“This can vary from school to school, and even from applicant to applicant,” says Erin Skelly, a former graduate school admissions counselor at the IvyWise admissions consulting and test prep company. “Some schools have a minimum score requirement, in which case the scores are very important. But if the rest of your application is very strong, the scores may be less important.”
GRE scores are a key factor that grad school admissions officers consider but are not necessarily the deciding factor, says Priyam Shah, a master tutor at IvyWise. “The GRE 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,” Shah wrote in an email.
Grad schools often use GRE scores to distinguish between applicants. Selepak at the University of Florida says GRE scores give him a metric he can use to make apples-to-apples comparisons between students who would otherwise be difficult to judge fairly because they have vastly different undergraduate backgrounds.
Selepak suggests that grad school hopefuls investigate whether the grad programs they are interested in have GRE score minimums and look into the average GRE scores at those programs so that they can target programs where they have a realistic chances of acceptance.
Ian Curtis, co-founder and former director of academic development at H&C Education, notes that grad 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 your chances of acceptance to great humanities and social sciences programs,” Curtis wrote in an email, adding that he once assisted a student who was accepted into a prestigious history Ph.D. program despite having 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,” Curtis explains.