GRE for PA school: the score to aim for, and whether you still need it

Is the GRE required for PA school?

Often not, and that is the single most useful thing to establish before you spend a month studying. PA programs set admissions requirements individually, and a large share have made the GRE optional or dropped it entirely in recent cycles. There is no central rule: two programs at neighbouring universities can take opposite positions in the same year.

So treat “is the GRE required for PA school” as a per-program question, never a national one. The check takes about two minutes per school:

• Open the program's own admissions page, not a roundup and not a forum thread. Requirements change between cycles and third-party lists lag.
• Look for the current cycle's wording.“Required”, “optional”, “not considered” and “waived for applicants with a GPA above X” are four different policies, and the last two are common.
• Cross-check the CASPA program listing for the same cycle. If the program page and the directory disagree, the program page is the one that governs.
• Note the deadline alongside the policy, because PA admissions is usually rolling. A programme that accepts the GRE optionally still needs the score before it reads your file.

One caution about “optional”. When a program says the GRE is optional, a good score can still help you and a weak one can still hurt, because you choose whether to send it. If your score lands below the ranges the program publishes elsewhere, optional means you can simply not submit it. That asymmetry is the reason it is often worth sitting the test even for an optional program, provided you have the time.

The same logic applies across graduate admissions generally. Our is the GRE required guide has the three-step check in full, and grad schools that don't require the GRE has our sourced policy data for 192 programs at 35 universities.

What is the average GRE score for PA school?

Nobody publishes one, and any page that gives you a precise national average for PA applicants is guessing. Neither ETS nor CASPA reports GRE averages broken out by intended profession, and individual programs publish their own class profiles in wildly different formats, some giving a mean, some a range, some a minimum, most nothing at all.

What you can anchor on is the all-test-taker baseline, which ETS does publish. Across the current reporting window the mean Verbal score is about 151 and the mean Quant score about 158, for a total near 309. That is the midpoint of everyone who sits the GRE, from every field.

This matters because the minimums PA programs do publish tend to sit close to that midpoint. A commonly published floor is a combined score around 300, which is below the all-test-taker average, not above it. Read that way, the typical PA requirement is a competence bar rather than a selective filter: it is there to screen out very low scores, not to rank the top of the pool.

Two practical consequences. First, if a program lists a number, treat it as a hard floor and clear it with room to spare rather than landing on it exactly. Second, do not read a modest published minimum as the score that makes you competitive, because the rest of your file, patient care hours, GPA, and prerequisites usually carry far more weight in PA admissions than the GRE does.

What is a good GRE score for PA school?

A good working target is 305 to 310 combined, with neither section badly lagging the other. That clears the ~300 floor most programs publish without requiring a score that PA admissions will not reward you for anyway.

Here is what each of those totals is actually worth, so you can judge a program's number rather than accept it:

The section split matters more than most applicants expect. A 305 built from a 150 Verbal and a 155 Quant reads very differently from one built on a lopsided pair, because some programs publish a per-section floor as well as a combined one. On the official ETS tables a 150 Verbal is about the 39th percentile while a 150 Quant is only about the 24th, so the same scaled number means different things on the two sections. Aim for balance rather than rescuing a weak section with a strong one.

If you want to see where a specific pair of scores lands, run them through the percentile calculator. For the wider question of what counts as strong outside PA admissions, see what is a good GRE score.

When should you take the GRE for PA school?

Sit it before your CASPA application goes in, and ideally with enough margin to retake once. PA admissions is typically rolling, which changes the calculus completely: applying early in the cycle with a finished file is worth more than applying later with a slightly better score.

A workable sequence:

• Three to four months out, take a full-length practice test cold to get a baseline. A free GRE mock test gives you an estimated score and your official percentile without a signup.
• Two to three months out, study against the gap that baseline exposed rather than the syllabus as a whole. Our GRE study plan lays out 4, 8, and 12 week versions.
• At least six to eight weeks before your earliest deadline, take the real test. Official scores take roughly a week and a half to reach programs, and that margin is what makes a retake possible rather than theoretical.
• Keep the five-year window in mind. ETS reports GRE scores for five years from the test date, so a score earned while you are still accumulating patient care hours is usually still usable when you apply.

Registration mechanics, the retake policy, and current fees are on our GRE test dates and GRE exam fees pages. If cost is the obstacle, the ETS fee reduction programme is covered on our GRE fee waiver page.

Does PA school take the GRE or the MCAT?

The GRE, where a test is required at all. The MCAT belongs to medical school admissions, and while a small number of PA programs will accept an MCAT score in place of the GRE, the GRE is the default and the MCAT is the exception. If you are choosing between the two solely for PA applications, the GRE is the shorter, cheaper, and more widely accepted option.

Related health programs behave similarly. Physical therapy programs that test tend to use the GRE, and some nursing and CRNA routes do as well, again with a strong recent trend toward dropping the requirement. The full comparison is on our GRE vs MCAT page.

How to prepare for the GRE for PA school

Nothing about GRE preparation changes because you are applying to PA school. The test is identical for every candidate; what changes is how much of it is worth your time given a target near 305 to 310 rather than 325.

At that target, the highest-yield work is the mid-difficulty material, not the hardest questions. You are trying to stop losing points you should be winning, not to convert the top few percent of items:

• Diagnose first with a full mock, under real timing. Our free mock tests are section-adaptive like the real exam and give a worked solution for every question.
• Drill the weaker section by type. Quant practice and Verbal practice both split by question type and difficulty, so you can work the band that matters instead of the extremes.
• Give vocabulary a fixed, small slot. Verbal rewards word knowledge more directly than Quant rewards any single topic. The GRE vocabulary trainer works in sets of 20 and brings back what you miss.
• Do not over-invest in the essay. PA programs rarely weight the Analytical Writing score heavily. Write a couple of timed practice essays so the format holds no surprises and move on; our GRE essay grader scores them against the official rubric.

Above all, keep the GRE proportionate. In PA admissions it is usually one of the smaller inputs, behind patient care experience, GPA, prerequisites, and your personal statement. Clearing the bar efficiently and getting back to the rest of the application is the right optimisation.

Frequently asked questions