GRE practice test: GRE test prep courses and GRE practice questions

ETS cut the GRE from 3 hours 45 minutes to 1 hour 58 minutes in September 2023, and it is now the only format offered. Analytical Writing always comes first and is a single Analyze an Issue task. The Analyze an Argument essay is gone. After that, Verbal and Quant can appear in any order. Every section you see is scored, which changes how you should pace yourself: on the old GRE you could tell yourself a bad section might be the experimental one. That excuse no longer exists.

• Analytical Writing: one Analyze an Issue essay, 30 minutes
• Verbal Reasoning: 12 questions in 18 minutes, then 15 questions in 23 minutes
• Quantitative Reasoning: 12 questions in 21 minutes, then 15 questions in 26 minutes
• No unscored experimental section, and no Analyze an Argument task

The GRE is not question-adaptive like the NCLEX. It is section-adaptive: your performance on the first Verbal section decides the difficulty of the second Verbal section, and the same holds for Quant. This has a practical consequence people miss. The first section of each measure disproportionately sets your ceiling, because it determines which difficulty tier you are routed into. Within a section you can skip a question, come back to it, and change your answers freely.

• First section of a measure sets the difficulty tier of the second
• You can move freely within a section: skip, return, and revise
• Raw scores are equated to account for form difficulty and the adaptive routing
• A harder second section is a good sign, not a bad one

This is where GRE prep advice goes badly wrong. Verbal and Quant use the identical 130 to 170 scale, so they look interchangeable. They are not. On the current ETS reference group the Verbal mean is 151.4 and the Quant mean is 157.6. A perfect 170 on Quant is only the 89th percentile, which means a 90th percentile Quant score does not exist. On Verbal, a 163 already reaches the 90th. The GRE pool is packed with engineering, computer science and physical science applicants who cluster against the Quant ceiling, so the scale runs out before the population does.

• Verbal mean 151.4, Quant mean 157.6, Analytical Writing mean 3.46
• Quant: 170 is the 89th percentile, 165 the 67th, 160 the 50th
• Verbal: 170 is the 99th percentile, 165 the 95th, 163 the 90th
• Analytical Writing: a 4.5 is the 85th percentile and a 5.0 the 93rd

A shorter test punishes slow starts. With 12 questions in 18 minutes on the first Verbal section, losing four minutes to one stubborn question costs you a fifth of the section that routes your difficulty tier. Practice triage before you practice content: decide in 20 seconds whether a question is worth your time, and be willing to guess and move. Then review every miss properly, because on a 27-question measure each individual question is worth far more than it was on the old format.

Drill by type rather than by random mixed sets. On Verbal, text completion and sentence equivalence reward finding the structural signal word first, before you look at any answer choice. On Quant, quantitative comparison is its own skill: answer D is only correct when the relationship genuinely varies, and students pick it far too often out of uncertainty rather than because the value actually changes.

• Text completion and sentence equivalence: find the signal word, predict, then match
• Reading comprehension: main purpose, inference and author attitude
• Quantitative comparison: the four-option format with its own logic
• Problem solving and data interpretation across algebra, geometry and statistics