GRE Info – Score Confidentiality

Students can take the GRE once every 21 days, or up to five times in any continuous 12-month period, and scores are valid for up to five years from the date of the test. This gives students the opportunity to take the test multiple times and choose which scores to submit to graduate, law, or business schools. It is always the student’s choice whether scores are submitted to prospective academic programs, as GRE scores are confidential and not released without explicit permission of the test taker.

It is also up to each individual student to determine whether they want their test scored. At the conclusion of your GRE, you will be presented with an option to cancel your test scores before the test is graded. If you select this option, your test will be invalidated, and you will not be able to see your score. It is important to note that canceling your score stills counts as one of the five GREs you are permitted to take each year.

If you submit your test for grading, you will immediately be shown your unofficial scores for the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections. Official scores will be available 8-10 days after the date of the test, after the difficulty level has been analyzed and equated against other test compositions. Analytical Writing scores are also available 8-10 days after your exam, as essays must be reviewed by at least one human reader and one computer “e-rater” created by Educational Testing Service (ETS), the administrator of the GRE.

ETS Student Empowerment

The GRE has been purposefully designed by ETS to maximize your control over the testing and credentialing process. The GRE is the only graduate-level admissions test that allows you to skip questions, revise an unlimited number of answers, and comprehensively review your work before submitting it for grading. This dedication to student empowerment is also reflected in the system for submitting test scores. At the conclusion of the test, after being given an option to cancel their scores, you will have the opportunity to view an estimated final score for the Quantitative and Verbal Reasoning sections before deciding whether to submit those scores.

The “Scoreselect” service makes it easy after the test for students to either submit all of their scores from the past five years or only the scores from the most recent testing session. After test day, students can send additional score reports for a fee, including the score reports from specific testing sessions instead of a bundle containing all test results. No matter when you report your scores or which options you choose, you are in charge of selecting which scores to report. Schools will only see the scores that you send to them, and there will be no special indication whether you have taken additional GRE tests.

Institutional Usage Guidelines

ETS provides educational institutions with a list of policies and guidelines to help ensure that they utilize test score information in a way that preserves its validity and confidentiality. The primary limitations of GRE scores are that they cannot measure all qualities that are important to predicting success in graduate, business, or law school, as they are an inexact measure with a standard error of measurement. So long as the difference between scores is greater than the “standard error of measurement” between the scores, then a comparison can be used as a reliable indication of real differences in applicants’ academic knowledge and developed abilities. Institutions are encouraged to use each section score as a separate metric and are forbidden from listing GRE score results on academic transcripts.

ETS policies describe their own practices for maintaining the integrity of the GRE, including determining who can use the score, validating the relevance of the exam for the purposes of admissions selection and guidance, maintaining student confidentiality, encouraging institutions to report test scores in an aggregated form, and providing concordance tables to compare new and old exam results. ETS guidelines describe advice for GRE score users to ensure proper use and maintenance of the test results. These guidelines include using multiple criteria for admissions decisions, conducting validity studies to ensure applicability of the test scores for specific institutions, using percentile ranks to compare candidates, avoiding decisions based on small score differences, and not comparing scores from different subject tests.

ETS has designed a score comparison tool to compare GRE and GMAT scores, designed to help institutions compare students with scores from either test. While the GMAT is used exclusively for MBA programs, the GRE is used for many different graduate programs including business and law schools. Although it is possible to compare scores using the ETS tool, or by looking at percentile scores, ETS emphasizes that the tests measure different attributes. The GMAT measures skills that are specifically useful in business contexts, whereas the GRE tests more general aptitudes. Generally, the GMAT is considered to have more challenging Quantitative sections, whereas the GRE has more challenging Verbal sections because its vocabulary is more difficult.

ETS has also created a score comparison tool to compare GRE and LSAT scores, designed to help individuals and institutions better understand the knowledge and abilities of students who have chosen to take the GRE rather than the LSAT. The LSAT is used to apply only to law schools, while the GRE is used to apply to graduate, business, and law programs. While GRE Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning scores can be used to predict an LSAT score, ETS makes it clear that each exam uses a unique framework to differentiate sub-skills covered in the test and notes that there may be variability between the difficulty level and proportion of different question types used on each exam.

Conclusion 

While many standardized tests are relatively unconcerned with score confidentiality, the GRE empowers students by providing them complete control over their test scores. This includes choosing if their exam is scored at all to selecting which test scores are sent to designated academic institutions. ETS provides institutions of higher learning with policies and guidelines intended to help them utilize GRE scores in ways that preserve both validity and confidentiality. With an increasing number of business and law programs now accepting the GRE in place of GMAT or LSAT scores, ETS has made it possible to compare scores across different exams while also noting that each test may measure specific attributes more likely to lead to success in a particular program.