I advise you to make the official materials your ‘primary’ prep resources, meaning that these should be the resources to which you give the most time and importance.
In this guide, I will walk you through all the available official prep resources for GRE quant and verbal, in the following order:
- An introduction to official materials
- A breakdown of the 504 verbal questions
- A breakdown of the 590 quant questions
- Secondary official materials
An introduction to official materials
ETS (abbreviation of Educational Testing Service, the non-profit organization that creates and administers the GRE) has published three books:
- The Official Guide to the GRE General Test (abbreviated as “OG” henceforth in this article),
- Official GRE Quantitative Reasoning Practice Questions, Volume 1 (abbreviated as “OG-QR”)
- Official GRE Verbal Reasoning Practice Questions (“OG-VR”)
I have discussed these books in greater detail here.
Coming to mocks, chapters 8 and 9 of the Official Guide are two full-length practice tests. In addition, the ETS website offers five full-length mock tests, of which:
- 2 are free. These are called PowerPrep Tests.
- 3 are paid. These are called PowerPrepPlus Tests (abbreviated as “PP+” in this article).
Therefore, the total number of official practice tests is seven.
504 verbal questions
There are 504 verbal questions in the official books and tests. When you draw your study plan for verbal, first make sure that you will have enough time to do these 504 questions very well, before you even think about adding any other verbal material on your to-do list.
The ‘209’ verbal practice questions belong to the OG and OG-VR, as enumerated below:
The question-type-wise breakdown of the 150 questions in OG-VR is as follows:
Your further experience with official verbal questions will come when you take official full-length mock tests. Here is the mock-wise breakdown of these questions:
OG chapters 8 and 9 are paper-based tests. Each of these tests has 2 verbal sections and 2 quant sections with 25 questions per section; so, the total number of questions in each test is (25*2 verbal questions + 25*2 quant questions =) 100.
An explanatory note about Sec C entries in the above table (30 each for ‘GRE PowerPrep Test 1 verbal sections’ and ‘GRE PowerPrep Test 2 verbal sections’ follows.
How to get the questions hidden inside PowerPrep tests?
When you take a GRE PowerPrep test, the difficulty level of the second verbal section that you face will depend on your performance in the first verbal section. If your raw score in the first section is:
- 8 (out of 12) or more, your second section will be Hard
- less than 5, the second section will be Easy
- else it will be Medium.
Whichever of these three be the version that you faced in the test, there are going to be two versions that you did not see, that remain hidden inside the belly of the test!
Let’s say that you attempted PowerPrep 1 and got a medium difficulty second section for both verbal and quant. Here is how you can get the easy and the hard versions out and make timed practice sets out of them:
- Note down the answer key for the first quant and verbal sections for PowerPrep 1.
- On the home page of your ETS account, go to ‘Shop for Test Preparation’ (refer to the image below) and add the PowerPrep 1 test to the cart; click Next and then Submit. Now, return to the home page and click on ‘My Test Preparation and Services.’ You will find two copies of PowerPrep 1 in the table of prep materials – the first being the one you have attempted before and the second being the one you’ve added just now.
- Using the answer key for the first section, intentionally put in mostly wrong answers so that your second section will be Easy.
- Create another copy of PowerPrep 1 using the same process as above, but this time, put in mostly correct answers in the first section. This way your second section will be Hard.
(Formerly, you could access all PowerPrep questions through this GRE Prep Club page. However, from November 2022, the GRE Prep Club has made the questions unavailable, in response to a legal notice served by the ETS.)
An explanatory note about the PowerPrep Plus tests
Each Powerprep Plus (PP+) test costs $40 and is available to you for 90 days after you take the test. During this time, you can review the test and check the explanations provided for correct answers for all verbal and quant questions in that test.
I have explained above how, for the Powerprep (free) tests, you could use the GRE Prep Club repository to get your hands on those difficulty levels of the second section that had remained hidden when you took the test.
No such trick is possible for the PP+ tests. When you review a PP+ test, the test will tell you the difficulty level of each individual question that you got. So, you can come to know, for example, that your second verbal section was Hard. If you are eager to somehow find Medium and Easy versions of the second section for your practice, the only possible way is to buy that particular PP+ test again, and this time, intentionally answer many questions wrong in the first verbal section so that your second verbal section this time is Medium. If you also want the Easy version, well, then, shell out yet another $40 and do even worse in the first section!
I do not think that any test-taker will spend an extra $80 per PP+ test and, therefore, a total of $240 overall for the three PP+ tests, merely to get hold of all possible versions of the second verbal and quant sections. This is why, I have considered the number of questions that you will get per PP+ test to only be 27 each for verbal and quant, even though at the back-end of each PP+ test, there probably lie 57 questions each for verbal and quant [12 questions in Section 1 + (15 questions per each difficulty level version of Section 2)*(3 such versions) for verbal and likewise for quant].
