The GRE, or Graduate Record Examinations, are standardized tests taken by potential graduate or professional students as supplements to their undergraduate records. Accredited graduate or professional schools, individual graduate departments or occasionally non-accredited schools may require the GRE. It serves to neutralize grades and faculty recommendations of the pool of applicants from different schools. There is a GRE General Test, required of most applicants, designed to measure general knowledge, and there are 8 different GRE Subject Tests, which may be requested by specific graduate departments.

The GRE General Test can be taken either as a computer-based or paper-based test. Most sites in the United States and Canada offer the computer-based test, whereas most of the paper tests are overseas. The types of questions posed on both examinations are similar, although the distribution of questions and time allotted is somewhat different. Both methods of testing begin with Analytical Writing sections, in which you are asked to write two different essays. The writing sections are followed by up to five multiple choice portions, measuring either verbal or quantitative skills. In the computer-based test, the multiple choice questions employ a unique method of generating questions and scoring them which is computer adaptive. In other words, the difficulty of questions posed depends on your answer to the previous question, and your score is determined by difficulty and number of questions answered. In the case of paper examinations, there is no adaptive feature, and the raw scores are just scaled to the difficulty of the test given. Each type of test may have a random pretest section which is not scored and not identified, and the computer tests may have an not scored research section which would be identified.