The shorter GRE: planning your prep around the current format
If you’re studying from an older GRE book or a friend’s notes, check the date on them. Since September 22, 2023, the GRE General Test has been a shorter test, and some of the advice written for the old version no longer applies. Here’s what the current test looks like, how to pace it, and how to build a six-week plan around it.
What changed
The current GRE takes about 1 hour and 58 minutes. It has five sections, and the writing portion is a single task: Analyze an Issue. The older format was longer and included a second essay, Analyze an Argument, an unscored section, and a scheduled break. None of those are part of the current test.
The current structure
Analytical Writing always comes first. After that, the Verbal and Quantitative sections can appear in any order.
- Analytical Writing: one Analyze an Issue task, 30 minutes.
- Verbal Reasoning, section 1: 12 questions, 18 minutes.
- Verbal Reasoning, section 2: 15 questions, 23 minutes.
- Quantitative Reasoning, section 1: 12 questions, 21 minutes.
- Quantitative Reasoning, section 2: 15 questions, 26 minutes.
Verbal and Quantitative are section-level adaptive. Your first Verbal section and your first Quant section are of average difficulty, and how you do on each one sets the difficulty of the second. Your score accounts for both the number of questions you answer correctly and their difficulty, so the first section of each subject matters a lot.
Within a section, you can skip questions, mark them, return to them with the Review screen, and change your answers. There’s an on-screen calculator for Quantitative Reasoning.
Pacing by the numbers
Divide the time by the questions and you get your average pace:
- Verbal: about 1.5 minutes per question in both sections.
- Quant: about 1.75 minutes per question in both sections.
Those are averages, not limits. Some Text Completion questions take 30 seconds, and some data interpretation questions take three minutes. Use Mark and Review: if a question is eating time, mark it, move on, and come back. Every question in a section counts the same, so an easy question you never reached costs as much as a hard one you got wrong.
Scoring
Verbal and Quantitative are each scored from 130 to 170 in 1-point increments. Analytical Writing is scored from 0 to 6 in half-point increments. Official scores usually appear in your ETS account 8 to 10 days after the test. With ScoreSelect, you choose which test dates to send, and your fee includes four free score recipients. Scores are reportable for five years after your test date.
A six-week plan
Six weeks is enough for many students who already have their math and reading foundations and need to rebuild speed and accuracy. Adjust it to your starting point.
- Week 1: Take a diagnostic. Take a full-length practice test under timed conditions. ETS’s free POWERPREP practice tests are the closest to the real thing. Start a mistake log for every question you miss: the question, why you missed it (content gap, misread, or timing), and what you’ll do differently.
- Weeks 2 and 3: Fix the biggest gaps. Use your mistake log to rank topics, and start with the weakest. For Quant, that’s often number properties, ratios and percents, or data interpretation. For Verbal, it’s often vocabulary in context and reading for the author’s purpose.
- Week 4: Practice in timed sections. Work in 12- and 15-question blocks at the real time limits. Practice marking and returning to hard questions. Write one Issue essay a week in 30 minutes.
- Week 5: Take a second full practice test. Compare it with your diagnostic, update your mistake log, and spend the rest of the week on the topics that are still costing you points.
- Week 6: Sharpen and rest. Review your mistake log, do short timed sets, and write one more essay. Confirm your test-day logistics, and take the day before the test off.
The essay in 30 minutes
The Issue task asks you to take a position on a claim and support it. A simple plan works: take a clear position, back it with two specific examples, and give one paragraph to the other side. Save a couple of minutes at the end to proofread.
Work with us
If you’re preparing for the GRE and want a plan built around your test date, book a consult at icosaprep.com/consult. One-on-one GRE prep is $200 an hour.