GRE
Graduate Record Examinations
The GRE® General Test is a computer-delivered test that features question types that closely reflect the kind of thinking you’ll do — and the skills you need to succeed — in today’s demanding graduate school programs, including business and law.
Prospective graduate and business school applicants from all around the world who are interested in pursuing a master’s, specialized master’s in business, MBA, J.D. or doctoral degree take the GRE General Test. Applicants come from varying educational and cultural backgrounds and the GRE General Test provides schools with a common measure for comparing candidates’ qualifications.
GRE scores are used by admissions or fellowship panels to supplement your undergraduate records, recommendation letters and other qualifications for graduate-level study.
GRE General Test Format
The GRE General Test measures your verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking and analytical writing skills — skills that have been developed over a long period of time and are not related to a specific field of study but are important for all. Here’s a look at content covered in the three test sections: Analytical Writing, Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning.
The Analytical Writing section measures your ability to:
- Articulate complex ideas clearly and effectively
- Support ideas with relevant reasons and examples
- Examine claims and accompanying evidence
- Sustain a well-focused, coherent discussion
- Control the elements of standard written English
The Analytical Writing section requires you to provide focused responses based on the tasks presented, so you can accurately demonstrate your skill in directly responding to a task.
The Analytical Writing measure tests your critical thinking and analytical writing skills. It assesses your ability to articulate and support complex ideas, construct and evaluate arguments, and sustain a focused and coherent discussion. It does not assess specific content knowledge.
The Analytical Writing measure consists of two separately timed analytical writing tasks:
- a 30-minute “Analyze an Issue” task
- a 30-minute “Analyze an Argument” task
The Issue task presents an opinion on an issue of general interest followed by specific instructions on how to respond to that issue. You are required to evaluate the issue, consider its complexities and develop an argument with reasons and examples to support your views.
The Argument task requires you to evaluate a given argument according to specific instructions. You will need to consider the logical soundness of the argument rather than agree or disagree with the position it presents.
The two tasks are complementary in that one requires you to construct your own argument by taking a position and providing evidence supporting your views on an issue, and the other requires you to evaluate someone else’s argument by assessing its claims and evaluating the evidence it provides.
Individuals taking the computer-delivered test will use a basic word processor developed by ETS. The basic word processor contains the following functionalities: insert text, delete text, cut-and-paste and undo the previous action. Tools such as a spell checker and grammar checker are not available in the ETS software, largely to maintain fairness for those examinees who must handwrite their essays at paper-delivered administrations.
The Verbal Reasoning measure of the GRE® General Test assesses your ability to analyze and evaluate written material and synthesize information obtained from it, analyze relationships among component parts of sentences and recognize relationships among words and concepts.
The Verbal Reasoning section measures your ability to:
- Analyze and draw conclusions from discourse; reason from incomplete data; identify author’s assumptions and/or perspective; understand multiple levels of meaning, such as literal, figurative and author’s intent
- Select important points; distinguish major from minor or irrelevant points; summarize text; understand the structure of a text
- Understand the meanings of words, sentences and entire texts; understand relationships among words and among concepts
The Verbal Reasoning measure contains three types of questions:
- Reading Comprehension
- Text Completion
- Sentence Equivalence
The Quantitative Reasoning section measures your ability to:
- understand, interpret and analyze quantitative information
- solve problems using mathematical models
- apply basic skills and elementary concepts of arithmetic, algebra, geometry and data analysis
The Quantitative Reasoning section includes an on-screen calculator.
Some of the Quantitative Reasoning questions are posed in real-life settings, while others are posed in purely mathematical settings. Many of the questions are “word problems,” which must be translated and modeled mathematically.
The Quantitative Reasoning measure of the GRE® General Test assesses your:
- basic mathematical skills
- understanding of elementary mathematical concepts
- ability to reason quantitatively and to model and solve problems with quantitative methods