Forget the old 200-800 scale of GRE grades that held for decades and even now serves as SAT test grade scale. The revised GRE (now about 5 years old) has scores in math and verbal with a range between the uninteresting bounds of 130-170, maybe deliberately innocuous numbers that were chosen to avoid all previous associations with any grade scores anywhere! A 150 in math and in verbal was scaled to be the national average, also called the 50th percentile, meaning it would be the score just above that of the bottom half of all test takers. But there has always been “percentile creep” on the ETS tests, meaning that over time the same test grade means a lower percentile than used to, i.e., the same grade has fewer people scoring below it, thereby losing some of its value as a grade.

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