The main purpose and benefit of GRE is to grant the qualifiers of this exam a place in the Masters or Doctoral programs in the non business schools. Many business schools has started accepting this examination as part of the admission criteria. Students coming from different backgrounds and under-graduate schools apply to the same graduate schools, therefore on this basis GRE becomes a fair test to select students of the same level. Students, who cannot boast high college GPA, can still aim to do exceptionally well in the GRE to open up new avenues for them. So if your college GPA is not something that you are very proud of, you still have a chance to outshine those who are with great GRE scores.
GRE is a basic and general test and it will not test the students for any specialized skill and on any specific subjects. The skills that will be tested through this tests are verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking and analytical writing. These are skills a student develops over the years through high school and college. It takes less than 4 hours for students to take this test. Extra time is given for reading instructions and for breaks.
The verbal reasoning assessment will basically test you on your reading comprehension skills by asking you to analyze the provided written material.
The Quantitative reasoning assessment is an assessment where your mathematic skills come in handy, you will basically be tested on how you can interpret the data and the quantitative problems presented to you.
The Analytical writing assesses your critical thinking besides assessing the analytical writing skills. Complex ideas are given and candidates are asked to articulate them effectively by supporting it with relevant ideas.
The quantitative part of the test, as well as the verbal part, together carry scores from 130 – 170, given in 1 point increments. Both these tests carry heavy weightage as far as getting accepted in graduate schools is concerned. The last part of the test has a score card ranging from 0-6.
The GRE is scored on a 130-170 scale in each section. You’ll receive both a GRE Verbal score and on GRE Quantitative score. Because there are so few possible scores – only 41 – that you can get on the GRE, answering just one more question correctly could be enough to turn an average score into a great score.
