GRE General Exam Pattern and Marking Scheme

Every stage, paper, question count and mark allocation for GRE General, followed by what the penalty ratio implies for whether to attempt a question you are unsure of.

Stages

StageCounts towards
GRE General Test (single sitting)Neither. There is no pass/fail and no ETS-set cutoff — three separate scaled scores are reported to the institutions the candidate designates, and each institution sets its own expectations.

Only the merit stages decide the final ranking. A qualifying stage must be cleared but its marks are discarded.

Papers

PaperStageQuestionsMarksDuration
Analytical WritingGRE General Test130 min
Verbal Reasoning - Section 1GRE General Test1218 min
Verbal Reasoning - Section 2GRE General Test1523 min
Quantitative Reasoning - Section 1GRE General Test1221 min
Quantitative Reasoning - Section 2GRE General Test1526 min

Marking scheme

No negative marking. ETS states 'the raw score is the number of questions you answered correctly' for Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning, so each correct answer contributes one raw point and wrong or unattempted answers neither add nor subtract. The raw score is then converted to the reported 130-170 scaled score by equating, which 'accounts for minor variations in difficulty among the different test editions as well as the differences in difficulty introduced by the section-level adaptation.' Because of equating and adaptation, a fixed raw-to-scaled conversion table does not exist. Analytical Writing is not marked this way: the essay is scored on a 6-point holistic scale by a trained analyst together with the e-rater scoring engine. Note: the integers above are raw-score points, not published 'marks' — ETS does not publish a marks total for the GRE.

Break-even accuracy

0% — There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so the break-even accuracy is zero — any answer is weakly better than a blank, and you should never leave a GRE question unanswered, however wild the guess.

Continue

The full set, with progress tracking and five agent perspectives per question, is in the JupiteX app — browse the exam catalogue or browse the Learn library.