GRE Frequently Asked Questions

The GRE has five sections: one Analytical Writing essay (30 minutes), two Verbal Reasoning sections (12 and 15 questions), and two Quantitative Reasoning sections (12 and 15 questions). That's 54 multiple-choice questions plus one essay, and the whole test takes just under two hours. The test is section-adaptive, meaning your performance on the first Verbal and Quant sections determines the difficulty of your second sections.

The current GRE takes about 1 hour and 58 minutes from start to finish with no scheduled breaks. That's roughly half the length of the old format, which ran nearly four hours, and just over 15 minutes shorter than the GMAT.

In September 2023, ETS cut the GRE nearly in half. They removed the Argument essay (leaving just the Issue essay), eliminated the unscored experimental section, and dropped scored questions from 80 to 54. Total testing time went from about 3 hours 45 minutes to 1 hour 58 minutes. The score scales (130 to 170 for Verbal and Quant, 0 to 6 for Analytical Writing) stayed the same. Source: ETS GRE Guide to the Use of Scores (2026-27).

The GRE has 54 multiple-choice questions plus 1 essay, for 55 total items. That breaks down to 27 Verbal questions (12 + 15 across two sections) and 27 Quant questions (12 + 15 across two sections), plus the Issue essay.

Five sections: one Analytical Writing section (the Issue essay), two Verbal Reasoning sections, and two Quantitative Reasoning sections. There is no experimental or unscored section on the current format.

Verbal and Quantitative scores each range from 130 to 170 in 1-point increments. The Analytical Writing section is scored separately from 0 to 6 in half-point increments. Your combined Verbal + Quant score ranges from 260 to 340.

Each scored section (Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning) ranges from 130 to 170, with 1-point increments. The Analytical Writing score is separate, ranging from 0 to 6 in half-point increments. Most schools focus on your Verbal and Quant scores, which combine for a total between 260 and 340.

Yes. On a given day, everyone gets the same moderately difficult first section for both Verbal and Quant. Your performance on each first section seperately determines whether your corresponding second section is harder (with higher scoring potential) or easier (with a lower scoring ceiling). You can navigate freely within each section, and each correct answer in the section earns you the same credit, but the second quant section that you see has adapted to your performance in the first and and the second verbal section that you see has adapted to your performance in the first verbal section. There is no consideration of verbal performance in quant or vice versa.

Your accuracy on the first section of each subject (Verbal or Quant) determines whether you get a harder or easier second section. Perform well on Section 1 and you'll see a harder Section 2 with a higher scoring ceiling. Struggle on Section 1 and you'll get an easier Section 2, but your maximum possible score drops.

There is no publicly confirmed exact cutoff, and ETS makes small statistical adjustments between test forms, so the threshold can shift slightly. Your goal should always be to get as many questions as you can correct in each section that you see, as that will lead to the highest scores. But not that you can reach scores as high as 161 or so without seeing the harder second section (if you fall just under the cut-off in the first section and do extremely well in the second moderate section), and you can also achieve scores significantly below that even in the harder second section (if you struggle signficiantly in that section). Generally, 2 or fewer errors in Section 1 will get you into that harder second section, but at 3 or 4 (depending on the exam) you are likley to drop to the moderate difficulty second section.

Computer-based only. There is no paper option for the GRE General Test. If you've heard otherwise or are hoping for one, it doesn't exist. The test is taken on a computer at a Prometric test center or on your own computer at home through ProctorU.

No. The old GRE had an unscored experimental section, but it was removed when the shorter GRE launched in September 2023. Every question on the current GRE counts toward your score.

No. The current shorter GRE, when taken with standard time, has no scheduled break between sections. The entire test runs continuously for about 1 hour and 58 minutes. Some testing accomodations allow students multiple breaks. (If you have approved testing accommodations, you may be entitled to additional scheduled breaks.)

Yes. You can navigate freely within each section, skip questions, and return to them before time runs out. You can cycle through the questions or view a summary listing of all questions in the section, including indications for which ones you have marked for review. You cannot, however, go back to a previous section once you've moved on.

Mark-and-review lets you flag any question within a section so you can easily find it again before time expires. It's a built-in tool on the GRE that supports a skip-and-return pacing strategy. You can mark as many questions as you want and jump back to them from a review screen.

