What GRE tries to learn about you

Let’s quickly think about the GRE test. We know that GRE (Graduate Record Examinations) is an essential part of the study migration process especially if the destination is the US, Canada, or Australia.

The test begets a ranking that the universities in the US will use to enlist candidates for their courses according to eligibility. The GRE exam finds out your language skills (writing), reasoning skills and analytical abilities. Why? These are necessary when it comes to ensuring that the candidate attempting to move to a new country to learn at an institution is equipped enough to make it through the time they will be in that country.

Well, well. If that seems to be a minimal discourse on the purpose of the GRE exam, you deserve to know a little more about what the exam actually evaluates about you. Let’s check that out.

First, there’s the verbal reasoning section. The questions that are asked in this section include tasks of:

• Text completion – The aim of this part is to test your ability to interpret, evaluate, and reason on a passage of text that's given to you. You are expected to omit crucial words from the passages. Then you should ask the test taker to use the information left in the passage based on which words or short phrases are selected to fill the blanks to create a logical, meaningful whole.
• Sentence equivalence - This task aims to check your ability to determine how to complete a passage based on bits of information. The meaning of the completed whole should be your focal point as it should be reached with the choices you make.
• Critical reading - This one is a broad task to check on a range of abilities that help you read a text and understand it on various levels. This includes:
  • developing and considering alternative explanations
  • identifying the strengths and weaknesses of a position
  • analyzing a text and reaching conclusions about it
  • identifying the author's assumptions and perspective
  • understanding the structure of a text in terms of how the parts relate to one another
  • reasoning from incomplete data to infer missing information
  • drawing conclusions from the information provided
  • summarizing a passage
  • distinguishing between minor and major points
  • understanding the meaning of paragraphs and larger bodies of text
  • understanding the meaning of individual words and sentences

Then, there’s the quantitative reasoning section. This section asks you questions to solve for which you will have to apply high-school level mathematics. These questions have the following in its scope:

• Statistics
• Algebra
• Geometry

The questions types that come in this section are:

• Numeric entry
• Quantitative comparison
• Problem-solving

Finally, there’s an analytical writing assessment section. Here, you have to write 2 essays.

The “argument essay” expects you to check the argument given by someone for which you need to write about what all more information you need to evaluate the argument.

The “issue essay” expects you to take a stance of your own and make your own argument about an issue.

Now that you have an idea about what GRE tries to assess about you, you can go for a GRE prep much more focused.

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