Graduate Record Examinations (GRE): US graduate admissions test

About the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE)

The Carnegie Foundation began developing a graduate-school admissions test in the late 1930s as part of broader efforts to bring objective measurement to higher education. The early GRE (introduced 1939) was administered by individual graduate schools to applicants. In 1949 the Educational Testing Service (ETS, newly founded to consolidate national testing operations) took over the GRE and standardized it nationally.

The 1949 GRE General Test had three sections: Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, and Analytical Reasoning. Methodologically it descended directly from the Army Alpha and the ACE Psychological Examination (1925) - both Carl Brigham and the GRE developers had served on the Army psychological program. The GRE Subject Tests in specific disciplines (mathematics, psychology, biology, etc.) were developed throughout the 1950s.

The GRE has gone through major revisions in 1981 (analytical section restructured), 2002 (analytical reasoning replaced with analytical writing), and 2011 (current revised GRE format, item-types updated, scoring rescaled to 130-170 per section). The Subject Tests have been gradually phased out (only six Subject Tests remained as of 2024). The GRE General Test remains the dominant US graduate admissions test, although a growing number of programs are dropping the requirement.

Like the SAT, the GRE has been the subject of extensive research on cultural fairness, predictive validity, and admissions implications. The GRE's predictive validity for graduate school success is modest (correlations around 0.3-0.4 with first-year graduate GPA) - meaningful but far from deterministic.

The 3 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

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