The GRE format has been offered in its current form since September 2023: one Issue essay (30 min), two Verbal sections (12 + 15 questions, 18 + 23 min), and two Quant sections (12 + 15 questions, 21 + 26 min). Total time is about 1 hour 58 minutes for 54 questions plus 1 essay.

The old GRE took about 3 hours 45 minutes with 82 questions, two essay tasks, and an unscored experimental section. The current GRE is under 2 hours with 55 total items (54 questions + 1 essay), only the Issue essay, and no experimental section. The score scale (130 to 170 for Verbal and Quant) is the same on both versions.

Yes. When the shorter GRE launched in September 2023, ETS removed the Argument essay entirely. Only the Issue essay remains, with 30 minutes to write it.

Just one: the Analyze an Issue essay, with 30 minutes to write it. The old format had two tasks (Issue and Argument), but the Argument task was removed as part of the shift to the shorter format in September 2023.

The GRE General Test is what most people mean when they say "the GRE." It's used for a wide variety of Masters Degree programs, as well as many PhD programs and most JD programs. It is designed to measure verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing. The GRE Subject Tests are separate exams in specific academic fields (such as Math, Physics, or Psychology) that some graduate programs require in addition to or instead of the General Test. Check with your target programs to determine what exams they require, and check the ETS website for which Subject Tests are currently offered, as availability has changed in recent years.

No. There is no penalty for guessing on the GRE. A wrong answer and a blank answer count exactly the same, so you should always fill in an answer for every question, even if it's a pure guess, as it will either count the same as it would have when left blank, or if you're lucky, the same as if you'd answered it correctly.

Always. A guess takes two seconds and gives you roughly a 20% chance of getting the point on most question types. Leaving it blank gives you 0%. That's free expected value. If you're skipping a question, click the middle answer choice and move on. Don't spend time trying to figure out a smarter guess. The goal is speed, not strategy. Save strategy for the questions you're actually solving.

Your raw score (number of correct answers) gets converted to a scaled score between 130 and 170 for each section. Because the GRE is section-adaptive, the conversion accounts for the difficulty of your second section. ETS uses a process called equating to keep scores comparable across different test forms and dates.

Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning are each scored on a 130 to 170 scale in 1-point increments. The Analytical Writing section is scored on a 0 to 6 scale in half-point increments. Verbal and Quant scores are based on number correct, adjusted for the difficulty level of your adaptive second section.

Within each section, every question counts the same regardless of difficulty. ETS doesn't publish their raw-to-scaled score conversion, so there's no public lookup table showing exactly how many points each wrong answer costs. What we do know: the GRE is section-level adaptive, meaning your performance on the first section determines the difficulty of the second section. A harder second section gives you access to higher scores. The practical takeaway: every question matters, careless errors add up, and you should never assume a question "doesn't count" because it looks easy.

Your essay is scored by at least one trained human rater and an automated scoring engine on a 0 to 6 scale in half-point increments. The scores are averaged. If the human and machine scores differ significantly (by more than 1 point), a second human rater reviews it. The essay is evaluated on analytical writing quality, not on whether the grader agrees with your position.

Not exactly. ETS uses a process called equating that adjusts raw scores based on the difficulty of each specific test form. This means the same scaled score represents the same ability level regardless of when you take the test. You're not competing against other test-takers on your particular date. The system is designed for fairness across all administrations.

Not directly, but the difficulty of your second section affects your scoring ceiling. Getting into the harder second section (by performing well on Section 1) gives you access to higher scaled scores. Within a given section, every correct answer contributes to your raw score the same way regardless of individual question difficulty.

The harder second section has a higher scoring ceiling, but there is more overlap than most people realize. Scores in the high 150s and low 160s can be achieved in either path. Getting the moderate second section does not cap you at a low score, and getting the hard second section does not guarantee a high one. What matters most is how accurately you answer the questions you attempt, regardless of which section you're in.

The core principle is to spend your time where it buys the most correct answers. That means doing the questions you're confident in first, then working through the ones you think are solvable but aren't sure about, and leaving the rest as quick guesses.

Use the mark-and-review feature to manage this. Within the first 30 seconds of each question, make a quick call: is this one you're confident you can solve accurately and efficiently? If so, do it now. If you're on the fence, mark it and move on to come back after you've collected the easier points. If it looks like one of the hardest problems in the section, log a guess and don't plan to come back.

You should always plan to leave at least one question as a permanent guess, never spending a minute on it. That's not giving up. It's buying yourself time to be less rushed and less likely to make careless errors on the questions you're more likely to get right.

