GRE vs. GMAT, Part IV: GRE Study Materials
UPDATED FOR THE NEW gmat and gre IN 2024
There are far more official GMAT practice questions available than official GRE practice questions. So if you’re studying for the GRE, make sure that you use these study materials wisely! And if you know that you’ll need a ton of repetition to achieve a competitive score, the GMAT might be the better exam for you.
Read on for a breakdown of the materials available to study for the GMAT vs. the GRE.
Best official GRE test-prep materials
If you’re planning to study for the GRE, here are the official materials that you’ll want:
GRE RESOURCE #1: 5 official GRE practice tests from ETS.org.
THOUGHTS, OPINIONS, AND GRIPES: These are your most valuable GRE practice materials, so use them carefully.
Also, please keep in mind that the question banks are shallow for all of the official GRE practice tests. So if you redo the exams, you’ll see a ton of repeated questions, and the score will be nearly meaningless.
In other words: be extremely careful to use these five exams only when you’re 100% ready to make the most of them.
GRE RESOURCE #2: The GRE Official Guide, Verbal Reasoning Guide, and Quantitative Reasoning Guide.
THOUGHTS, OPINIONS, AND GRIPES: These GRE books are among the most valuable resources available, but the quantity of official questions is pretty disappointing.
Grand total, there are only 210 verbal questions and 210 quant questions in the three books combined – far, far fewer than are available for the GMAT. Additionally, there are 2 full GRE practice tests in the Official Guide, but paper-based tests do not even begin to mimic the experience of taking an actual, computer-adaptive GRE exam, and therefore are of somewhat limited value.
Bottom line: these three GRE resources are indispensable, but they provide a very limited number of official practice questions.
RESOURCE #3: The “Old” GRE Official Guide
THOUGHTS, OPINIONS, AND GRIPES: The old GRE official guide (out of print, but still widely available online) consists of official paper-based GRE tests that were administered long before ETS radically overhauled the GRE in 2011. This guide is still a decent source of quant practice questions, but some of the vocabulary-based questions are completely obsolete, the Reading Comprehension format differs substantially from that of the current GRE, and the quant questions are generally easier than the ones you’ll encounter on an actual, computerized GRE.
This book is very much worth using if you’re desperate for some extraReading Comprehension, quant, orText Completion practice questions. Just keep in mind that the format and difficulty of these questions won’t be quite like what you’ll encounter on the current version of the GRE.
Best official GMAT test-prep materials
Compared to the paltry offerings for the GRE, the official questions available to practice for the GMAT are wildly abundant.
RESOURCE #1: 6 official GMAT Focus practice tests from MBA.com.
THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS: These are your most valuable GMAT practice materials, so as with the GRE, you’ll want to use these official practice tests carefully.
If we’re comparing the GRE vs. the GMAT, the GMAT’s offerings are much better here: the GMAT offers an extra test, and the question banks are much deeper on the GMAT exams.
So if you need the extra practice, it’s not always a bad idea to retake the official GMAT practice exams: yes, you might see repeated questions if you do so, and it will warp the experience somewhat. But you won’t see THAT many repeated questions, so if you’re in a pinch, it can be OK to retake the GMAT exams – and we can’t say the same about their GRE counterparts.
RESOURCE #2: The GMAT Official Guide Bundle
THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS: There are more than 1500 official verbal, quant, and Data Insights questions in this bundle of four books – several times more than you’ll get from the GRE equivalents.
RESOURCE #3: GMAT Focus Official Practice Question Bundle on MBA.com
THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS: You’ll encounter a total of about 300 official GMAT questions in these question packs – and there’s absolutely no GRE equivalent to this resource. There are additional online GMAT question packs available as well.
RESOURCE #4: GMAT Advanced Questions
THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS: This little volume contains a total of 300 GMAT quant and verbal questions. In all honesty, the book isn’t GMAC’s finest work: the editor who selected and categorized these “advanced” questions made some questionable choices. And of course you’ll want to skip any geometry and Sentence Correction questions, as those have been retired from the GMAT exam. But still: if you need more repetition, an extra several hundred official questions is worth something.
More importantly, this brings us to a grand total of more than 2000 official GMAT quant and verbal questions – not including the practice tests. That’s roughly five times as many official questions as are available for the current version of the GRE.
RESOURCE #5: LSAT® materials for GMAT RC and CR
THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS: The LSAT® contains questions that are very similar to GMAT RC and CR, and the roughly 90 available LSAT® tests give you a nearly limitless supply of questions to study. LSAT® RC might be useful for the GRE, but the question format on the LSAT® aligns more cleanly with the GMAT.
RESOURCE #6: Older editions of the GMAT Official Guide, Verbal Review guide, and Quant Review guide.
THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS: If you’ve worked through a recent edition of official GMAT materials, you can use older versions (we usually recommend the 12th edition of the Official Guide and the 2nd edition of the Verbal Review and Quant Review guides). While the questions overlap a bit with newer editions, you’ll see plenty of fresh, high-quality questions in these older editions. Just make sure to skip geometry and Sentence Correction questions, since those no longer appear on the GMAT.
The bottom line: it would take literally hundreds of hours of studying to exhaust the supply of worthwhile GMAT materials. We’ve seen it happen, but it’s a rarity. But unfortunately, it’s far too easy to exhaust the supply of useful GRE questions in just a couple of weeks.
Non-official study materials for the GMAT and the GRE
Of course, there’s a healthy ecosystem of GMAT and GRE test-prep firms that will happily provide additional materials and practice tests, albeit of lamentably variable quality.
We don’t recommend that you use non-official materials as your primary study resources, particularly for verbal questions – there just aren’t great non-official verbal resources out there, and you may end up doing more harm than good if you study those questions.
The bottom line: GMAT vs GRE official materials
Based on the above rundown, we have roughly 1/5 as many high-quality GRE test questions as we do GMAT questions, depending on how you want to define the term “high-quality.” If you’re a naturally gifted test-taker, then you probably won’t need that much practice, and the lack of good GRE materials is a non-issue. But if you’re looking for a huge score improvement, you might have an easier time moving forward on the GMAT than on the GRE.