Graduate Record Examinations (GRE General Test)

The GRE General Test is a standardised graduate-admissions test owned and run by ETS (Educational Testing Service). It dates back to 1936, and ETS has administered it since 1948. It measures three abilities that graduate study draws on: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing.

For an Indian applicant, the GRE is mostly a route to postgraduate study abroad. ETS says its scores are accepted by thousands of graduate and business programmes worldwide, including master's and doctoral courses, many MBA programmes, and a growing number of law (JD) programmes. There is no fixed eligibility bar: ETS sets no minimum, so the test is open whatever your undergraduate background, and each university decides its own score expectations.

The GRE is a computer-based test. You can sit it at an approved test centre or at home under live remote proctoring, with the same scoring and acceptance either way. It runs year-round by appointment rather than in fixed sittings. The verbal and quantitative sections are section-level adaptive, so how you do on the first section in each measure sets the difficulty of the second.

Verbal reasoning and quantitative reasoning are each reported on a 130 to 170 scale in one-point steps. Analytical writing is scored from 0 to 6 in half-point steps. A GRE score stays valid for five years from the test date.

Sources: The GRE General Test - ETS · GRE General Test Structure - ETS · Graduate Record Examinations - Wikipedia