One Test. More Opportunities for Success.
Whether you’re planning to go to graduate, business or law school — or just exploring your options — you’re taking an important step toward your future. It’s a smart move to show schools your best. With the GRE General Test, you can!
Test Content
The GRE General Test closely reflects the kind of thinking you’ll do in today's demanding graduate school programs, including business and law. It measures your verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking and analytical writing skills — skills that have been developed over a long period of time and aren’t related to a specific field of study but are important for all.
Verbal Reasoning
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 meaning of individual words, sentences and entire texts; understand relationships among words and among concepts
Quantitative Reasoning
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
Analytical Writing
The Analytical Writing section measures your ability to:
- articulate complex ideas clearly and effectively
- support ideas with relevant reasons and examples
- sustain a well-focused, coherent discussion
- control the elements of standard written English
It requires you to provide focused responses based on the tasks presented, so you can accurately demonstrate your skill in directly responding to a task.
GRE General Test Structure
The GRE General Test is a computer-delivered test. Its test-taker friendly design lets you skip questions within a section, go back and change answers and have the flexibility to choose which questions within a section you want to answer first.
Test sections and timing (beginning September 22, 2023)
The overall test time is about 1 hour and 58 minutes. There are five sections.
| Measure | Number of Questions | Allotted Time |
|---|---|---|
| Analytical Writing (One section) | One "Analyze an Issue" task | 30 minutes |
| Verbal Reasoning (Two sections) | Section 1: 12 questions Section 2: 15 questions | Section 1: 18 minutes Section 2: 23 minutes |
| Quantitative Reasoning (Two sections) | Section 1: 12 questions Section 2: 15 questions | Section 1: 21 minutes Section 2: 26 minutes |
The Analytical Writing section will always be first. The Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections may appear in any order after the Analytical Writing section.
Section-level adaptation
The Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections are section-level adaptive. The first section of each measure (i.e., Verbal and Quantitative) is of average difficulty. The difficulty level of the second section of each of the measures depends on your overall performance on the first section.
For example, if you do very well on the first Quantitative Reasoning section, the second section of Quantitative Reasoning will be at a higher level of difficulty. The scoring for the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning measures takes into consideration the total number of questions answered correctly across the two sections, as well as the difficulty level of the sections.