It  is a standardized test, that is, an admissions requirement for many graduate schools in the United States and in other English-speaking countries worldwide.The GRE General Test is offered as a computer-based exam administered by selected qualified testing centers.
The test measures students on verbal, quantitative and analytical writing skills. Data shows that scores on the GRE General Test accurately predicts graduate school students' grades and performance.
Many programs, especially those at large state schools, establish cut off points for GRE scores to limit the application pool, while others use GRE scores to directly determine how much financial support a student receives.
The GRE was completely revised on August 2011.It creats an exam that is not adaptive on a question-by-question basis, but rather by section. So that the performance on the first verbal and math sections determine the difficulty of the second sections shown. Overall, the test retained the sections and question types from its predecessor, but the scores were changed to a 130 to 170 scale.
The computer-based GRE General Test consists of six sections. The first section is always the analytical writing section involving separately timed issue and argument tasks. The next five sections consist of two verbal reasoning sections, two quantitative reasoning sections, and either an experimental or research section. These five sections may occur in any order. The experimental section does not count towards the final score but is not distinguished from the scored sections. Unlike on the computer adaptive test prior to August 2011, the examinee is free to skip back and forth within sections. The entire testing procedure lasts about 3 hours 45 minutes.One-minute breaks are offered after each section and a 10-minute break after the third section.
The paper-based GRE General Test consists of six sections and is only available in areas where computer-based testing is unavailable. The analytical writing is split up into two sections, one section for each issue and argument task. The next four sections consist of two verbal and two quantitative sections in varying order. There is no experimental section on the paper-based test.
The GRE General Test is designed to provide graduate schools with a common measure for comparing the qualifications of applicants from varied backgrounds. In addition to using it as an admission criterion, schools often use GRE scores to determine a students’ eligibility for merit-based grants and fellowships, as well as teaching and research assistantships.

Measure	Number of Questions	Allotted Time
Analytical Writing (One section with two separately timed tasks)	One "Analyze an Issue" task and one "Analyze an Argument" task	30 minutes per task
Verbal Reasoning (Two sections)	Approximately 20 questions per section	30 minutes per section
Quantitative Reasoning (Two sections)	Approximately 20 questions per section	35 minutes per section
Unscored Section	Varies	Varies
Research Section	Varies	Varies

The GRE revised General Test design features advanced technology that allows a student to freely move forward and backward within a section. Specific features include:

• • Preview and review capabilities within a section
• • A "mark and review" feature to tag questions, so a student can skip these and return to them later
• • The ability to change/edit answers within a section
• • An on-screen calculator for the Quantitative Reasoning section
• • New answer formats, including tasks such as numeric entry and highlighting a sentence in a passage to answer a question

GRE can be taken on weekdays from Monday to Friday at Thomson Prometric centers across the world.
Test Fee: US$ 190 (Includes fee for reporting scores to 4 universities)

Measure	Scores Reported*
Verbal Reasoning	130 – 170, in 1 point increments
Quantitative Reasoning	130 – 170, in 1 point increments
Analytical Writing	0 – 6, in half point increments