The cutoff dates that disqualify an alternative score

Most summaries of the alternative-score route give you the score table and stop. The score table is the easy half. The dates are what actually disqualify people, and there are two separate date conditions in the same paragraph of the rule.

Miss either and the score is worth nothing, however high it is.

Condition one: the administration date

This is a hard floor written into the rule. It is not about how old the score is relative to today; it is a fixed calendar date, and a sitting before it never qualifies no matter when you apply. The GRE gets the earlier date and the other three share the later one, with no reasoning given in the text.

Our reading of why the dates fall where they do: both correspond to points where the tests themselves changed. The rule is fixing on score scales it can actually interpret. That is inference on our part rather than anything the Department states, and you should treat it as such.

Condition two: the ten-year window

The two conditions do different jobs and they bite different people. The fixed dates rule out anyone who sat their admissions test before those calendar floors. The rolling window rules out anyone whose qualifying score is now getting old, which over time will be everyone whose score sits close to the original floor.

There is a squeeze coming for a specific group. A candidate whose only qualifying score is a GRE from shortly after 1 July 2015 satisfies the fixed date permanently and is running out of room on the rolling window. If that describes you, act on it now rather than after you have finished a preparation program.

What to check on your score report

1. The test date itself, not the date the report was issued or reissued
2. Whether that date falls on or after the floor for your test
3. How far you are from the edge of the ten-year window at the point you expect to apply
4. Whether the testing body will still issue an official report for a score that old

That last item catches people independently of Florida. Testing bodies keep scores reportable for a limited period and then stop sending official reports at all. A score can be inside Florida's window and outside the vendor's, at which point you cannot document it even though it would qualify.

If your score is disqualified on dates

Then you sit the subtests, and the good news is that this is a smaller problem than it feels like. Four subtests, registered and passed separately, USD 32.50 each and USD 130 for all four. A retake after a failure is another USD 32.50 and a 30-day wait, not a fresh full sitting.

It is also worth knowing what the published pass rates look like before you panic about it. In 2025 the first-attempt rates were 64% for the essay, 68% for English Language Skills, 78% for Reading and 71% for Mathematics. Every one of those is a majority passing. The reason the whole test feels harder than those numbers is that you have to clear all four, and our own compound arithmetic on those rates puts the all-four first-attempt figure at roughly a quarter.

Do not retake an admissions test to fix a date problem

This is the one piece of advice on the page we hold most firmly. If your SAT is from before 1 March 2016, sitting a new SAT to get a qualifying date is a worse deal than sitting the FTCE subtests on almost every measure: cost, scheduling, preparation time and the risk of missing the threshold on the day.

The concession: we cannot price that comparison exactly, because we do not publish admissions test fees and they change. But the FTCE side of it is fixed and public, and USD 130 for the entire general knowledge requirement is not a number an admissions test is going to beat.