Nifty Score Converter

ETS now has a downloadable spreadsheet you can use to predict your GMAT score from your GRE Quantitative and Verbal scores. The motivation behind this appears to be to make it easier for business admissions committees to compare applicants who took the GRE to those who took the GMAT and to give adcoms a sense of what a particular set of GRE scores mean in terms of the familiar GMAT scores. (GMAT is scored as a single number up to a perfect 800; they do provide quantitative and verbal scores and percentiles also, but people usually concentrate on the single number.)

ETS came up with this after looking at the scores of 525 students who took both tests in real testing conditions from 2006-2008. (Students who took the GRE gave permission for ETS to get official score reports from GMAT, I believe.)

My 800-V, 75o-Q results in a predicted 760 GMAT, which is very solid. The highest "average" GMAT score for marketing PhD students in a program that I've seen is the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) program, whose admitted students had a mean score of 738, and that is most probably the best business PhD program in the world.

Oh, it would appear that a 760 GMAT is 99th percentile. That makes sense; my combined GRE score was in the 99th percentile, too.

Of course, the total GMAT score sort of glosses over the fact that my scores are imbalanced; while the scaled numbers look similar, the percentiles are very different because so many people max out the Quantitative section and only a few score super-high on the Verbal section. I wouldn't care so much about this except for the emphasis that business PhD programs put on the Quantitative score; you want it to be as close to perfect as you possibly can - in the range of 780 - 800, really. I'm just hopeful that since I'm a consumer behavior and not a quantitative marketing applicant that the "low" Q score won't be as important.

I recognize that it looks ridiculous to need to explain away a 1550 GRE score. But the competition really is brutal, and any weakness in one's profile can matter.

I've also noticed, from looking at average GMAT scores published on the various program websites, that the scores of today's successful applicants seem higher than even a few years ago. For example, 2008's admits at Northwestern had an average GMAT of 728, but the number for a couple years ago was 700. That's a move from 92nd to 96th percentile.

I'm trying to educate myself a bit about GMAT scoring, since that's one objective criterion that I can use when comparing my credentials to those of successful applicants at various programs.