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What is tested on the GRE
The six sections on the GRE are :
The Analytical Writing measure consists of two separately timed analytical writing tasks for which 30 minutes are allocated each:
The two tasks are complementary in that one requires you to construct your own argument by taking a position and providing evidence supporting your views on an issue, and the other requires you to evaluate someone else's argument by assessing its claims and evaluating the evidence it provides.
Individuals taking the computer-delivered test will use a basic word processor developed by ETS. The processor in the real test is similar to Microsoft-Word, but this basic word processor contains only the following functionalities: insert text, delete text, cut-and-paste and undo the previous action. Tools such as a spell checker and grammar checker are not available in the ETS software, largely to maintain fairness with those examinees who must handwrite their essays at paper-delivered administrations.
In layman's language, AWA includes two essays which have to be typed out.
The usual set of instructions before an ISSUE ESSAY are :
In this section, you will need to analyze the issue presented and explain your views on it. There is no “correct” answer. Instead, you should consider various perspectives as you develop your own position on the issue.
WRITING YOUR RESPONSE : Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
Take a few minutes to think about the issue and plan a response before you begin writing. Be sure to organize your ideas and develop them fully, but leave enough time to reread your response and make any revisions that you think are necessary.
" Many people believe that a few individuals or small groups (family, friends, teachers, celebrities, for example) have caused them to think and behave in the way they do. Yet it is always society as a whole that defines us and our attitudes, not a few individuals. "
It is important that you address the central issue according to the specific instructions. Each task is accompanied by one of the following sets of instructions:
The GRE® readers scoring your response are not looking for a "right" answer — in fact, as far as they are concerned, there is no correct position to take. Instead, the readers are evaluating the skill with which you address the specific instructions and articulate and develop an argument to support your evaluation of the issue.
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
The following appeared in a newspaper story giving advice about investments.
“As overall life expectancy continues to rise, the population of our country is growing increasingly older. For example, over twenty percent of the residents of one of our more populated regions are now at least 65 years old, and occupancy rates at resort hotels in that region declined significantly during the past six months. Because of these two related trends, a prudent investor would be well advised to sell interest in hotels and invest in hospitals and nursing homes instead.”
AWA-Essay is scored out of 6 in 0.5 increments by two assessors. The final score is calculated after taking the average of the two grades and rounding off the average score. The score on AWA ranges between a 0 and 6.
In Verbal Reasoning sections, scores range from 130 to 170 in 1 point increments. Verbal Reasoning questions appear in several formats. About half of the measure requires you to read passages and answer questions on those passages. Rest of the measure requires you to read, interpret, and complete existing sentences, groups of sentences, or paragraphs. Many, but not all, of the questions are standard multiple-choice questions, in which you are required to select a single correct answer; others ask you to select multiple correct answers, and still others ask you to select a sentence from the passage. The number of choices varies depending on the type of question. Verbal Reasoning sections test your skills on three different types of questions:
.
B1 - Critical Reading or Reading Comprehension – Reading passages contain material from subject areas like social sciences, history, physical sciences, and business-related areas. Reading comprehension passages are accompanied by interpretive, applied, and inference questions. This section measures the following abilities:
Each Reading Comprehension question is based on a passage, which may range in length from one paragraph to several paragraphs. The test contains approximately ten passages; the majority of the passages in the test are one paragraph in length, and only one or two are several paragraphs long. Passages can be drawn from the physical sciences, the biological sciences, the social sciences, the arts and humanities, and everyday topics, and are based on material found in books and periodicals, both academic and non-academic. Usually, about half of the questions on the test will be based on passages, number of questions based on a given passage can range from one to six. Questions can cover any of the topics listed above, from the meaning of a particular word to assessing evidence that might support or weaken points made in the passage. Many, but not all, of the questions are standard multiple-choice questions, in which you are required to select a single correct answer; others ask you to select multiple correct answers, and still others can ask you to select a sentence from the passage.
Example of a Reading Comprehension Question :
More Examples of Reading Comprehension Questions :
Passage
Line The new school of political history that emerged in
the 1960’s and 1970’s sought to go beyond the traditional
focus of political historians on leaders and government
institutions by examining directly the political practices of
(5) ordinary citizens. Like the old approach, however, this new
approach excluded women. The very techniques these
historians used to uncover mass political behavior in the
nineteenth-century United States – quantitative analyses of
election returns, for example – were useless in analyzing
(10) the political activities of women, who were denied the vote
until 1920.