About 3 minutes per quant question and 2.5 minutes per verbal question as upper limits. These are maximums, not averages. You'll be faster on easy questions and slower on harder ones, so think of these as ceilings for when it's time to move on, not as targets.

Even students aiming for near-perfect scores (169+) should plan to skip at least one question per section, meaning guess immediately without ever attempting it. Never leave it blank.

The exact number depends on your ability level and the section, but the principle is universal: you should always have at least one question that you've identified as not worth your time and left as a permanent guess. That frees up minutes you can redistribute across the questions you're more likely to get right.

A useful way to train this: within the first 30 seconds of every question, write a +, /, or - on your scratch paper. + means you're confident and solving it now. / means you're on the fence and will come back. - means you're guessing and moving on. Your goal is maximum correct answers, not maximum questions attempted.

Yes. The decision to skip should happen fast. If you're approaching 30 seconds on a question and you don't have a clear plan for solving it, or the only plans you see seem time-consuming and not guaranteed to get you all the way to an answer, that's a strong signal to guess and move on.

Four signals that help you make this call quickly: (1) Question type. If you know from practice that you consistently struggle with a category, like geometry or strengthen questions, that's useful data. (2) Look and feel. You can learn to recognize at a glance the kind of dense word problem or challenging passage that gives you trouble. (3) Length. For some students, longer passages or problems are meaningfully harder. (4) Plan. If you can see a clear, efficient path to an answer within 30 seconds, that's a good sign to continue. If you can't, it's a good sign to skip.

A random guess takes two seconds and gives you roughly a 20% chance on most question types. If spending two minutes only gets you to 35% accuracy, that's a terrible trade. Guess quickly and invest that time where the return in correct answers is higher.

Almost always, you're spending too much time on the wrong questions. If you get stuck on a hard problem early in the section, you lose time you could have spent getting easier questions right, and you're more likely to rush through those easier questions and make careless errors on them.

The fix isn't speed. It's strategic ordering. Do the questions you're confident in first, then tackle the borderline ones, then accept that some questions are permanent guesses. Before you write anything down, spend up to 30 seconds reading and looking for a clear path to an answer. If you don't see one, mark it or guess and move on.

Most students who run out of time are trying to solve every question in order. That's the most expensive possible approach because it means your hardest problems get your freshest minutes and your easiest problems get whatever's left.

No. Going faster usually means making more careless errors, which costs you more points than the extra questions are worth. The key is working at an efficient but controlled pace on the questions you're actually solving, and spending closer to zero time on the ones you're not.

Think of it this way: if you rush through 27 questions and get 20 right, that's worse than carefully solving 24 and getting 22 right. You want to do all of your work at a pace where you actually get credit for the questions you know how to answer, rather than losing them to careless mistakes driven by rushing to reach questions you're likely to struggle with anyway.

The real time savings come from skipping strategically, not from solving faster. A question you guess on in two seconds frees up two full minutes you can spend being careful on a question you're likely to get right.

Skip around. Work from the questions you're most confident in to the ones you're least confident in, so that if you do run out of time, you run out on the questions least likely to produce correct answers.

Use the mark-and-review feature to manage this. On your first pass, solve only the questions where you see a clear, efficient path to an answer. Mark the borderline ones to revisit on your second pass. Leave the hardest ones as guesses.

For verbal, this might mean starting with the vocab-based questions (Text Completions and Sentence Equivalence) before tackling reading comprehension, then choosing which passages to read based on topic, length, or question type. For quant, it means scanning each question for about 30 seconds before deciding whether to solve it now, mark it for later, or guess and move on.

Start by getting all of the points that you can from the vocab-based questions (Text Completions and Sentence Equivalence), but don't get stuck on questions where you don't understand the context or multiple answer choices.

Then choose which Reading Comp passage to begin with. The first section generally contains two passages: begin with the one that feels like a comfortable topic or length, or has questions of a type that you tend to be better at. Focus on getting those questions correct without rushing yourself, so that if you are crunched for time you've already correctly answered the questions that you were most likely to get right, and any rushing required can be consolidated on the passage that you were most likely to struggle with anyway. But be sure to register a guess on all questions, even if you haven't read them.

