Breaking News: The GRE is getting shorter, from Sep 2023 onwards!

Table of Contents

An overview of the changes

On May 31, 2023, ETS – the non-profit organization that conducts the GRE – announced that the GRE, whose present duration is 3 hours 45 minutes, will only be 1 hour 58 minutes long from September 22, 2023.

All GRE tests administered before Sep 20, 2023 will be of the current (longer) version, while all administered after Sep 22, 2023 will be of the shorter version. Registrations for the shorter version are already open.

The study material for the Shorter GRE is the same as that for the Longer GRE. You can safely continue to use the existing editions of the GRE Official books. For more context on this, refer to my analysis in the second-half of this article of the first official mock for the Shorter format.

What has changed


* The ‘Analyse an Argument’ task has been chopped off. Now, there will be only one essay to write – ‘Analyse an Issue.’

* While the present version has two scored sections with a total of 40 questions each for quant and verbal, the new version will have two scored sections with a total of only 27 questions each for quant and verbal.

The section-wise breakup is the same for both quant and verbal and is as follows:

  • Section 1 – which will be of medium difficulty level – will have only 12 questions.
  • Section 2 – whose difficulty level will be easy, medium or hard, depending on performance in Section 1 – will have 15 questions.
Image Source: https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/general-test-enhancement-faqs-for-test-takers.pdf

* The unscored experimental section has been chopped off.

* As the complete test itself is now less than 2 hours, the scheduled break that occurs around the 2-hour mark in the current version will not be offered in the shorter version.

* The score reports will be available faster, in just 8-10 days instead of the 10-15 days taken at present.

What has NOT changed


# The syllabus and the question-types for quant and verbal are the same. So, all the currently available official prep materials will still apply.

# The score scale will still be 130-170 for both quant and verbal and that for the analytical writing section will still be 0-6.

In the longer GRE, 40 questions were used for each quant and verbal to determine your scaled score that had a range of 40. In the shorter GRE, only 27 questions will decide your scaled score on the same range of 40 points (from 130 to 170). This means, each question will count more towards the final score, which in turn implies that careless errors that lead to the wrong answer will now have a greater impact on your scaled score.

The ability implication of a particular score will remain the same; meaning, that a V160 in the new version will be comparable to a V160 in the present version and will require the same level of verbal ability.

# The current averages of 1.75 minutes available per quant question and 1.5 minutes available per verbal question have been maintained. This also means that the test difficulty remains unchanged.

# The difficulty of the second section will still be decided by your performance in the first section.

How to practice for the Shorter GRE?

The first Official Practice Test for the Shorter GRE is now available!

(Sign into your ETS account, go to the Test Preparation page and look for “POWERPREP® Online – Practice Test 1 for the Shorter GRE”)

The ETS has promised to launch one more (paid, $40) mock before September 22.

If you need more practice tests to practice pacing as per the new format, you may want to register for a FREE Practice Test that I am making for the Shorter GRE.

As you may know, I only work with official questions in my coaching practice, and for this mock too, I am creating quant questions that closely resemble official questions (I’ll share the parentage of each mock question so that you can practice the original official questions after taking the mock).

The verbal sections in my mock will be put together by collecting existing official questions (from the Big Book etc.) into question-sets as per the template set by the official mock discussed in this post. I’m not creating questions from scratch.

Fill this form if you are interested and I’ll notify you when the test is ready.

Takeaways about the Shorter GRE format from the new PowerPrep1 (for the Shorter GRE)

All the questions in this mock test have been taken from the PowerPrep Practice Test 1.

Based on this one test that the ETS has published so far, here are my major takeaways about the Shorter GRE’s format:

🔶 In Verbal,

  • The 50:50 split between SE+TC and RC question-types has in spirit been maintained, though of course equal splitting of the odd number 27 must by necessity mean 14+13 or 13+14.

We’ll have to wait for more official practice tests to see if the (SE+TC)+(RC) number will always be 14+13, respectively, or if it may also sometimes be 13+14.

  • What is more interesting is that in the Longer format (currently in use), TCs outnumbered SEs. Out of the 40 scored verbal questions, 20 were SE+TC, and within these 20, 8 were SE while 12 were TC. However, in the Shorter GRE, the total 14 SE+TC questions split equally into 7 SEs and 7 TCs.

🔷 In Quant,

  • The relative frequency of Numeric Entry and Multiple Answer questions is broadly unchanged. It ranged from 5% to 15% in the Longer GRE and is 11% in the Shorter GRE.
  • The share of QC questions has marginally decreased. In the Longer GRE, 15 questions out of the total 40 (that is, 37.5%) are QCs. Going by this, the Shorter GRE should have had (37.5% of 27 =) 10 QC questions. However, it has only 9.
  • The proportion of set-members (questions based on graph sets) is unchanged: 15% (= 6/40 in the Longer GRE and 4/27 in the Shorter GRE). The split of this number 4 now is 3+1: one quant section will have 3 questions based on a graph set, while the other quant section will have only one graph-based question.

Further References