The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the organization that administers the GRE, asks you who you want the scores reported to – the schools can’t just call up the ETS and ask how you did. You can choose to report none of your scores, some of your scores, or all of your scores to any university programs that you choose.

That being said, perhaps you have already instructed the ETS to forward your 1st score to a particular school, and now you are concerned that they’ll wonder why your scores went down.

If that’s the case, you are getting into an entirely different field – now you’re talking about the realm of testing and measurement, which is actually a sub-field of psychology.

For many reasons that can have little or nothing to do with your skillset or knowledge, scores can vary significantly in multiple administrations of the same exam. The school will certainly be curious about the variance in your scores, but there is no reason to be concerned that they’ll decide that you’re really not as smart as you seemed the first time around. Think about if for a second, and you’ll realize that there is no support for the argument that your 2nd score is more representative than your first.

If the scores are very different – and your ability is fairly constant (why wouldn’t it be?), there is some other explanation for the difference. There are a million possibilities, and you may not even “know” why it happened. Perhaps you were more nervous the 2nd time around, because you were determined to improve your score. Perhaps you were less careful the 2nd time, because your unfamiliarity on the first exam made you more attentive, while you kind of blew through the test on the 2nd occasion. Perhaps the problem lies in the test itself – the questions were chosen from the same pool of items, but there may have been some critical differences in the quality of questions (though a well-designed test shouldn’t experience a lot of variation there).

All of the graduate programs that I have been involved with have looked at GRE scores as a single component of a far more complex evaluation of each application. True, if your scores are way below the “cutoffs”, they create a red flag that can sometimes trigger an almost automatic rejection, but for the most part, GRE scores, on their own, are not the determining factor in an admissions decision. The fact of the matter is that GRE scores, though somewhat predictive of graduate school performance, are only slighly correlated – one much better measure is undergraduate performance.

You have said that your undergrad GPA is outstanding, so that’s a big, big plus for you. If you have taken a reasonably difficult courseload at an undergraduate institution that is respected for the quality of its academic rigor, that will be a much more important factor in determining whether you will be offered admission. Another important factor will be whatever written materials you have been asked to provide. If given the opportunity, your essay or personal statement is an excellent opportunity for you to comment upon your GRE scores, and offer your personal thoughts about why they may not be truly representative of your academic abilities.

Best of luck to you in your future education!