How is the GRE scored?
The GRE has three sections – a Verbal Section, a Quantitative Section and an Analytical Writing Sections. The Quantitative and Verbal Sections are each out of 800 points making the highest possible score on the GRE a 1600. The Analytical Writing Section is scored on an independent scale where a student gets a score from 0 to 6 (with a “6” being the highest. The Analytical Writing Score does not affect the overall score out of 1600 points.
The Verbal and Quantitative sections are scored separately, with scores for each ranging from 200-800 in 10-point increments. The median scores on the Verbal and Quantitative sections are approximately 470 and 600, respectively, and almost 60% of all test takers fall into the 360-580 scoring range for the Verbal and 450-740 for the Quantitative. Only 1% of all test takers receive a score of 730 or higher on the Verbal and 6% of all test takers receive an 800 on the Quantitative. The two Analytical Writing Assessment essays are each initially scored on a 0 to 6 scale by a pair of GRE readers assigned to each essay. The scores from each reader are then averaged to produce a final score for both the Issue and Argument Analysis essays. These final scores are then averaged together to create an overall score, in half-point increments, for the entire Analytical Writing section.
The verbal and quantitative sections of the computer-based test are computer adaptive. Your score is affected by the number of number of questions correctly answered in the time allotted. For the verbal and quantitative sections of the paper-based test, a score is calculated based on the number of correctly answered questions. Then, the difference in difficulty among the different test editions is taken in account through a process known as equating. There is a single score for the analytical writing section, which is computed as the average of scores from two readers. They give more importance to your critical thinking and analytical writing skills, rather than overblown language.
