a) Analytical Writing

Measures your critical thinking and analytical writing skills through a 30-minute “Analyze an Issue” task / essay. This task presents an opinion / view on an issue and instructions on how to respond. You’re required to evaluate the issue, consider its complexities and develop an argument with reasons and examples to support your views.

It assesses your critical thinking and analytical writing skills by assessing your ability to:

• Articulate and support complex ideas
• Construct arguments
• Sustain a focused and coherent discussion

It doesn’t assess specific content knowledge. You might find it helpful to review the Issue and Argument pools: Issue Topic Pool (PDF). This file is published by ETS.

b) Verbal Reasoning

Assesses your ability to:

• Analyze and evaluate written material and synthesize information obtained from it
• Analyze relationships among component parts of sentences
• Recognize relationships among words and concepts

Verbal Reasoning questions appear in several formats, each of which is discussed in detail in the corresponding sections linked to below. About half of the measure requires you to read passages and answer questions on those passages. The other half requires you to read, interpret and complete existing sentences, groups of sentences or paragraphs.

The Verbal Reasoning measure contains three types of questions:

• 1Reading Comprehension:

  Involves passages with questions testing your understanding of the text.

  • Understanding the meaning of individual words and sentences
  • Understanding the meaning of paragraphs and larger bodies of text
  • Distinguishing between minor and major points
  • Summarizing a passage
  • Drawing conclusions from the information provided
  • Reasoning from incomplete data to infer missing information
  • Understanding the structure of a text in terms of how the parts relate to one another
  • Identifying the author's assumptions and perspective
  • Analyzing a text and reaching conclusions about it
  • Identifying strengths and weaknesses of a position
  • Developing and considering alternative explanations

  Questions can cover any of the topics listed above, from the meaning of a particular word to assessing evidence that might support or weaken points made in the passage. There are three question types:

  • Select a single answer
  • Select multiple correct answers
  • Select a sentence from a passage

• 2Text Completion:

  Requires you to fill in blanks in passages using your understanding of the context.

  Skilled readers do not simply absorb the information presented on the page; instead, they maintain a constant attitude of interpretation and evaluation, reasoning from what they have read so far to create a picture of the whole and revising that picture as they go. Text Completion questions test this ability by omitting crucial words from short passages and ask you to use the remaining information in the passage as a basis for selecting words or short phrases to fill the blanks and create a coherent, meaningful whole.

  Question structure

  • Each passage is composed of one to five sentences, with one to three blanks per sentence.
  • If there are two or three blanks, each blank has three answer choices.
  • If there is only one blank, there are five answer choices.
  • Each blank has a single correct answer.
  • The answer choices for different blanks function independently, i.e., selecting one answer choice for one blank doesn’t affect the answer choices you can select for another blank.
  • There’s no credit for partially correct answers.

• 3Sentence Equivalence:

  Involves choosing two words that would complete a sentence in a way that makes it meaningfully complete.

  Like Text Completion questions, Sentence Equivalence questions test your ability to reach a conclusion about how a passage should be completed based on partial information, but to a greater extent they focus on the meaning of the completed whole. Sentence Equivalence questions consist of a single sentence with just one blank, and they ask you to identify the two choices that lead to a complete, coherent sentence while producing sentences that mean the same thing.

  Question structure

  • Each question consists of a single sentence with one blank and six answer choices.
  • Select two of the answer choices.
  • Here is no credit for partially correct answers.

c) Quantitative Reasoning

Tests your mathematical skills and understanding of basic concepts in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and data analysis.

• 1Problem Solving

  Traditional multiple-choice questions with five options, where you select the correct answer.

• 2Quantitative Comparison

  Compares two quantities and requires you to determine the relationship out of four possible relationships between them.

• 3Multi – Answer

  A question has multiple answers so you have to select all correct possible answers.

• 4Numeric Entry (Fill-in)

  You have to either type the answer of the question.

Content areas covered

Some of the Quantitative Reasoning questions are posed in real-life settings, while others are posed in purely mathematical settings. Many of the questions are "word problems," which must be translated and modelled mathematically. The skills, concepts and abilities are assessed in the four content areas below.

Arithmetic topics, including:

• Properties and types of integers, such as divisibility, factorization, prime numbers, remainders and odd and even integers
• Arithmetic operations, exponents and roots
• Concepts such as estimation, percent, ratio, rate, absolute value, the number line, decimal representation and sequences of numbers

Algebra topics, including:

• Operations with exponents
• Factoring and simplifying algebraic expressions
• Relations, functions, equations, and inequalities
• Solving linear and quadratic equations and inequalities
• Solving simultaneous equations and inequalities
• Setting up equations to solve word problems
• Coordinate geometry, including graphs of functions, equations and inequalities, intercepts, and slopes of lines

Geometry topics, including:

• Parallel and perpendicular lines
• Circles
• Triangles, including isosceles, equilateral and 30°-60°-90° triangles
• Quadrilaterals
• Other polygons
• Congruent and similar figures
• 3-dimensional figures
• Area
• Perimeter
• Volume
• The Pythagorean theorem
• Angle measurement in degrees (The ability to construct proofs is not tested).

Data analysis topics, including:

• Basic descriptive statistics, such as mean, median, mode, range, standard deviation, interquartile range, quartiles, and percentiles
• Interpretation of data in tables and graphs, such as line graphs, bar graphs, circle graphs, boxplots, scatterplots, and frequency distributions
• Elementary probability, such as probabilities of compound events and independent events
• Conditional probability
• Random variables and probability distributions, including normal distributions
• Counting methods, such as combinations, permutations, and Venn diagrams