Preparing for the GRE

Preparing for the GRE
General Test
Preparation for the test will depend on the amount of
time you have available and your personal preferences
for how to prepare. At a minimum, before you
take the GRE General Test, you should know what to
expect from the test, including the administrative
procedures, types of questions and directions, the
approximate number of questions, and the amount of
time for each section.
The administrative procedures include registration,
date, time, test center location, cost, scorereporting
procedures, and availability of special
testing arrangements. You can find out about the
administrative procedures for the paper-based General
Test online at www.gre.org, or by contacting
Educational Testing Service (see the GRE Information
and Registration Bulletin).
Before taking the practice General Test, it is
important to become familiar with the content of
each of the sections of the test. You can become
familiar with the verbal and quantitative sections by
reading about the skills the sections measure, how the
sections are scored, reviewing the strategies for each
of the question types, and reviewing the sample
questions with explanations. Determine which
strategies work best for you. Remember—you can do
very well on the test without answering every question
in each section correctly.
Everyone—even the most practiced and confident
of writers—should spend some time preparing for the
analytical writing section before arriving at the test
center. It is important to review the skills measured,
how the section is scored, scoring guides and score
level descriptions, sample topics, scored sample essay
responses, and reader commentary.
To help you prepare for the analytical writing
section of the General Test, the GRE Program has
published the entire pool of topics from which your
test topics will be selected. You might find it helpful
to review the Issue and Argument pools. You can
view the published pools on the Web at
www.gre.org/pracmats.html or obtain a copy by
writing to GRE Program, PO Box 6000, Princeton,
NJ 08541-6000.
The topics in the analytical writing section relate
to a broad range of subjects—from the fine arts and
humanities to the social and physical sciences—but
no topic requires specific content knowledge. In fact,
each topic has been field-tested to ensure that it
possesses several important characteristics, including
the following:
• GRE test takers, regardless of their field of study
or special interests, understood the topic and
could easily discuss it.
• The topic elicited the kinds of complex thinking
and persuasive writing that university faculty
consider important for success in graduate
school.
• The responses were varied in content and in the
way the writers developed their ideas