<p>I have yet to take a practice test. From your guys' experience, if I get half the questions right on the verbal, would that put me in the 70% percentile on the GRE Verbal?</p>
<p>Well, I suppose it depends on a number of factors. First and foremost, which questions are you intending to get right? Obviously, the relative difficulty of questions adjusts to your ability (or more specifically, which questions you are answering correctly), and the point scales are different for each type.</p>
<p>As for percentile, I haven’t found any data that conclusively links the amount of questions you answer correctly with a precise percentile, likely because that would be almost impossible to gauge. </p>
<p>But my advice to you is to take a practice test, and use the mechanisms provided to calculate your score. I’m not too sure where your launching point of half the verbal questions originates from, but without having taken the test, I can’t imagine how you could make that determination.</p>
<p>Aren’t all the questions on the verbal weighted equally?
Since the GRE is based on a curve, I assume the # of questions you get right is approx. the same each time?</p>
<p>That’s not my understanding of it, but I’ll have to look into it. It is to my understanding that it is less so the amount of questions you answer correctly (that’s a factor of course), but also the difficulty. I know it works like that for the quant section, and I believe the same applies to the verbal. I would say a curve is involved, but only in the aftermath of the relative scoring.</p>
<p>I know the old GRE was an adaptive test, where if you get a Q right they give you a harder one, and if you get it wrong you get an easier one. Not sure if it still is since they changed the grading scale.</p>
<p>Yes, what matters is not the number of questions that you get correct but the difficulty level of the questions that you are getting correct. The more difficult questions that you get correct, the higher your score. The lower the difficulty level of the questions that you get correct, the lower your score. It’s because the GRE is a CAT and is adaptive in nature.</p>
<p>They are not weighed equally - The way the test is administered, earlier questions are more important than later ones, so don’t blast through them! You get questions from a different path if you do very well at first v. if you get the first 5 wrong, so even if you get the same number total right v. wrong, you can have a very different score. This is because if you start strong, you continue getting the more difficult vocabulary set which is “worth” more. If you start poorly, you get the easier pool. This is, as MS2014 pointed out, an adaptive system, so even if you mess up early, you may eventually get tougher/more valuable questions, but overall you’ll have lost the opportunity to get a higher score earlier.</p>
<p>The GRE is a scaled examination. The new test is still computer adaptive, but in a different way - across sections rather than within. The first section is a fixed number and sequence of questions with varying levels of difficulty. More difficult questions are worth more points. But on this test (since 2009, I think) your performance on the earlier questions within section 1 does NOT determine the difficulty of the question you get later in section 1. The sequence and difficult of questions you get are already fixed.</p>
<p>Your performance on the first verbal section DOES, however, determine which second verbal section you get. If you do very well, you get a more difficult second section with the opportunity to earn more points. If you do poorly, you get an easier second section, and there are only so many more points you can get. However, your earlier questions in section 2 don’t affect later questions in section 2.</p>
<p>So what percentage of questions you need to get right is dependent upon the difficulty level of the questions you are presented. But I wouldn’t imagine that only 50% of the questions would put you in the 70th percentile. It will vary year to year. The GRE is a scaled exam, which means that they scale the scores you get to correspond to percentiles. So for example, a score of 152 on the verbal will always be around the 53rd percentile because the score is normed to be that way. Some years it may be that around 50% correct answers gives you that whereas other years, it may be closer to 40% because the questions on the exam are harder, and thus the scale is more forgiving. There’s no way to tell just from the percentage of questions you answer correctly what your score will be - you’d have to know the difficult weights.</p>