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Comment by sjburt | Hacker News Reader

It's a suspicious claim as well, a perfect score on GRE math is only 94th percentile.

You're right. I misremembered. I went back to check the reports. I ended up with a perfect score in math (which is only 96th according to the score report and 1 point off on the reading section, which was 99th.

I only brought up the scores to indicate that I didn't need to cheat. I don't think GRE scores are a valid metric of competency or anything worth bragging about. I'm sorry it was taken in another way

How is this possible? Do you mean that the top 6% all get perfect scores and all get assigned 94th percentile, rather than 100th?

Anyway, this isn’t true in my experience. 167/170 in math got me 94th percentile. Far from a perfect score.

Yes the top 6% all got perfect scores. This happened to me on one of the optional SAT math exams, I was ironically confused for a bit.

Test needs to be harder

Maybe, maybe not. For this sort of test there is a huge selection bias since only people planning to work in math or an adjacent field bother to take the test. If you gave the same test to the general population this wouldn’t happen. I’m guessing most selective schools treat it as sort of a pass/fail, and I’m not sure whether that’s problematic for them or not.

It's definitely my recollection from the GRE (though this was many years ago now that I took it): for math a perfect score got you a percentile in the mid-to-high-90s, while on the opposite side you could lose several points and still be 99th percentile in verbal.

The percentile will vary by whatever the testing period is, since the percentile is the rank among other people taking the text within the same testing interval.

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