The GRE Isn’t Just a Grad School Test Anymore
It’s quietly become a real alternative to the GMAT for MBA applicants too. Here’s what’s driving the shift.
If you’re applying to a master’s program, a PhD, or even an MBA, there’s a good chance the GRE is on your radar, but what a lot of applicants don’t realize is how much its role has shifted in the last few years, especially for business school.
The GRE has quietly become a genuine alternative to the GMAT for GRE for MBA admissions, and not in a token way. At the top 25 US MBA programs, GRE submission rates climbed from roughly 30 percent in 2022 to nearly 33 percent by 2024, while GMAT submissions dropped from around 54 percent to under 43 percent over the same stretch.
At Berkeley Haas, GRE submissions have actually made up the majority of applications since 2023. Dartmouth Tuck, Duke Fuqua, Harvard and Stanford are all seeing GRE submissions in the 40 percent range. This isn’t a temporary blip, it reflects a real, structural shift in how business schools evaluate applicants.
That matters because it gives applicants real choice. If your strengths line up better with the GRE’s format, vocabulary-heavy verbal section, more flexible question navigation, you’re no longer at a disadvantage by skipping the GMAT for your MBA applications. And of course, for the traditional graduate degrees the GRE has always covered, master’s programs, PhDs, it remains the standard.
The Format
What the GRE Test Format Looks Like Today
The GRE General Test has five sections and takes about two hours to complete. It always opens with the Analytical Writing section, a single essay where you’ll analyze an issue, take a position on it and support that position with reasoning and examples. You get 30 minutes for this.
After that come two Verbal Reasoning sections and two Quantitative Reasoning sections. The first Verbal section has 12 questions in 18 minutes, and the second has 15 questions in 23 minutes. Quant follows the same pattern, 12 questions in 21 minutes for the first section and 15 questions in 26 minutes for the second.
Like the SAT, the GRE uses section level adaptivity for Verbal and Quant. How you do on the first Verbal section affects the difficulty, and therefore the scoring potential, of the second Verbal section. The same goes for Quant. That first section in each subject carries real weight.
Scoring runs from 130 to 170 for both Verbal and Quant, and 0 to 6 for the essay. You’re also free to skip questions, flag them for review and move around within a section, which is more flexible than some other standardized tests.
The Real Gap
Why Most Self-Study Plans Fall Short
A lot of GRE preparation gets reduced to pure vocabulary memorization or math drilling, flashcard apps, word lists, endless practice sets. That approach can raise your content knowledge, but it rarely fixes the actual thing holding scores back, which is reasoning quickly and accurately under time pressure while the section-level adaptivity is quietly working against you if you start slow.
There’s also the target-score problem. GRE score expectations vary enormously depending on the program, a strong score for a competitive PhD program looks very different from a strong score for an MBA program that also considers work experience and essays. Self-study rarely accounts for this.
Our Approach
How Gradmission Approaches GRE Coaching
We build your plan around both content review where you actually need it, and heavy practice on pacing and strategy for that first section in each subject, since it shapes everything that follows. We also help you figure out what score range you’re realistically aiming for, tying your target back to the specific schools on your list, whether that’s a master’s program, a PhD, or an MBA where the GRE is now a legitimate path in.
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