GRE® Calculator

The GRE provides an on-screen calculator during both Quantitative Reasoning sections. The above interactive calculator is a perfect replica of the calculator you can use on the exam, so feel free to practice on it and get familiar with it.

At the same time, while the calculator can occasionally be your friend, it helps less than you might expect. Overall, you’ll want to use it sparingly, as most GRE questions are designed to be solved most easily without a calculator at all.

What the GRE Calculator Can Do

It’s a simple on-screen calculator. You get the four basic operations, a square root function, and a memory function, which is enough for any arithmetic the exam will throw at you. It’s not able to do anything advanced, and that’s on purpose.

When to Use It, and When to Leave It Alone

GRE quant questions are built to be solved through reasoning rather than computation. Most of them have a solution that involves very little arithmetic, which is typically the most efficient path. If you find yourself typing a long strings of numbers into the calculator, pause for a moment: that’s usually a signal that you’ve missed a better approach.

A rough guide for calculator use:

• Reach for it when the arithmetic is unavoidable and ugly. Think awkward decimals, large numbers that can’t be rounded, or square roots that can’t be simplified.
• Leave it alone for anything you can feasibly estimate or approximate. Unless the answer choices are really closely spaced, estimation and rounding are often good methods.
• Be careful on Quantitative Comparison, where the question is usually more about understanding relationships rather than performing long computations. Our QC guide goes into more depth on why we recommend this approach.

A Few Practical Notes

You’ll have the same on-screen calculator whether you test at a center or at home, since it’s built into the testing software. Also, you can’t use it in the Verbal sections (not that you’d ever want to).

Make sure you get some reps using the calculator by practicing with the official version. Get familiar with its layout and quirks. You don’t want to waste time fiddling with it when you’re taking the real exam.