Experimental Section in GRE
Overview:
The experimental section in GRE is a 30- 35 minute long unscored section added by ETS to analyze the student’s ability to answer the questions in GRE. The questions in this section can be Verbal or Quantitative questions that aim to analyze the student’s ability to understand the difficulty of the questions. The ‘Experimental’ section in GRE got its name because of its out-of-the-box nature, questions of being unscored, yet having a definite reason to exist within the GRE. It is an entire section with 20 questions, but students don’t get scored irrespective of their answers. However, they are expected to answer every question nonetheless. ETS, the makers of the GRE, are constantly preparing new questions every day with a tested mechanism to classify new questions based on their difficulty levels, which is why they are being tested on students. Then, based on the answer responses given by thousands of students every day and the average time taken to solve each question, ETS decides if a particular question can be considered easy, complex, or somewhere in between.
Questions:
The section can be combined with any other sections as it may have Quantitative or Verbal questions, and it would be impossible for students to guess whether the section is experimental or not. If there are more than 2 Math or Verbal sections, the third section can be considered the Experimental section. One can recognize the Experimental section with the appearance of strange quant or verbal questions. One cannot differentiate the experimental section from the rest of the test on the revised GRE. Hence, it is crucial to attempt all the parts of the GRE test with utmost care.
The scores of the Experimental section is not considered in the final score of GRE, and the student’s performance in this section does not affect the difficulty of the next section. The questions in this section are complicated. Students spend months preparing for this ambitious test, and some students feel overwhelmed due to the experimental section. However, ETS claims that this one section helps them accommodate more tests in the future because the significance of the questions can only be determined by the real-time students in a real-time environment. The simple logic behind hiding this section amongst the tests is that it reveals the student’s behavioural segments while working on these questions. At the same time, ETS ensures that the new questions are on par with the problematic sections of the present GRE questions. The experimental section is not computer-adaptive and hence does not affect the difficulty levels of the upcoming sections.
Research Section:
Additionally, the only alternative to
GRE experimental section is The GRE research section. The apparent disparity between the GRE experimental section and the GRE research section is that the latter is optional while the former is not. Therefore, most students will get either of the sections but not both. It is an unscored Quant or Verbal section, but it is always marked and always appears at the end of the exam. There are times when a research section is provided instead of the experimental section. In this case, the aspirant can skip the entire section as it is optional to answer.
The Paper-based GRE has no experimental section included, and only Computer Delivered GRE has an experimental section / Research section. The Research Section always appears at the end of the test and is marked, making it comfortable to decide whether to answer it or not depending on the time available.