New GRE is shorter | GRE Update

Welcome to the new era of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) – a crucial stepping stone for students with dreams of higher education in graduate programs, business schools, or legal institutions. In an initiative to enhance the test-taking experience, minimize test anxiety, and respect the time of the candidates, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) is launching a shorter version of the GRE. Starting September 2023, the revised GRE General Test will only require less than two hours to complete, cutting the current test time in half. This evolution marks the GRE as the shortest and most time-efficient graduate school admissions test available, leading the way in modernized educational assessments.

Shorter GRE – Exam Structure and Number of Questions

Comparison between Current GRE & Shorter GRE

Here is the Comparison of the major features of the Shorter GRE and the current GRE.

Analytical Writing

The Analytical Writing section consists of two 30-minute essay-writing tasks, having a task to "Analyze an Issue" and a task to "Analyze an Argument".The Issue task presents an opinion on an issue along with specific instructions on how to respond to the issue, constructing an argument with reasons and examples to support your views. The Argument task presents an argument and asks you to evaluate it according to specific instructions, evaluating its logical soundness rather than agreeing or disagreeing with it.

The Analytical Writing section measures your ability to:

• articulate complex ideas clearly and effectively
• support ideas with relevant reasons and examples
• examine claims and accompanying evidence
• sustain a well-focused, coherent discussion
• control the elements of standard written English

The Analytical Writing section requires you to provide focused responses based on the tasks presented, so you can accurately demonstrate your skill in directly responding to a task.

Verbal Reasoning

The Verbal Reasoning sections of the GRE can be divided into three categories of questions:

Reading Comprehension, Text Completion, and Sentence Equivalence. About half of the questions are Reading Comprehension, and the other half are Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence.

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
• 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 GRE Quantitative Reasoning sections are intended to evaluate basic math skills, elementary math concepts, the ability to quantitatively reason, and to model and solve problems with quantitative methods.

Each Quantitative Reasoning section consists of approximately 8 quantitative comparisons, 9 problem-solving items, and 3 data interpretation questions.

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

The Quantitative Reasoning section includes an on-screen calculator.