the independent writing skills that this test seeks to measure. When ETS reaches that conclusion, it cancels the Analytical Writing score and, because Analytical Writing scores are an integral part of the test as a whole, scores for the rest of the GRE revised General Test are canceled as well.

Verbal Reasoning & Quantitative Reasoning sections - For the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning measures of the computer-delivered GRE revised General Test, the reported scores are based on the number of correct responses to all the questions included in the operational sections of the measure.

The Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning measures are section-level adaptive. This means the computer selects the second operational section of a measure based on your performance on the first section. Within each section, all questions contribute equally to the final score. For each of the two measures, a raw score is computed. The raw score is the number of questions you answered correctly.

The raw score is converted to a scaled score through a process known as equating. The equating process accounts for minor variations in difficulty among the different test editions as well as the differences in difficulty introduced by the section-level adaptation. Thus a given scaled score for a particular measure reflects the same level of performance regardless of which second section was selected and when the test was taken.