By Dr. Meena Falor, Co-Founder & Managing Director, EduKonnect
Almost every Mumbai student I counsel through GRE prep walks in with the same instinctive strategy, stated almost as a fact: “Quant is my strength, I’ll focus my energy on Verbal since that’s where I’m weak.” It sounds like sound, sensible logic. It’s also, according to ETS’s own published data, built on a misunderstanding of how the GRE actually differentiates candidates — and getting this backwards is one of the more expensive mistakes I see students make in their prep timeline.
Let me show you the number that changes this conversation, straight from ETS’s own scoring data: a 165 in Verbal Reasoning currently sits at the 95th percentile. A 165 in Quantitative Reasoning sits at only the 67th percentile. The same scaled score, on the same 130–170 scale, means something completely different depending on which section it’s in — and understanding why is the single most useful thing I can tell a student before they build a study plan.
Why the Same Score Means Different Things in Each Section
The reason isn’t that Verbal is harder in absolute terms. It’s that the pool of people taking the GRE has shifted dramatically over the past decade, and ETS’s percentile tables reflect exactly that shift. India has now overtaken the US in total GRE test-taker volume — both countries sit at roughly 100,000 test takers a year, according to ETS’s most recent snapshot report — and the same report shows India’s average Quant score at 161.5, against a US average of 150.5. China’s average Quant score sits even higher, at 166.2, just a few points off the maximum possible score. ETS’s own analysis is blunt about the consequence: because the test-taker pool has become so quantitatively strong, largely driven by growth in Indian and Chinese candidates, Quant percentile ranks have been compressing year over year. A 160 Quant score was roughly the 61st percentile in 2023; today, per the most recent ETS interpretive data window, that same 160 sits closer to the 50th percentile — a genuinely large shift for an unchanged raw score.
What this means practically for a Mumbai applicant is close to the opposite of the instinctive strategy most students walk in with. A strong Quant score is table stakes in an applicant pool where most of your direct competition — other Indian and Chinese STEM applicants — is also scoring in the 160s. It signals competence, but it doesn’t differentiate you the way it once did, because everyone around you is doing the same thing. Verbal, by contrast, is where genuine separation from that same competitive pool still happens, precisely because it’s the section most Indian applicants under-invest in relative to their Quant prep. A student who treats Verbal as the section to merely “not embarrass myself in” while banking on Quant to carry the application is optimising for a differentiation effect that, per ETS’s own data, has been quietly shrinking for years.
Understanding the Current Format Before You Build a Study Plan
Since September 2023, the GRE General Test runs on a substantially shorter format than the version many seniors describe from their own attempts — roughly 1 hour 58 minutes total, down from the earlier 3 hours 45 minutes, with the unscored experimental section removed entirely and the Analytical Writing section reduced to a single “Analyze an Issue” essay. If a friend or a coaching centre is still describing a nearly four-hour test with two essays, that guidance is out of date and worth discarding.
The current structure runs Verbal Reasoning across two sections — roughly 27 questions total in about 41 minutes — and Quantitative Reasoning similarly across two sections, roughly 27 questions in about 47 minutes, both scored on the familiar 130–170 scale. One detail matters more than most students realise: both sections are section-level adaptive, meaning your performance on the first Verbal section determines the difficulty, and therefore the maximum achievable score, of your second Verbal section — and the same is true for Quant. A weak first section doesn’t just cost you points directly; it caps what’s mathematically possible to reach in the second section, regardless of how well you perform there. This is exactly why “warming up” cautiously in Section 1, or treating it as less important than Section 2, is a genuinely costly strategic error — every section counts fully now, and there’s no experimental section left to hide a bad day in.
