Welcome

When you complete this course, you’ll have the tools and practice you need to tackle any GRE problem. Because every student has different strengths and needs, this course is designed to do two things:

• Teach the core principles and strategies you should know
• Adapt to your performance by focusing on the areas where you’re missing questions before moving on

Think of this course like hiking a trail. As you master specific skills, you keep moving forward and reach more challenging terrain. Along the way, make time to recall strategies and principles from earlier lessons, and use the review quizzes to keep those skills sharp.

While you can jump around to focus on specific lessons, we recommend working through the chapters in the order presented.

If any reading material or quizzes need more explanation or clarification, leave a note using the feedback form.

GRE scoring

The GRE is comprised of three sections, with these official names:

• Verbal Reasoning (verbal)
• Quantitative Reasoning (quant)
• Analytical Writing (essay)

You’ll receive a separate score for each section:

• Verbal and quantitative are scored on a scale of 130-170.
• Analytical writing is scored from 0 to 6.

You’ll also receive a percentile for each section. Percentiles show how you rank compared to other test takers. A higher percentile means you scored better than more people.

Percentiles are often more useful than raw performance (for example, “19/20 correct”) because the same raw performance can correspond to different percentiles from year to year. ETS publishes statistics periodically, showing which scores currently correspond to which percentiles. Our blog also discusses average GRE scores for specific grad school programs.

GRE format

The exam always starts with the Analytical Writing section. The order of the other sections is randomized. Here’s a summary of the exam structure.

GRE adaptive difficulty

Another important feature of the GRE is that it adapts from section to section. Your performance on the first verbal section affects the difficulty of the second verbal section, and your performance on the first quant section affects the difficulty of the second quant section.

Here’s the basic idea:

• The first section of each type (verbal and quant) starts at a middle difficulty.
• If you do well, the second graded section of that type will be harder.
• If you do poorly, the second graded section of that type will be easier.

Don’t try to game the system by intentionally doing poorly early to get easier questions later. That approach lowers your ceiling because you’ll have fewer opportunities to earn points on higher-difficulty questions. To reach your potential, focus on answering as many questions correctly as you can in every section.