Strategies for Difficult GRE Questions

Strategies for Difficult GRE Questions- The GRE Questions on GRE® General test features questions types that elicit thinking and skills that students will need in today’s competitive graduate and business school programs. The structure of the computer delivered test involves analytical writing, verbal reasoning, and quantitative reasoning. An unidentified section may also be included that does not count towards your score.

To score high in the GRE test, students can go through GRE question papers that are available online. Other than the Education Testing Service (ETS), there are plenty of other resources that enable students to download the mock GRE question papers. Careers 360 is one such site through which one can download the GRE Analytical writing, verbal reasoning and quantitative reasoning sample papers for practice. PDF form of the paper –based test is also available at – GRE®revised general test.

GRE Questions with solutions

The verbal reasoning consists of reading comprehension question, text completion question, and sentence equivalence questions. The reading comprehension questions tests a wide range of abilities of students. The passages are extracts that you would normally encounter in graduate and business schools. The topics are based on biological sciences, social sciences, business, humanities, arts and so on. The questions are basically to test if students have understood the main theme of the passages. Students can have an overview of the sample questions by visiting the ETS website that provides sample questions along with the solutions.

The quantitative reasoning has four types of questions- quantitative comparison questions, multiple- choice questions– select-one-answer-choice, multiple-choice-questions-select-one-or-more answer choices and numeric entry questions. The quantitative reasoning assesses the basic mathematical skills of test-takers based on elementary mathematical concepts. It includes topics on algebra, geometry, arithmetic, and data analysis. To have a clear understanding of the maths concepts, students can visit the Khan Academy instructional videos.

The analytical writing measures the critical thinking, analytical writing skills and persuasive writing skills of the test- takers. It consists of “Analyze an issue task” and “Analyze an argument task”. The “Analyze the issue task” assesses the ability of students to think critically about a topic of general interest and to express the thoughts clearly in writing. The “analyze an argument task” assesses the ability of students to understand, analyze and evaluate arguments and convey the evaluation clearly in the writing.

Below is an example of an Issue task (text from the ETS site):

As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

To take a closer look at the sample analytical writing questions and sample quantitative reasoning questions with solutions, students can visit the ETS site.

GRE® subject tests that measure achievements in a particular field of study consists of multiple-choice-questions. Practice books can be downloaded to view the specifications of the content.

Strategies for difficult GRE questions  

Students are bound to come across difficult GRE questions. Experts believe that if you spend more than a minute on one question and if still you are unable to figure out the answer, it is time to move on. It is not advisable to spend excess time on one question when you can tackle several other questions and gain higher scores. GRE gives you the advantage to skip questions and come back to it later, hence students can make use of this. Test-takers shouldn’t get stressed while skipping a question as at the most they may lose a point, as most of the questions are multiple choice questions. Test-takers should learn the art of gauging a question and then decide whether to work on it or skip it. And this only comes with practice.