The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is an admission
requirement for many graduate schools in the United States. It is
administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), a New
Jersey based non-profit organisation whose mission statement is
“To advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and
valid assessments, research and related services.”
The GRE is a computer-based test made up of three graded sections
and an experimental section that is not included in the final
score. The test takes about 3 hours to complete and the three
graded sections are analytical writing,
verbal reasoning and
numerical reasoning. The analytical writing section will always
appear first, while the quantitative, verbal, and experimental
sections may appear in any order. An additional non-scored and
clearly-marked optional research section may also appear at end of
the test
Analytical Writing
The analytical writing section assesses your ability to articulate
analyse an issue or argument and to forward a focused and coherent
discussion relating to it. It does not assess specific content
knowledge.
The analytical writing section consists of two separately-timed
tasks:
1) Present Your Perspective on an Issue (45 minutes)
You will be given a choice between two Issue topics. Each states
an opinion on an issue of broad interest and asks you to discuss
the issue from any perspective(s) you wish, so long as you provide
relevant reasons and examples to explain and support your views.
2) Analyze an Argument (30 minutes)
You will not have a choice of Argument topics. You will need to
consider the logical soundness of the argument rather than to
agree or disagree with the position it presents. The Argument task
is different from the Issue task in that it requires you to
critique a given argument by discussing how well reasoned you find
it.
The ‘Issue’ and ‘Argument’ tasks are complementary in that one
requires you to construct your own argument by adopting a position
and then providing evidence to support your view, whereas the
other requires you to evaluate someone else's argument.
Verbal Section
The GRE Verbal section consists of four types of questions:
Sentence Completions, Antonyms,
Verbal Analogies and
Reading comprehension.
This section usually has 30 questions and a time limit of 30
minutes.
Sentence completion questions measure your ability to understand
the logic of a sentence and to recognize words or phrases that
complete the meaning of a sentence. You are shown a sentence with
either one or two words missing. Your job is to pick the answer
choice with the word, or words, that best fits the meaning of the
sentence as a whole.
Antonyms measure your vocabulary and your ability to reason from a
given concept to its opposite. In these questions you are
presented with a single word followed by five answer choices
containing words or short phrases. You have to select an answer
choice that's most nearly opposite in meaning to the original
word.
Verbal Analogies measure your ability to recognize
relationships among words and concepts they represent as well as
parallel relationships. In these questions you are presented with
a related pair of words followed by five answer choices containing
lettered pairs of words or phrases. Select the lettered pair that
best expresses a relationship similar to that expressed in the
original pair.
Reading comprehension
measures your ability to analyze a written passage and answer
questions about it. Passages are taken from the humanities, social
sciences, biological sciences and physical sciences. The passages
are generally from 80 to 150 lines. The number of questions
pertaining to a particular passage ranges from 3 to 5.
Quantitative Section
The quantitative section consists of about 30 problem solving
and quantitative comparison questions and has a 45 minute time
limit. Questions can be classified into the following categories :
arithmetic, algebra, geometry and data analysis as well as
questions covering quantitative comparisons, problem solving and
data interpretation.
Experimental Section
This section will not count toward your score and will be either a
verbal, quantitative or essay section containing new questions
that ETS is considering for future tests. However, the section
will appear identical to the other sections and you will have no
way of knowing which section is experimental.
Research Section
An additional research section may appear at the end of the
test. This section will be clearly marked and will be completely
optional. Whether you complete it or not will not affect your
score in any way.
Use in Admissions
The level of emphasis placed on GRE scores varies widely between
schools and even departments within schools. The importance of a
GRE score can range from being an important selection factor to
being a mere admission formality.
Programs in liberal arts topics may only consider the applicant's
verbal score to be of interest, while math and science programs
may only consider quantitative ability; however, since most
applicants to math, science, or engineering graduate programs all
have high quantitative scores, the verbal score can become a
deciding factor even in these programs.
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