The New GRE
The New GRE is designed to measure verbal and quantitative reasoning skills, as well as critical thinking and analytical writing skills that are necessary for your success in graduate school and business school. The new GRE has important changes for test-takers. Here’s what you need to know.
New GRE Test Format Changes
Test-takers can now preview and review questions within a section.
Test-takers can “mark” questions so that they can return to those questions later.
Test-takers can change their answers to questions within a section.
The GRE Quantitative Reasoning section has an on-screen calculator.
There are new answer formats such as numeric entry questions, multiple choice questions with the potential for more than one response, and sentence highlighting questions.
New GRE Test Structure and Length
The new GRE testing time is 3 hours and 45 min and has the following 6 sections.
Analytical Writing
Verbal Reasoning (two sections)
Quantitative Reasoning (two sections)
One unscored experimental section that is usually a Verbal Reasoning or Quantitative Reasoning Section.
The NEW GRE Analytical Writing Section
The analytical writing assessment on the New GRE is used by graduate schools and business schools to assess how well you write. This section of the New GRE is 60 minutes long, consisting of two 30-minute essays: Analysis of an Argument and Analysis of an Issue.
This essay asks you to read and critically respond to an author’s argument. Your goal will be to evaluate that argument. You should consider assumptions behind the argument, evidence neglected in the argument that might strengthen or weaken it, alternatives to the argument, and possible further inferences to be made from it.
This second essay asks you to construct a sound and compelling position in response to a given prompt. What position you take will be less important than how well you develop it. For this essay, there are no incorrect answers, only well- or poorly-made arguments.
The New GRE Verbal Reasoning Section
Verbal Reasoning questions are designed to test your knowledge of standard written English, your ability to analyze and evaluate an argument, and your ability to read critically and analytically. There are three types of questions on the Verbal Section of the New GRE: Reading Comprehension, Text Completion, and Sentence Equivalence. If you’d like to see a more complete breakdown of the verbal content that’s tested on the New GRE,
click here .
New GRE Reading Comprehension Questions
The Reading Comprehension passages present you with a short section of text (generally from business, social science, biological science, humanities, arts, or physical science). You’ll then be asked a series of questions based on the passage. These questions may ask you, among other things, for the main point of the passage, to paraphrase something asserted in the passage, to make an inference implied by the passage, to identify an assumption behind statements made in the passage, or to identify the function of a part of the passage.
You'll see about 10 Reading Comprehension passages, most of which are only one paragraph, while others are a few paragraphs. Most of the questions are standard multiple choice questions with only one correct answer, while others may ask you to select multiple correct answers or even to select sentences from a passage. If you’d like to see some examples of the New GRE Reading Comprehension questions,
click here .
New GRE Text Completion Questions
New GRE Text Completion questions present you with short passages of between one to five sentences. Within each passage, there will be one to three blanks where crucial words have been omitted from the text. In text completion passages with one blank, there will be five possible answers, whereas in questions with more than one blank, there will be three possible answers for each blank. If you’d like to see some examples of the New GRE Text Completion questions,
click here .
New GRE Sentence Equivalence Questions
Sentence Equivalence Questions present you with one sentence that has one blank. Your task is then to select two of the six possible answers that produce clear, grammatical, complete, and logically equivalent sentences. These questions test your ability to understand the greater meaning of a passage, although some important information has been omitted. If you’d like to see some examples of New GRE Sentence Equivalence questions,