I heard that your SAT score in high school is what you can expect to earn for your GRE. When I took the SATs in 2014-2015 I received a 1550 out of 2400 (in other words, not great). Can I improve this? Is what I heard even true?
My kid’s were pretty comparable percentage-wise with her SATs, but she didn’t study much for the GRE (did for SAT). I’d suggest studying for the GRE for sure.
It depends a lot on what you do during your undergrad. My GREs were better than my SATs because I read voraciously in college. Study hard in school and study for the GRE in particular and you should see substantial improvement.
I don’t think you really can compare them. Your percentile ranks on the SAT compare you to two million high school students who are considering college. This should be a brighter group than the general population which would include people who never completed high school and those that did but were not interested in college.
Similarly the ACT compared you to about two million students considering college, with significant overlap (many take both tests). I don’t have the data, but it would be reasonable to assume that about three million students take at least one or the other. Only around 100,000 of these students were international students.
The GRE test-takers are a significantly more elite group. Fewer than 600,000 students take this test each year. The vast majority of these will graduate from college. They are further distinguished from the average college graduate in that they think they have good enough grades and are bright enough to consider graduate school. In other words, these test-takers are largely high-achieving college students. More than a third of them are elite international. students, looking the get graduate-school educations in the U.S.
The bottom line is that with your score at the 57th percentile on your SAT, you should not expect to automatically score at the 57th percentile on the GRE. Can you score this high? Sure, or even higher, but you will need to work very hard in college to master the skills you will need. GRE exam prep and practice tests should also help.
I actually think they’re pretty comparable with no prep, but that doesn’t mean you can’t increase them. They largely test the same major skill sets: the verbal section the GRE uses similar question types as the SAT but just expects a more advanced vocabulary and nuanced understanding of the English language. The math section of the GRE doesn’t really include math beyond about the 10th grade, so it’s slightly more advanced than the SAT but not by much. My own percentile ranks were really very, very similar to what my SAT score percentiles were (I was 99th percentile in verbal on both, and I think 85th percentile in SAT math and 88th percentile in GRE math).
[url=<a href=“https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.2731%5DThis%5B/url”>https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.2731]This[/url] study of undergraduates at the University of Oregon found a 0.75 correlation between SAT scores and GRE scores. That is a very high correlation.
I also think they are pretty comparable- two of my kids have taken them and both were strong in the areas they were strong in before college.
In particular, the psych/phil major did BETTER because she really studied, and did not at all for the SAT/ACTs.
The other kid is just kind of brilliant and never studies for these types of tests, but his writing skills atrophied- fortunately the grad school engineering programs didn’t care.
So I’d say, if you didn’t study much for your SAT/ACTs, study for the GREs. You CAN improve them.
If you do nothing, they will likely be the same, except they will reflect a bit what you emphasized in college- math & science or humanities.