What is a good GRE Score?

What is a good GRE Score?

A common query that arises in most of the Graduate Record Examinations candidates is, “What is a fine GRE mark?” Will my marks be enough to secure me a seat in my dream college?  Well, the answer lies in the question itself.  Different colleges have different cut-offs and requirements. So, what you consider as a good GRE score might not be the same for a particular institute! Every college has specific admission criteria. To be more precise, each department within a college might’ve different score requisites.

Besides GRE preparation and a good GRE score form only half of the MS/MBA abroad preparation process. A good GRE score helps you clear the necessary cutoff and even can be a good mitigator for previous academic scores. However, to gain admission to your dream college you need to focus on other aspects of the admission process too.

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How to find out the essential GRE score requirement for a university?

The best thing to do is to visit their site. Their website will show the admission criteria including the Graduate Record Examinations benchmark score. The quants & verbal section are separately viewed thus making the departments have a varied idea of a good Graduate Record Examinations score. Major of the top colleges are pretty obvious regarding their requirements. They state minimal marks for a section as well as the overall to get a seat into their institute.

The bottom line is that you need to understand the needs of your ideal college before concluding a good score/ bad score. Here are a few examples that will give you an idea about the scores different universities are looking at:

 University Verbal avg. marks Quant marks Quant avg. marks
Purdue University 158 160 163
Michigan Ann Arbor 154 159 161
Georgia Technological 155 159 161
Illinois Urbana 155 159 163
University of California 155 159 161
Stanford University 158 160 163
Massachusetts Institute of technology 157 160 162
Cornell University 160 159 162
University of Texas Austin 155 157 160
Carnegie Mellon University 159 159 161

In general, the benchmarks for different sections in GRE are as follows:

1. Great Marks: Getting 163 + in verbal, 165 + in quantitative & an overall of 328 plus will make you among 10% of GRE toppers. You need to also have 5.0+ in AWA.

2. Good Marks: Getting 158 to 162 in verbal, 159 to 164 in quantitative & an overall of 317- 327 will make you among 25% of scorers. You need to also get 4.5 in AWA.

3. Modest marks: Getting 152 to 157 in verbal & 153 to 158 in quantitative & an overall of 305 & 316 will make you amongst 50% of the scorers. You need to also get a 4.0+ in AWA.

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