Graduate schools often make the GRE part of the admission criteria.
Educational Testing Services (ETS) administers the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) to over 600,000 would-be graduate school applicants from about 230 countries each year. As of May 2010, more than 3,200 graduate and business schools, as well as departments within these schools, accept the GRE General Test, according to the ETS website. Many academic departments use GRE scores as a tool to evaluate graduate school candidates.
Test Structure
Most people experience the GRE as a computer-based test comprised of Analytical Writing, Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections. The Analytical Writing section always begins the GRE. An unidentified unscored section along with the Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning sections appear in no particular order. The ETS website advises treating all sections as if they are real, since you will not know which one is unscored. Occasionally, the GRE includes an identified research section, which appears at the end.
Analytical Writing
You are allotted 75 minutes to complete the Analytical Writing section of the GRE. This section consists of a 45-minute issue task and a 30-minute argument task. The issue task requires you to respond to an opinion on a topic of general interest in any way you like, as long as you support your answer with sound reasoning, examples and explanations. The argument task asks you to assess the argument of another. Rather than state your agreement with the argument, you must evaluate the "logical soundness" of it, explains ETS.
Verbal Reasoning
The GRE gives you 30 minutes to answer 30 Verbal Reasoning questions. This section poses four types of questions: analogies, antonyms, sentence completions and reading comprehension. Analogy questions require you to recognize the relationship between two words, while antonym questions measure your vocabulary by seeing how you make the leap from a given concept to its opposite. Sentence completion questions ask you to complete a sentence by choosing from a set of five words or phrases. On reading comprehension questions, you read a passage and then answer various types of questions about it.
Quantitative Reasoning
Three types of questions make up the 45-minute, 28-question Quantitative Reasoning section. Quantitative comparison questions ask you to compare the relative sizes of two quantities or determine that you need more information to make an accurate assessment. Problem solving questions require mathematical computations in a variety of areas. Data interpretation questions are a type of problem solving question that come in sets of two to five questions that ask about a table or graph presented on the exam.
Scoring
The Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning sections are scored in 10-point increments, each on a scale ranging from 200 to 800. The Analytical Writing section is measured in 1/2-point increments on a continuum from zero to six. Based on ETS data of all GRE test takers between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2008, mean scores (in parentheses) for each section were as follows: Verbal Reasoning (457), Quantitative Reasoning (586) and Analytical Writing (3.9).
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