GRE

The Writing Task

In the analytical writing section, students are presented with an 'Analyze an Issue' task, which provides an opinion about an issue and instructions on how to respond. Students must evaluate the issue, consider its complexities, and develop a reasoned argument with supporting examples.

The analytical writing section is designed to test critical thinking and analytical writing skills. Specific content knowledge is not tested.

Subjects

The analytical writing tasks relate to a broad variety of subjects without requiring any specific knowledge.

Tasks are specifically designed and tested to ensure that test takers can understand and easily respond to them, regardless of their fields of study or interests. They are intended to elicit the kinds of complex thinking and persuasive writing that is crucial to graduate school work.

Tested Abilities

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  Argument construction

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  Clear and effective articulation of complex ideas

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  Development of support for ideas via reasons and examples

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  Sustained, well-focused, and coherent discussion

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  Control of standard written English elements

Overview

Questions in the verbal reasoning section appear in a few different formats.

Approximately half of the questions in this section require reading an associated passage, while the other half requires reading, interpreting, and completing existing sentences, groups of sentences, or paragraphs.

Where passages are present, each passage is accompanied by 1-6 questions. Most passages are just a single paragraph, although a couple may be several paragraphs long.

Reading Comprehension Questions

These kinds of questions evaluate abilities required to read and comprehend graduate-level prose. They may be multiple choice - with exactly or at least one correct answer choice - or select-in-passage questions.

Select-in-passage questions require students to select the sentence in a given passage that best matches a provided description.

Text Completion Questions

Text completion questions evaluate the ability of students to fill in blanks in a body of text to create a coherent, meaningful whole.

Passages associated with these questions vary from 1-5 sentences in length, with 1-3 blanks per sentence. If a sentence has one blank, questions about that sentence will have 5 choices. If, on the other hand, a sentence has two or three blanks, questions about the the sentence will have three choices.

Each sentence blank has exactly one correct answer, and the answer choices for different blanks are independent from one another. No partial credit is given.

Sentence Equivalence Questions

Questions in sentence equivalence are similar to text completion questions, but focus more on the meaning of the completed whole.

The sentences accompanying these questions have just one blank, and ask students to identify the two choices that both coherently complete the sentence and establish the same overall meaning.

Tested Abilities

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  Discourse-derived analysis and conclusions

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  Reasoning from incomplete data

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  Identification of authorial assumptions and perspective

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  Understanding multi-level meaning (literal, figurative, authorial intent)

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  Selection of important points

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  Differentiation between major, minor, and irrelevant points

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  Summarization of text

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  Understanding of text structures, word meaning, and sentences

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  Comprehension of word and conceptual relationships

Overview

The quantitative reasoning section features a variety of questions that test mathematical skills and understanding.

Many of the questions in this section are word problems, which require translation into mathematical models. For more information about the specific structure of quantitative reasoning questions, visit the GRE Quantitative Reasoning Overviewopen_in_new.

Arithmetic Topics

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  Properties & types of integers (divisibility, factorization, primes, remainders, even/odd)

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  Arithmetic operations, exponents, and roots

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  Estimation, percentages, ratios, and rates

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  Number lines, absolute values, decimal representations, and numeric sequences

Algebraic Topics

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  Exponential operations

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  Factoring & simplifying expressions

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  Relations, functions, equations, and inequalities

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  Solving linear and quadratic equations and inequalities

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  Solving simultaneous equations and inequalities

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  Configuring equations to solve word problems

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  Coordinate geometry (graphs, intercepts, and slopes of functions)

Geometric Topics

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  Parallel and perpendicular lines

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  Circles

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  Triangles (isosceles, equilateral, 30-60-90)

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  Quadrilaterals and other polygons

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  Congruency & similarity

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  3-Dimensional figures

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  Common measures (area, perimeter, volume)

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  The Pythagorean theorem

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  Angle measurements in degrees

Data Analysis Topics

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  Basic descriptive statistics (mean, median, mode, range, etc.

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  Interpretation of tabular and graphical data (line, bar, and circle graphs; box/scatter plots and frequency distributions)

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  Elementary probability (compound and independent events)

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  Conditional probability

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  Random variables and probability distributions (including normal)

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  Counting methods (combinations, permutations, venn diagrams)

Tested Abilities

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  Understanding, interpretation, and analysis of quantitative information

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  Problem solving using mathematical models

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  Application of elementary skills & concepts in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and data analysis