About the GRE
The GRE revised General Test measures basic Verbal, Quantitative, and Analytical Writing skills that are developed over a long period of time and are of great use in graduate school.
The GRE revised General Test is “computer-adaptive”, as was the previous edition, but in a different way. The computer will adapt to your performance, but rather than doing so from question to question, it will do so in one fell swoop when you move from the first to the second Verbal Reasoning (or Quantitative Reasoning) section. Your initial section will be at medium difficulty level; the difficulty level of your second section will depend on your performance on your initial section. If you did very well, you will move up to the Hard level; if you did all right, you will be served another Medium-level section; and if you did poorly, you will be demoted to an Easy-level second section. Therefore, the GRE revised General Test is section-level adaptive.
The process of taking the test is more flexible than in previous editions: the test taker can skip questions and come back to them later, and is even provided with an on-screen tool that shows which questions have been answered at any given point, as well as an on-screen calculator for use during the Quantitative Reasoning measure.
Final score calculations take into account the difficulty level of questions, of course – not simply number of questions correctly answered. The new scale for scoring is:
| 130 – 170 | in one-point increments for the Verbal Reasoning measure. |
| 130 – 170 | in one-point increments for the Quantitative Reasoning measure. |
| 0 – 6 | in half-point increments for the Analytical Writing measure. |
Test Structure
| Section | Number of Questions | Time |
| Analytical Writing (1 section) | 2 separately timed writing tasks | 30 min. per task |
| Verbal Reasoning (2 sections) | Approximately 20 questions per section | 30 min. per section |
| Quantitative Reasoning (2 sections) | Approximately 20 questions per section | 35 min. per section |
| Unscored* | Approximately 20 questions | 30-35 min. per section |
| Research** | Varies | Varies |
*An unidentified unscored section that does not count toward a score may be included and may appear in any order.
**An identified research section that is not scored may be included, and it will always be at the end of the test.
The test begins with two Analytical Writing tasks, testing two complementary sets of writing and critical reasoning skills, both with 30 minutes allotted. In both, only one topic is given. The first, “Analysis of an Issue”, task assesses the test-taker’s ability to think critically about a topic of general interest and to clearly express your thoughts about it in writing. The second, “Analyze an Argument”, task assesses your ability to understand, analyze and evaluate arguments that ought to be logical, and to clearly convey your evaluation in writing.
Then come two sections each (30 minutes each for Verbal, 35 minutes for Quantitative) of the “Verbal Reasoning Measure” and the “Quantitative Reasoning Measure”. These may come in any order, and there will also be an unscored section. You should treat all sections equally – you will not know which is the unscored one.