Let's talk GREs...how are my scores!

[lle1]

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Hello! I recently decided to buckle down and quit my job to spend the next few months living with my folks and studying for the GRE so I can apply to grad schools for next year...the problem being that I kind of overlooked how little time I have! I just took a GRE practice test and scored a 152 on the verbal section and a 142 on quantitative reasoning. I have a feeling that this isn't a superb grade, but I can't quite get a feel for it because many of the Psyd programs I'm looking at online either don't list average GRE scores or have the old system.

Can anyone tell me what kind of grades I should be striving for, or what approximate percentile I might be in? Do you think I will be able to improve in time to apply and get into a Psyd program?

Thanks so much, I appreciate any feedback!

 

[AcronymAllergy]

At least for me, studying for a couple hours a day, four to five days per week while in school was more than enough over the course of three-ish months to make a significant difference in my preparedness for the test. If you're planning to apply this year, I'd imagine you'll need to take the GRE within the next month to have your scores reported in time...unless the reporting is immediate nowadays, in which case you may have closer to two months (someone who's actually going through the process currently can give you better info about that).

Using ETS's concordance chart, it looks like your scores equate to a 480V and 470Q on the old scale. Unfortunately, those are likely going to be too low for many programs. In general, if there's a university-wide or department-wide cut-off, it's going to be ~1000 (~153V and ~144Q using the new scale, apparently), while most "competitive" applicants will score 1100 or 1200+. The number I was told to aim for way back when I applied was 1300 so that the score wouldn't be an issue nearly anywhere. All of this is for PhD programs, though.

If you do a quick google search, you'll be able to find ETS's concordance chart and can do the rough conversions from old scale to new scale yourself. This should help give you an idea of where you should be aiming.