A recent survey shows that most Chinese students who plan to take the Graduate Record Examination usually spend one to six months to prepare for the exam.

More than 18,000 students from 150 countries around the world were polled in the survey organized by Education Testing Service, an education and assessment institution in the United States.

Findings show that 39.3 percent of the Chinese respondents need one to three months for preparation, while 28.3 percent said that they need a longer period — three to six months.

The survey also found that Chinese students usually spend more time preparing for the verbal reasoning and analytical writing parts, while spending the least amount of time on quantitative reasoning. However, the test scores of general Chinese test takers present a picture that is contrary to the energy they have spent — they usually score higher in quantitative reasoning than on the other two parts.