Syllabus
GRE — What the syllabus covers
- Verbal Reasoning — Reading Comprehension
- Passages drawn from the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences, with questions on the main idea, inference, the author’s assumptions and purpose, the function of a sentence within the argument, and the meaning of words in context. Passages are dense and often deliberately unfamiliar.
- Verbal Reasoning — Text Completion
- Passages with one to three blanks, each requiring a word selected from a list. Where there are multiple blanks, all must be correct for credit, which makes these questions unforgiving. They turn on understanding the logical structure of the sentence as much as on vocabulary.
- Verbal Reasoning — Sentence Equivalence
- A single sentence with one blank and six options, from which two must be selected that both complete the sentence and produce sentences alike in meaning. Both must be correct for credit. Precise vocabulary knowledge is unavoidable here.
- Quantitative Reasoning
- Arithmetic covering integers, fractions, percentages, ratios, exponents and roots; algebra covering expressions, equations, inequalities, functions and coordinate geometry; geometry covering lines, angles, triangles, circles, polygons and three-dimensional figures; and data analysis covering statistics, probability, distributions and the interpretation of graphs. Quantitative comparison questions, which ask you to compare two quantities rather than compute a value, are a distinctive type worth practising separately.
- Analytical Writing
- An issue task presenting a general claim and asking for a reasoned position. Scored on the quality of the argument, the use of relevant examples, the organisation of the response and the control of standard written English — not on which position you take.
For Indian candidates the quantitative section is usually the easier half, since its mathematics rarely exceeds what an Indian school syllabus covers. The verbal section is the harder one, and specifically its vocabulary component — text completion and sentence equivalence questions require knowing words precisely rather than approximately, and that is genuinely a months-long project.
What the verbal question types actually demand
- Text completion tests logic before vocabulary — the blanks are determined by the structure of the sentence — a contrast, a consequence, a restatement. Candidates who read for the missing word rather than for the logical relationship guess between plausible synonyms.
- Sentence equivalence requires two answers that mean the same thing — not two answers that both fit. That distinction eliminates most wrong pairs immediately and is the single most useful piece of technique in the section.
- Reading comprehension is short and dense — passages are often a single paragraph with one question, which rewards close reading rather than skimming for a located fact.
- Vocabulary is tested in context, not in isolation — which is why word lists memorised without usage transfer poorly. The test asks how a word functions in a sentence, not what a dictionary says it means.
For most Indian candidates the quantitative section requires familiarity rather than study — the mathematics rarely exceeds what a class 10 or 11 student has covered, and there is no calculus. What does need practice is the quantitative comparison question type, which appears nowhere in Indian examinations and rewards recognising when a comparison cannot be determined from the information given rather than computing both quantities.
The analytical writing task is scored on argument, not prose
The issue task rewards a clear position, developed reasoning and relevant examples far more than elegant sentences. Candidates who write beautifully and argue loosely score below candidates who argue tightly in plain prose — which is worth knowing before spending preparation time on style.
