GRE Verbal Reasoning Skills

The Verbal Reasoning sections of the GRE are designed to test a student’s ability to perform graduate-level qualitative work. According to Educational Testing Service (ETS), the owner and administrator of the GRE, the Verbal Reasoning part of the exam assesses a student’s ability to analyze and evaluate written material, synthesize information obtained from written material, analyze relationships among component parts of sentences, and recognize relationships between words and concepts. 

The GRE evalutes specific skills associated with academic success, which include reaching a conclusion about how a passage should be completed based on partial information, maintaining a tone of evaluation and interpretation while reading, and understanding and evaluating the sort of complex prose you will encounter in graduate school. 

Specifically, these broader skills include:

• understanding the meaning of paragraphs and large bodies of text as well as individual words and sentences
• summarizing passages and distinguishing between major and minor points
• drawing conclusions and making inferences from incomplete data
• understanding the structure of a text
• identifying authorial assumptions and perspective
• analyzing a text
• identifying strengths and weaknesses of an argument
• developing and considering alternative explanations. 

Success on the Verbal Reasoning sections requires active engagement with the texts and continual refinement of your conception of a passage as you gain more information. While this may sound relatively easy, be assured that maintaining focus while reading about things that are likely to be boring or not of interest to you is actually a high-level skill that can only be developed through consistent practice.

There are three types of questions on the GRE Verbal Reasoning sections: Reading Comprehension, Text Completion, and Sentence Equivalence. Each of these types of questions requires a specific approach coupled with the ability to employ certain skills in order to arrive at the correct answer. We examine the question types and associated skills below.

Reading Comprehension

About half of the questions in the GRE Verbal Reasoning sections will be Reading Comprehension questions. You likely have encountered Reading Comprehension passages before on other standardized tests, but the GRE passages will probably be more difficult than what you are used to—they are frequently quite dull, complicated, or technical, and not at all similar to passages meant for pleasure reading. The passages are written in the GRE style, which means they will not be exciting or have plot twists or conclude with an unexpected ending. Even a passage on your favorite topic may not be easy for you to get through. While this may be frustrating, it is also intentional on the part of the GRE creators. 

The GRE seeks to measure your ability to sift through convoluted and unfamiliar topics, generally culled from dissertations or research papers on a variety of subjects from various disciplines, which is exactly the sort of reading you will be exposed to and expected to perform as a graduate student. Reading Comprehension questions test your ability to understand, analyze, and apply the information and concepts you have read about. This calls for utilizing an approach to solving Reading Comprehension questions in order to stay focused and maintain your concentration. The topics of the passages mostly come from but are not limited to physical, biological, and natural sciences; social sciences; topics considered to be of general interest, and business-related content. Although Reading Comprehension questions may look like the easiest part of the Verbal Reasoning section, the time constraints make this aspect of the exam very challenging. 

With regards to time constraints, managing your time is of the utmost importance on the GRE, and the two Verbal Reasoning sections can be broken down as follows:

GRE Section	Number of Questions	Time Given
Verbal Reasoning #1	12	18 minutes
Verbal Reasoning #2	15	23 minutes

There are a total of 27 Verbal Reasoning questions, which means roughly 13 or 14 of those will be Reading Comprehension questions. On the first Verbal Reasoning section, you have a little over one minute per question; on the second section, you have just under two minutes per question. Some questions will take you less than the average amount of time you are given, but since Reading Comprehension questions involve time spent reading a passage as well as reading the question, you will need to be both efficient and accurate when working through these types of questions. 

Vocabulary

The Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence sections of the GRE are intended to evaluate a student’s vocabulary understanding and usage. In order to successfully answer these questions, you must master a wide breadth of gradute-level vocabulary words from a variety of fields. The best way to learn this vocabulary is to take a diverse undergraduate courseload and to read a variety of literature from different perspectives, areas, and time periods. 

For those students who obtained an undergraduate degree in the arts, humanities, social sciences, or related fields, many of these vocabulary words may already be familiar. For students who have a less well-rounded background or who pursued an undergraduate degree in mathematics, chemistry, biology, or another physical science, dedicated studying may be required to acquire the extensive vocabulary necessary to succeeding on the Verbal Reasoning sections of the GRE.

GRE vs. GMAT

Generally, the GRE is regarded as having a more difficult Verbal Reasoning section than the GMAT and a less difficult Quantitative Reasoning section. This is likely due to what each test is intended to be used for, with the GRE being used to apply to graduate, business, and/or law programs and the GMAT being used exclusively to apply to business programs. 

The philosophical distinction underpinning differences between the two tests is that the GRE is intended to reflect all of your undergraduate learning and accomplishment, whereas the GMAT is intended to test your problem-solving ability. This distinction is most clear in the Verbal Reasoning sections of the test. Whereas the GMAT tests a student’s ability to memorize and deploy grammar and spelling rules, the GRE is more concerned with overall vocabulary knowledge and understanding, as well as your ability to analyze complex linguistic structures. The skills needed to succeed on the GRE are best acquired over many years, but it is important to know that focused study and preparation can help you overcome your weaknesses and master the language of the GRE.

ETS Research

ETS conducts validity studies to ensure that the test is accurately measuring aptitude and knowledge of skills that are considered important for success in graduate school. In the Verbal Reasoning sections, the specific skills measured include the “ability to understand text” and the “ability to interpret discourse” (roughly, the ability to understand and summarize a text and the ability to draw conclusions and infer information from an argument). 

While in the past ETS dedicated one or more sections of the GRE to research through the inclusion of an unscored experimental test section, this is no longer the case. As of 2023, in an effort to shorten the GRE without changing the test content, ETS instead changed the test structure and removed all experimental and/or research sections. However, ETS continues to conduct validity studies on the GRE, and their ever-growing body of research is available on their website at www.ets.org.