Dear Aspirant,
There are two exams mandatory for US universities. There are two exams which students have to qualify for the same. First is GRE and the second is IELTS or TOEFL.
GRE is also called Graduate Record Examination and it tests your verbal reasoning skills, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing. It is a 3 hour and 45 minutes test and it is mandatory if you are applying for a Masters or Doctorate in the US. It is computer-based. You also have the option of taking it multiple times and there is a limit of taking it the maximum five times in a year. You can attempt it only once in 21 days. These scores are valid for 5 years. For the verbal and quantitative section, GRE score falls around 150 to 152. If you get 165 you are have secured close to 95%. In the section of analytical writing, an average score would be 3.5, 6 being the highest.
The paper is as follows:
There is an unsecured section at the end of the exam which is a dummy and does not carry marks but is to be filled so that the conducting body can get information about the candidate.
The second test is IELTS or TOEFL, which are English Proficiency Test. You can choose one of these and go ahead with it. IELTS is also called the International English Language Testing System and for higher education, you will have to choose the format of IELTS Academic which uses British English. It has four parts: Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. The length is 2 hours 45 minutes. TOEFL is a Test of English as a Foreign Language. It has the same conducting body as GRE and it allows both paper-based and Internet-based Tests. It is a 4 hours paper consisting of the same sections. The average minimum score required for IELTS is 6.3 out of the highest of 9. For TOEFL, it is 78 with the highest of 120.
Hope this helps. All the best!
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