The second section generally contains four passages, with (1), (2), (2), and (3) questions. You want to learn a good system for picking which one comes first and which one comes last. Many people find that the short, one-question passage is a good one to save for last or even plan to guess on without ever reading, to free up time for the other questions. Some people like to begin with the longest, three-question passage, while others prefer to tackle the two-question passages next. Others find it is better to choose based upon the topics covered or the types of questions asked.

But the key is always to complete things you're confident in before worrying about the ones that seem more challenging, and to do all of your work at an efficient but controlled pace so that you do get credit for the questions that you know how to answer, rather than losing them to careless mistakes driven by rushing to reach questions that you're likely to struggle with and may get wrong anyway.

Before you write anything down or start solving, spend up to 30 seconds reading the question and thinking about the most clear and efficient path to an answer. If you have a good plan that you're confident in, go back and carefully gather the details, set yourself up, and then begin solving. Moving slightly slower on a more efficient route always beats racing off in what might be a roundabout or wrong direction.

If you don't have a good plan within that short window, or you just recognize that a problem is likely to be among the 4 or so hardest questions in the section, just log a guess and move on. For some of these questions that are "borderline," you can save them using the mark function so that you know to come back later if there is time, after you've carefully answered all of the easier questions correctly.

On others, you should recognize that they are just not worth coming back to. Unless you're typically missing zero questions in a section (in which case I'm not sure why you're searching for timing strategies), your goal should be to minimize the time that you spend on questions that you miss. So taking an honest look at a small number of problems and saying "I know I don't have time for stuff like this" is a smart, strategic move that allows you to actually have time for the rest of the questions.

You should still be working on new questions for the last five minutes. Rather than rushing through everything in order to create time for review at the end, it's much more efficient to build in small reviews at each step of each problem so that you can move forward with confidence and know that you don't need to circle back.

Rather than taking the questions in the order that they're given to you, you should solve the problems you're comfortable with first, and then tackle the more challenging ones from most to least approachable.

In the last five minutes, you should be seeing the two hardest problems that you'll actually attempt to solve and doing your best to carefully solve them, and be comfortable with the fact that there may be one or more questions remaining that you're leaving as complete guesses, never having wasted a single minute trying to work through them.

You're always guessing, and you don't have to be perfect. Remember, if you are ever on the fence, just save a problem for later with the mark function and do the ones that you know are solid first. Some people find it helpful to reverse this question and think about "which questions should I not skip?" in order to make the default a skip, and the only problems that you attempt on your first pass are those with obvious signals indicating that they're among the easier options you'll see, and that you have a clear plan for solving. But either way, you're looking for signals that help make that guess educated.

Four of the most useful signals are:

1) By Type: if you learn to categorize questions by form domain, you can use past performance statistics to identify your lowest-performing types. So some students might choose to skip Geometry or Permutations, or in verbal they might choose to skip Strengthen Questions.

2) By Look/Feel: This one requires training and most people don't start off knowing how to use it effectively. But you can learn to recognize at a quick glance a certain kind of dense quant word problem, or challenging verbal subject matter, and know that it is the kind that gives you trouble.

3) By Length: For some people, the longer passages (or shorter!) may be meaningfully more challenging than the others.

4) By Plan: If you're able to quickly establish a good plan and look down the road to see a clear path to an answer in under 30 seconds, that's a good sign that you could continue. But if you're approaching 30 seconds and realize that you don't have any plan at all, or that the only plans you have seem time-consuming and not guaranteed to get you all the way to an answer, that is a strong sign that you should skip, or at the very least save for later.

Testing this: Use the +/÷/- game to train yourself. Within the first thirty seconds of every question that you see, write a +, /, or - on your notes.

+ : I'm confident that I can solve this accurately and efficiently. It seems very likely to be in the easier half of problems I will see in this section. First pass, never skip.

/ : I'm genuinely not certain. I'm on the fence. Some indicators make me think that I should be solving this immediately, but I also have some reasons for doubt. I might learn that it is actually a + or - later and I just didn't have enough information at first, or that it falls somewhere in the middle third. These are problems to plan to attempt at the beginning of your second pass, as soon as you're done with all of the +s. Mark them.

- : These are problems that you suspect are very likely to be among the hardest 4 or so questions in the section, and that you won't attempt until you've been through all of the +s and /s, or won't attempt at all. You can mark some of these if you find that you generally do have time to get back to some of them, but it is best to have at least one that you don't mark and plan to leave as a guess and never come back to, so that you can use that time to be less rushed and less likely to make careless errors on all of the other questions that you are more likely to get right.