Erfun Geula - McGraw-Hill Education GRE 2018

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Study this chapter to learn about:

GRE scoring

The section-adaptive nature of the exam

Using the calculator

Skipping questions and guessing

The GRE test format

The GRE (Graduate Record Examination) is a test required by most universities for admission to their MA, MS, and PhD programs. Increasingly, many business schools are accepting the exam as well. Unlike most tests that students may have taken in college or high school, the exam does not test knowledge or achievement in any specific areas. Instead, the exam is designed to assess the test-takers fundamental Quantitative and Verbal Reasoning abilities.

Thus the Quantitative portion of the exam does not address advanced mathematical concepts such as calculus or advanced trigonometry. Instead, it assesses a students conceptual understanding of the foundational mathematical topics from high school: algebra; fractions, decimals, and percents; arithmetic; word problems; and geometry. Many students interpret this information to mean that they simply need to re-memorize their rules from high school math to succeed on the Quantitative section. In fact, the Quantitative questions are concerned more with a students ability to implement logic skills in conjunction with these topics rather than to regurgitate a certain set of rules.

You should think of the Quantitative questions as puzzles to be solved using certain mathematical principles, not as questions that can be solved by straightforward application of a few principles or formulas.

Likewise, the Verbal portion of the exam does not require preexisting content knowledge. The Reading Comprehension questions do not assume or require prior familiarity with the passages content; instead, they are designed to measure a students ability to efficiently digest the information in a college-level text. Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions, however, will require knowledge of college- and graduate-level vocabulary. For students who perform below their desired score range on the Verbal Reasoning section of the diagnostic test, learning vocabulary may be the quickest way to a score improvement.

It should be noted that even the vocabulary-based questions address verbal reasoning in the sense that they address a test-takers ability to use the context of a sentence and logical connections among a sentences parts to identify the word(s) that best fit in a certain context.

The GRE consists of six or seven sections: an Analytical Writing section, two scored Quantitative Reasoning sections, two scored Verbal Reasoning sections, and one unscored experimental section, which could be either Quantitative or Verbal. The computer-based version of the test is arranged as follows:

The paper-based version of the GRE involves slightly different time limits and numbers of questions. It does not include a Research section.

For your performance on the Quantitative and Verbal sections, you will receive raw scores, which are calculated based on the questions you answered correctly in each section and the level of difficulty of these questions. These raw scores are then converted to scaled scores ranging from 130 to 170, going up in 1-point increments. The conversion from the raw score to the scaled score depends on: