<p>Was sitting in an adcom meeting today (for graduate school). One applicant
had taken the GRE 8 times! Never see more than 2-3 max, and most often we see just one score. </p>
<p>First 6 tries: Very low but extremely close scores (in the 30th percentile range on all). </p>
<p>7th try: Big jump in quant (65th percentile), but decline in verbal (24th percentile). </p>
<p>8th try: 98th percentile on both. </p>
<p>I would love your opinions on what happened here. Any guesses?</p>
<p>8th try=sounds like they got someone else to take the test for them.</p>
<p>How much time elapsed between the 6th/7th and 7th/8th tries?</p>
<p>starbright, I generally try to avoid thinking the worst of people I don’t know, but the score on the 8th try is not believable to me.</p>
<p>I knew a kid many years ago who made quite a bit of money taking the GREs for other people, but a lot of security has supposedly been instituted since then.</p>
<p>To tell you the truth, if I were sitting on your committee, I would be deducting points just because he took the test 8 times–even if the jump in scores were legitimate. It doesn’t say much about someone that it took a half dozen lousy scores before he figured out how to prepare.</p>
<p>Is there an answer??</p>
<p>New glasses? Paper test vs. computer test? Paid test takers for tries 7 & 8 (get refund from person who took test #7)?</p>
<p>Yeah, if we had some way of digging up what really did happen, this would be interesting. The speculation could go off in all kinds of directions. Is there any indication that the person is not a native speaker of English and received secondary education outside the United States?</p>
<p>Is there a writing section on the GREs (as on the SATs), or are they strictly multiple choice?</p>
<p>Hmmm… suspicious…</p>
<p>"8th try: 98th percentile on both. "</p>
<p>I wonder how much they paid their proxy to do the GRE for them…</p>
<p>Yeah well your guess is as good as ours. We definitely saw it as suspicious.</p>
<p>Possibly the 7th try was a bad purchase (made no sense the verbal dropped when it hadn’t the 6 times before); and maybe the last try was a more expensive professional or something. </p>
<p>One always fears a misjudgement but this seems way too strange. It may explain an issue we’ve had across our discipline (at every uni), whereby “perfect scorers” from a particular part of the world too often do not live up to their scores at all when they arrive (there is a complete disconnect that doesn’t make sense).</p>
<p>" It may explain an issue we’ve had across our discipline (at every uni), whereby “perfect scorers” from a particular part of the world too often do not live up to their scores at all when they arrive (there is a complete disconnect that doesn’t make sense)."
BINGO. It makes sense when the students who did not take the test shows up for class and do badly.</p>
<p>He found someone else to take the test for him.</p>
<p>^^^This was an international? It is a good question, I think, whether the beefed-up security precautions in the U.S. are followed closely in all other countries.</p>
<p>* I merged two threads with duplicate Original Posts. Sorry for any discontinuity in the discussion. I think I caught it in time for the problem to be minimal.*</p>
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<p>Wouldn’t the remaining part of the application lift a little corner of the veil masking this mystery? Isn’t there a personal statement?</p>
<p>I would think that a very easy test would be to send an email with a simple question about a part of the application AND a very short time to respond. Someone who scores in the 98th percentile should be able to answer an email with a style that backs his scores up. </p>
<p>Fwiw, I wonder if ETS should not be alerted about this. My money is that the test center was a bit too lenient. If the test center was abroad, a different word for leniency comes to mind.</p>
<p>I hear what you are saying, but it’s not so simple in practice. We do conduct in person interviews for those we are serious about, which helps (even phone interviews we know get gamed- someone else taking the call). </p>
<p>ETS should be alerting us! They are the ones who send us these scores, and obviously have the ability to red flag strange oddities such as this. More generally, they’ve been well aware of endemic problems that pop up in some regions, to the point of lawsuits. It’s an ongoing battle I think in some countries where the competition is fierce, desperation is high, and corruption is more prevalent.</p>