590 quant questions
The total number of official quant questions that are available to you as a primary resource is 590, the sum of 295 practice questions and 295 mock questions.
The 295 practice questions are found in the OG and OG-QR, as detailed in the following table. Remember that by ‘OG-QR’ I mean the ETS-published book titled Official GRE Quantitative Reasoning Practice Questions, Volume 1.
OG Chapter 7 is titled Math Review and is a great summary coverage of the quant concepts that are tested in the GRE. If it is not in the Math Review, it will not be tested. Conversely, if it is in the Math Review, it may be tested; so make sure to read every line in Math Review carefully.
The Math Review is divided into four sections – Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry and Data Interpretation, in that order. Each section ends with practice questions. For example, the Arithmetic section ends with 15 practice questions. So, in the above table, the ‘Set 1’ number for OG Chapter 7 is 15, and so on. As some of the Math Review exercise questions are quite easy, students tend to ignore these questions. This is a mistake; one of my own GRE attempts had a question that was very similar to a question in the Arithmetic exercises. I have also noticed that many questions in the official books and mocks are similar to Math Review exercises. So, do ensure that you give proper attention to these questions and revise any mistakes that you make with them.
The question-type-wise breakdown of the 150 questions in OG-QR is as follows:
The number of quant questions in the official mocks is 295, as enumerated below:
Therefore, the total number of official questions that you need to cover thoroughly is 1094, the sum total of 504 verbal questions and 590 quant questions.
That’s a lot of questions! Doing them well will take time. Therefore, before you decide to buy a third-party course or book, do consider if you have enough prep time to do justice to both that resource and these 1094 official questions.
Secondary official materials
The Big Book
If, you have finished the verbal and quant practice questions and still feel the need for more practice material, you could use the Big Book. The ETS published this book in the 1990s and it is a compilation of 27 actual paper-based GRE tests from that era. Though the format of the GRE has changed since then, it is still a great resource to practice your SE/TC answering skills, reading comprehension, critical reasoning, and quant questions.
To know more about how to use Big Book, click here.
Official questions licensed by Magoosh
Magoosh has licensed 160 previously unseen GRE test questions from the ETS. These questions have been organized into:
- four quant sectional tests and
- four verbal sectional tests.
Each sectional test has 20 questions, which was the number of questions in each section of the longer GRE, which retired in September 2023. For both quant and verbal, there is one easy section, two medium sections and one hard section.
If you already have a Magoosh subscription, then these 160 official questions will cost you nothing extra and you must do them.
However, if you are not studying with Magoosh and have budgetary constraints, then instead of buying a Magoosh subscription solely for these official questions, I think your money will be better spent on the PP+ tests. As I write this, even the least expensive Magoosh GRE plan (a 1-month subscription) costs $149. So, in this amount, what you will get is effectively 2-full-length official tests; the average cost per test will come out to be $75. This is way more expensive than the PP+ tests, which are priced at $40.
GRE Mentor Online Course
This is a new product launched by the ETS in mid-2022. When you:
- sign in to the ETS website and,
- go to Shop for Test Preparation (under Test Preparation on the Home Page),
this new course will probably be the first thing that you see in the list of all available official materials.
I have not yet gone through the course completely, but even within the fraction of it that I have analyzed, I found that along with questions from the PowerPrep (free) tests and official books, it includes many questions from PowerPrepPlus 1 and 3!
Why would ETS create and market heavily a product that spoils their own excellent free and paid mock tests? I do not know!
I did find some unique questions in the part that I have done; so, if this part is representative of the whole, then doing the course will indeed expose you to some new questions, although most of the questions overlap with other official resources.
Even if you do buy the course, do not study with it before taking the PP+1 and PP+3. Most students take the PP+ tests close to their GRE test date; so if they follow my advice, they may not have any time left for this course. I don’t think they will lose much.
Other than the Math Review, all official resources that I have detailed in this article are mutually exclusive, meaning that the questions contained in one resource (for example, the OG-QR) are unique and are not also contained in another resource (say the OG or the PowerPrep mocks).
(The Math Review chapter is published in both the OG and the OG-QR and is also available as a downloadable PDF on the ETS website.)
However, as the GRE Mentor course contains questions from almost all other official resources, it might just end up muddling your study tasks. For example, it will expose you to some questions of PP+1 but not to others, and so, you will be confused about whether to spend an additional $40 to buy PP+1 or not? The same dilemma would happen with respect to PP+3 and the official books.
The course might be useful for retakers who are looking to restart their prep with a new material. For other GRE students, my opinion till I complete a detailed analysis is that the value offered by this course is questionable.