Preparing for Quant: Precision Under a Compressed Clock, Not Just Concept Mastery
Most Mumbai students preparing for Quant already have the underlying mathematical foundation from school and early college — Quant content covers arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and data analysis, none of which is conceptually unfamiliar territory. The actual preparation challenge is different: roughly 1.75 minutes per question, with an on-screen calculator available but no time to lean on it as a crutch for basic arithmetic, and a scoring system with no penalty for wrong answers, which means every question genuinely deserves an attempt rather than a skip.
Given how compressed the Quant pool has become at the top end, the practical implication for prep is this: the students getting into the high 160s aren’t the ones who understand more math than everyone else in the applicant pool — they’re the ones who’ve eliminated careless errors almost entirely. A rushed misread of a data interpretation question, a sign error under time pressure, a geometry question where the figure wasn’t drawn to scale and the shortcut backfired — these are exactly the mistakes that separate a 165 from a 158 among candidates who all fundamentally know the material. Practice under strict timing from early in your prep, and drill the specific discipline of double-checking the two or three “easy” questions you’re most tempted to rush through, precisely because the rest of the pool is making the same careless mistakes you’re trying to avoid.
Preparing for Verbal: Where the Real Prep Investment Should Go
If Quant preparation is mostly about precision and speed under a familiar knowledge base, Verbal preparation for most Indian students is a genuine skill-building exercise, and it deserves proportionally more of your total prep time than the instinctive 50-50 split most students default to. Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions test precise vocabulary in context, not memorised word lists — a student who’s crammed a thousand flashcard words without understanding how those words function in a sentence’s logical structure will still struggle, because the GRE is testing whether you can identify the exact shade of meaning a sentence demands, not whether you recognise a word in isolation.
Reading Comprehension, the other major component, rewards a specific discipline that’s different from general reading ability: identifying the author’s actual argument and tone rather than just the topic, distinguishing between an answer that’s true in general and an answer that’s actually supported by the specific passage, and resisting the pull toward an answer choice that sounds sophisticated but overstates or understates what the passage actually says. This is a trained skill, built through deliberate practice with GRE-style passages and a genuine review of why wrong answers were wrong — not something that improves simply through general English reading, however strong.
Given the ETS percentile data, I’d tell most students to allocate their preparation time roughly in proportion to where the real differentiation happens — which, for a Mumbai applicant with a typical STEM-strong, Verbal-underdeveloped profile, usually means genuinely more weeks on Verbal than the instinctive plan allows, not simply “enough to not drag down the overall score.”
What I Actually Tell Every Student Before They Start Prepping
Take a full diagnostic test before assuming you know your relative strengths. Many students assume they’re “naturally strong” in Quant without checking where that score actually lands on the current, more compressed percentile scale.
Don’t build your prep time allocation around the instinctive 50-50 split. Given how the applicant pool has shifted, Verbal is very often where a Mumbai student’s prep time earns the most differentiation per hour invested, not Quant.
Treat every section as fully scored from the first question. There’s no unscored experimental section anymore, and Section 1 performance in each measure sets the ceiling for what Section 2 can achieve — there’s no room to “warm up” cautiously.
Build genuine timing discipline into Quant practice specifically to eliminate careless errors, since raw content knowledge is rarely the actual gap for Indian applicants — precision under the clock is.
Practise Verbal as a trained comprehension and precision skill, not a vocabulary memorisation exercise. Flashcard word lists without contextual practice consistently underperform genuine passage-based and sentence-based drilling.
Ignore prep advice describing the old, longer GRE format. If a source is still discussing a near-four-hour test or two AWA essays, it’s describing a version of the exam that no longer exists.
The GRE isn’t really testing whether a Mumbai STEM graduate can do Quant — ETS’s own data shows that’s rarely in question for this applicant pool. It’s testing something closer to whether that same student can bring their Verbal ability up to a level that genuinely stands out in a pool where Quant excellence has quietly become the baseline, not the differentiator. Students who understand that distinction early tend to build a study plan that actually matches where the score gains are still available.
Co-Founder & Managing Director of EduKonnect, and has guided over 15,000+ students through international admissions over the past two decades.