Start your free GRE Practice Test
2 hours
You’ll get a baseline score estimate as well as a performance breakdown by question types so that you can learn more about your strengths and weaknesses.
- Writing – Issue Task 1 question, 30 minutes
- Math – 1st Section 12 questions, 21 minutes
- Verbal – 1st Section 12 questions, 18 minutes
- Math – 2nd Section 15 questions, 26 minutes
- Verbal – 2nd Section 15 questions, 23 minutes
Magoosh is excited to offer you a free GRE practice test (online) with video answers and explanations. This full-length GRE practice test will take around two hours, and afterwards you’ll also get access to:
- your baseline score estimate
- a detailed breakdown of your strengths and weaknesses by question type
- in-depth video and text explanations for every question
Don’t have two hours to take the full free GRE practice test? We’ve got you covered! You can opt to take our shorter two-section Score Assessment. That one is 24 questions and about 40 minutes long. Though the full-length test will give you the best estimated score, the Score Assessment will still give you plenty of valuable data about your strengths and weaknesses in both math and verbal.
And if you can only spare 20 minutes, you can also take just a single 12-question section, whether for math or verbal.
Table of Contents
- What Quant content will I be tested on?
- What Verbal content will I be tested on?
- How are GRE practice test scores calculated?
- How do I evaluate AWA in GRE practice tests?
- Is the GRE harder than the practice tests?
- How do I practice for GRE tests?
What to Expect on the GRE
What Quant content will I be tested on?
For a lot of students, the GRE Quantitative Reasoning section presents question types they’ve never seen before. However, with careful practice, you can master these! On test day, expect to see:
- Multiple choice questions with one answer choice
- Multiple choice questions with multiple answer choices. These could be “all that apply” or “exactly X correct answer choices” (such as “exactly three correct answer choices”). Be sure to read directions carefully!
- Type-in answers (numeric entry)
- Quantitative comparisons. These are the trickiest question types for many test-takers but becoming familiar with them helps a lot.
For examples of each question type, check out 15 GRE Math Practice Questions with Explanations.
If the GRE quantitative practice test makes you nervous, you’re not alone. A lot of test-takers won’t have studied math since high school or college. That’s OK! Just make sure to brush up on the topics you’ll see on the GRE Quant section.
You can expect to see the following subjects covered on the GRE.
| GRE Quant Concept | Percentage frequency on the test |
|---|---|
| Word problems | 35.5% |
| Ratios, percents, and fractions | 23.9% |
| Algebra | 22.8% |
| Data interpretation | 20% |
| Integer properties and arithmetic | 16.7% |
| Two-dimensional geometry | 15% |
| Statistics | 14.4% |
| Powers and roots | 7.8% |
| Inequalities | 6.1% |
| Probability and combinatronics | 5.6% |
| Coordinate geometry | 4.4% |
| Three dimensional geometry | 2.2% |
| Sequences | 1.7% |
| Functions | 1.1% |
What Verbal content will I be tested on?
When taking the GRE Verbal practice test, you’ll encounter questions that test your reading comprehension and critical reading skills. These include:
- Text Completion. These are similar to standard sentence completion question types, which you are likely already familiar with. However, the GRE levels up the difficulty. You’ll not only encounter texts with single blanks, but also texts with two and three blanks. For questions with more than one blank, you must fill in the correct answer for every blank in a text completion to get the point.
- Reading Comprehension. These questions come with passages, which vary considerably in length. They ask about your understanding of the text.
- Critical Reasoning. Technically a subset of Reading Comprehension questions, CR questions ask you to make logical connections between pieces of information in a short passage.
- Sentence Equivalence questions. SE questions ask you to select words that complete a given sentence—and that produce the same meaning. If your vocabulary is strong (and you can make it stronger with good preparation), these questions go quickly!
For examples of each question type, check out 27 GRE Verbal Practice Questions with Explanations.
Now that you know what to expect, check out these do’s and don’ts when taking a GRE Verbal practice test:
How are GRE practice test scores calculated?
We would love to be able to give you a score calculator where you input your raw score (the number of questions you answered correctly) from a GRE practice test and it spits out a scaled score (that’s the 130-170 scale). Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.
Once you’ve taken the actual GRE test, ETS (the test-maker) performs mysterious calculations on the raw score. This process, known as “equating,” translates those scores into the scaled scores you’ll see on you report. Read this article to learn exactly what that means.
You can use some of the available ETS materials, like this evaluation PDF, to get a very rough sense of what your raw score means for your test-day performance. However, we strongly urge you not to rely too much on this method. The equating process is different for each exam, so the likelihood of getting a different scaled score on the real GRE test—even if you answer the exact same number of questions correctly—is very high!
In short: Use this practice test to get a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, not to estimate your exact GRE score. Your goal on the GRE is to answer as many questions correctly as possible within the given time limits.
So how should you use your practice tests? Look carefully at the explanations for the questions that you missed on your practice test, understand what you did wrong, and then devote extra time to understanding those concepts and question types.
On your next practice test, compare the results to see if your raw section scores have improved and if you’ve mastered the concepts that used to give you trouble.
How do I evaluate AWA in GRE practice tests?
Evaluating your own Analytical Writing section isn’t the easiest thing in the world. After all, if you knew what you needed to do to improve your GRE AWA…well, you would probably have done it already.
The very best way to score your GRE essay is to get a friend, study partner, tutor, or teacher to help (if you can enlist one of them to help, here’s a GRE AWA rubric they can use!). But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do if you’re working on your own.
You can use that same AWA rubric to score your own essays. Now, the key here is honesty: Be brutally honest with yourself as you go over your essays.
Remember, you’re evaluating your analytical writing skills. If you’re struggling with this, scroll down in that post to find a series of questions you can ask yourself as you evaluate it.
Is the GRE harder than the practice tests?
The answer to this is complicated: it can be, but it depends.
In terms of the content, the actual test is section adaptive. In other words, the difficulty level of the questions change as you go through the test. They might become easier, if you mess up a few in a row—or they might become harder. As hard as it is, try not to take the difficulty level of the question as a comment on your current score; a particular question might just be easy for you, rather than easy in general, so it doesn’t necessarily reflect your score band the way you think it does.
This is different than the free practice tests given in paper format (or in standard quiz form) above. Though these can give you a sense of how well prepared you are for test day, they don’t necessarily change difficulty as you go along. So they might be easier or harder than what you’ll actually see on test day.
Now, for most people, the actual test is definitely harder psychologically, in that test day pressure can make you more anxious than you were taking a practice test at home. But with enough practice in test-like conditions, as well as relaxation strategies, you can prepare yourself to succeed in this environment.
Overall, keep in mind that different people will find different questions easy, medium, or hard depending on their training or background. A particular practice exam might seem like a breeze for you while being objectively difficult—or vice-versa.
The best thing you can do to prepare for variations in question difficulty on test day? Practice as much as you can with a variety of questions of all different difficulty levels. That way, nothing you see on the official exam will throw you off your game!
How do I practice for GRE tests?
Still craving more GRE practice? You can find it in these Magoosh resources:
Finally, don’t forget to set goals! You can find out everything you need to know about target GRE scores here. And Magoosh GRE prep can help you reach those goals once you’ve set them. Choose between our affordable 6 month or 1 month self study plans, or test out the material with a free 1 week trial. Happy studying!