By redefining “political activity,” historian Paula Baker
has developed a political history that includes women. She
concludes that among ordinary citizens, political activism
(15) by women in the nineteenth century prefigured trends in
twentieth-century politics. Defining “politics” as “any action
taken to affect the course of behavior of government or of
the community,” Baker concludes that, while voting and
holding office were restricted to men, women in the nine-
(20) teenth century organized themselves into societies commit-
ted to social issues such as temperance and poverty. In
other words, Baker contends, women activists were early
practitioners of nonpartisan, issue-oriented politics and thus
were more interested in enlisting lawmakers, regardless of
(25) their party affiliation, on behalf of certain issues than in
ensuring that one party or another won an election. In the
twentieth century, more men drew closer to women’s ideas
about politics and took up modes of issue-oriented politics
that Baker sees women as having pioneered.
1. The primary purpose of the passage is to
(A) enumerate reason why both traditional scholarly methods and newer scholarly methods have limitations
(B) identify a shortcoming in a scholarly approach and describe an alternative approach
(C) provide empirical data to support a long-held scholarly assumption
(D) compare two scholarly publications on the basis of their authors’ backgrounds
(E) attempt to provide a partial answer to a long-standing scholarly dilemma
2. The passage suggests which of the following concerning the techniques used by the new political historians described in the first paragraph of the passage?
(A) They involved the extensive use of the biographies of political party leaders and political theoreticians.
(B) They were conceived by political historians who were reacting against the political climates of the 1960s and 1970s
(C) They were of more use in analyzing the positions of United States political parties in the nineteenth century than in analyzing the positions of those in the twentieth century.
(D) They were of more use in analyzing the political behavior of nineteenth-century voters than in analyzing the political activities of those who could not vote during that period.
(E) They were devised as a means of tracing the influence of nineteenth-century political trends on twentieth-century political trends.
B2 - Text Completion - Text-completion questions test your ability to figure out which word or words best complete a given sentence or group of sentences. On the GRE, the sentence can have one, two, or even three blanks that you must fill.
Text Completion questions test your ability to interpret while you read. Normally, skilled readers do not simply absorb the information presented on the page; instead, they maintain a constant attitude of interpretation and evaluation, reasoning from what they have read so far to create a picture of the whole and revising that picture as they go. Text Completion questions test this ability by omitting crucial words from short passages and asking the test taker to use the remaining information in the passage as a basis for selecting words or short phrases to fill the blanks and create a coherent, meaningful whole.
Example of a Text Completion Question
B3 - Sentence Equivalence – These questions are similar to the text completion questions. You may still require you to find the best word to complete a sentence, but you'll have to pick two answers that best complete the sentence; this means the two correct answers will be synonyms. Because both words create sentences that are equivalent—both have the same meaning.
Example of a Sentence Equivalence Question
Questions are presented in three formats:
C1 - Problem Solving - Problem solving questions are designed to test the ability to reason quantitatively and solve quantitative problems. In these questions, you may be asked to select one answer, one or more answers, or may be asked to make a numeric entry in the space provided.
Example of an Problem Solving Question :
The level of difficulty of the Math component is the common level to which all students have studied Math, so in case of Indian students, the level is Class X – CBSE, though questions do not require derivations and proving theorems.
C2 - Quantitative Comparison– Quantitative Comparison questions measure the following abilities:
Example of a Quantitative Comparison Question :
Computer Adaptive Testing
Two sections on the GRE use Computer Adaptive Testing. Computer Adaptive Tests (CATs) are computer-based tests that adapt to the test taker's performance. Each test taker is given a different mix of questions, the mix depending partly on how well he or she is scoring.
The Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections are section-level adaptive, meaning that the first section of the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning measures spans a range of difficulty levels, from easy to difficult. The first section is assembled such that, overall, the first section is of average difficulty. The difficulty level of the second section of each of the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning depends on your performance on the first section. For example, if for the Quantitative Reasoning measure you do very well on the first section, the second section of the Quantitative Reasoning measure will be at a higher level of difficulty. The scoring for the Quantitative Reasoning measure takes into consideration the total number of questions answered correctly across the two sections, as well as the difficulty level of the section (similar process for the Verbal Reasoning measure).
Our Advice – Computer Adaptive Testing takes a bit of time to get comfortable with. We advise you to attempt a series of Mock / Simulated GREs so that this new format of testing doesn’t shock your senses. Attempting Mock / Simulated GREs helps you to understand and ace the test-dynamics involved in this exam.
More Advice - If while attempting the second section of Verbal Reasoning or Quantitative Reasoning, you start getting horribly difficult questions, then REJOICE, as it shows that you are doing good at your test so ETS is throwing the most difficult questions in its arsenal at you.
