Is the GRE® Hard?

Yes, but probably not for the reasons you’re worried about.

The content on the GRE® isn’t advanced. The math tested on it lingers around the high-school level, with no trigonometry and no calculus, and the reading passages don’t require any specialized knowledge. What makes the exam hard is that it asks you to reason precisely, under time pressure, on questions specifically engineered to reward the careful reader and punish the careless one. That’s a different kind of difficulty than you may be used to. The good news: it’s also very trainable.

If you’re looking for a definitive overview of the GRE®, visit our complete guide to the GRE®

What Actually Makes the GRE® Difficult

The content, which is the easy part. GRE® quant covers arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics, and probability. If you took those classes in high school and remember most of them, you have the raw material you need. Verbal asks you to read closely and understand words in context. Nothing here is conceptually out of reach.

Time management, which decides more scores than content does. You get just under two hours for the whole exam with no scheduled break, and within each section, the clock is your real opponent. A student who knows the material and manages the clock badly will have trouble attaining a strong score. This is why we tell people to mark a question and move on the moment it starts becoming a timesuck, rather than fighting that question out of pride.

Performance under pressure. Plenty of students do well on homework and practice sets, but then watch their score drop on test day. It’s a perplexing phenomenon, and in a lot of cases, it just boils down to nerves affecting your performance. To avoid this, train deliberately to keep your composure under pressure.

Consistency on easy questions. A lot of students tend to assume their score is limited by the hardest questions they can solve. Usually though, they’re limited by the easy ones that they make careless mistakes on; bad habits like misreading, rushing, or slipping on your arithmetic can result in very real consequences for your score. While the process of fixing these errors is unglamorous, it’s one of the easiest ways to gain back points. Rather than mastering a whole new topic, you’ll simply need to develop consistent and methodical problem solving habits.

Is GRE® Verbal Hard?

For many people, verbal is the harder part of the equation, and the reason is vocabulary.

Roughly half of the verbal questions are vocabulary-based, and unlike quant content, you can’t cram your way to a large working vocabulary in a few weeks. We see a lot of students worry over the prospect of learning so many words.

If that sounds like you, here’s the good news: you don’t actually need to know every word, because the questions are built to be solvable through the logic of the sentence. Learning how to analyze each part of a sentence and how it relates to other parts allows you to eliminate your way to answers. Said another way: you don’t need to know the definition of every word to be able to answer the question.

We teach this approach in more detail in Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence. One last note: before you buy a deck of flashcards, you can read in more detail why word lists won’t save you.

Reading Comprehension is difficult in a different way: the passages are dense, sometimes boring, and the questions ask about structure and purpose rather than facts you can look up in the passage. Our RC guide covers our suggested approach to conquer GRE® Reading Comprehension.

Is GRE® Quant Hard?

The math itself? Nothing that can’t be learned again. Keep in mind, the GRE® quant section never goes beyond high-school material, so the topics are manageable. On top of which, you get an on-screen calculator, so the arithmetic isn’t the challenge. So where exactly does the difficulty arise? Long story short, it’s the way the questions are constructed. They way they’re written to be misread. The way they hide a simple relationship inside a wordy setup. The way they ask for something slightly different than what you assumed. The way they offer the exact answer choice you’d get by making a careless mistake. 

If you’ve been out of school for a decade, expect the first few weeks to be a little rough as you refresh yourself on the math. But know that being rusty is not the same as being bad at the GRE®. Once that rust comes off, you can focus on training your reasoning ability, which is what the test is really after.

Who Finds the GRE® Hardest?

The following three groups, in our experience, struggle the most at first on the GRE®.

• Non-native English speakers usually find verbal the hardest, because the vocabulary demand lands on top of everything else. The encouraging side of this is that non-native English speakers are usually more cognizant of the underlying structure and construction of sentences and paragraphs in English. This comes in handy, especially when you’re dissecting statements to identify a missing word, or to identify a purpose of a passage.
• People years out of school often hit the “rusty” math skills problem we talked about earlier. Though in many cases, they shake off the rust pretty quickly.
• Strong students who’ve never had to study sometimes struggle the most, oddly enough. The GRE® punishes autopilot, and people who coasted academically often haven’t built the habit of catching their own errors.

What “Hard” Doesn’t Mean

It doesn’t mean unbeatable, and it doesn’t mean the score is a verdict on your intelligence. The GRE® measures a specific and fairly narrow set of skills: reading precisely, reasoning under time pressure, and avoiding unforced errors. Those are learnable skills, not fixed traits, which is why scores move when people train them properly.

It also doesn’t mean you should be afraid of the exam. Nervous? Sure! Everyone gets nervous. But don’t be afraid of it. The GRE® is a very conquerable exam with the right approach. To learn about how we suggest honing that approach, visit our full guide on How to Study for the GRE®.