The Graduate Record Examinations is a standard test that quantifies the quality of international students on global benchmark. Hence, most of the universities consider GRE as a measurement tool for basic screening parameters. However, most school’s score benchmark differs as per their requirements. Students need to verify from school to school, and even from applicant to applicant.
Some schools have a minimum score requirement but give more weight age to activities like co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, in those cases, the scores are least important. But most of the schools in the USA still prefers GRE score as base. GRE scores are a key factor that grad school admissions officers consider; these scores are necessarily the deciding factor at least screening initial level of shortlisting school. GRE scores give a metric that can be used to make apples-to-apples comparisons between students who would otherwise be difficult to judge on an equal footing, because they have vastly different undergraduate backgrounds.
However, the graduate program has cut off GRE scores. Students investigate whether the grad programs they are interested in have GRE score minimums and look into the average GRE scores at those programs, Let’s take a realistic look at what score is a good GRE score. Any score above 310 is very good score. Any score between 295 – 310 is very decent score. Importantly, great score also defines great job opportunities for students. Good schools will pick up great college that offers ample job opportunities.
International students can also target programs where they have a realistic chance of acceptance. Graduate program admissions officers often care more about GRE section scores than overall GRE scores. Ph.D. programs are generally interested in highly specialized applicants, so a low math score, for example, won’t necessarily hurt students’ chances of acceptance to great humanities and social sciences programs, recently a student who was accepted to a top history Ph.D. program with a math score in the 40th percentile. He had numerous publications and extensive teaching experience, the benefits of which far outweighed his poor performance in math.”
The GRE test is part of the application package and doing well on it will certainly help your odds but other aspects of the application (college grades, extracurricular activities, recommendations, etc.) carry weight as well. Graduate schools often use GRE scores to distinguish between applicants and admits and do not make most of their admits’ judgement solely on GRE test score only. To conclude there is no fix mantra that GRE score is the only deciding factor but not the only factor of admission.
