According to Payne, the largest changes planned for the exam are going to be made to the verbal reasoning section. The antonyms and analogy questions are going to be eliminated from the exam in order to decrease the focus on vocabulary. In its place, Payne said there will be more critical reading sections that will call for increased verbal reasoning.

In addition to more emphasis on critical reading, there will also be some new question types. One example Payne gave was a question that asks students to find a sentence filling a role, such as one in which the author gives examples reinforcing arguments against a view that was presented earlier. He pointed out that a person’s ability to answer this type of question does not depend on vocabulary, but rather, requires them to fully understand the meaning of the passage.

Payne explained, “The overall goal, at the end of the day, is to increase the overall validity of the GRE scores.” While the changes to the verbal section may be the largest, the other two sections of the exam will also see some changes as will the exam overall.

The quantitative section will have fewer geometry based questions and will have a different mix of questions, and some new types. Payne said, however, that the idea is not to make the quantitative reasoning needed more difficult, but rather to make the questions better reflect the reasoning needed by graduate students.

The current exam is two and a half hours long while the new format will take over four hours and have multiple verbal and quantitative reasoning sections. The new format will also have two 30-minute essay questions for the writing portion of the score and the essays written will be able to be viewed by faculty at the schools the test taker applies to—currently, the faculty can only view the score a students’ essay received. Payne said that the new essay questions will be somewhat more specific than they have been in the past, since it seemed that some essay responses had not been directly answering the questions asked.

Currently, a prospective graduate student can take the GRE in a computer-adaptive format in which the difficulty of questions is determined by the test taker’s previous responses. This format, however, will be discontinued next fall and the new test will be administered in a linear format in which all test takers on a given date will be given the same questions. One reason for this change was a security concern about questions that were reused being posted on websites and perhaps giving some test takers an advantage; with the new exam, questions will not be reused.

While currently GRE exams are offered by appointment on a fairly continuous basis, as of October 2006, there will be 30 dates on which the exam will be offered. Payne explained that ETS would work to ensure that there was enough space available for those who wanted to take the exam.

Payne noted that the exam itself is going to be administered over the Internet at the proctoring locations, ensuring that each person is getting the same question set. He said that ETS is the only organizations that is administering “high stakes tests over the internet.” This type of administration for the Test of English as a Foreign Language began last month in the United States and will be worldwide by the end of next summer.

The score ranges on the GRE General Test will change from the 200-800 on each of the verbal and quantitative sections to around 120-170. These scores, as well as the final amount of time for the entire exam, could still change based on field tests that will take place this fall.

Payne said that college juniors who are looking into graduate school will be able to take the current format of the exam before it is replaced, or take the new format beginning in October 2006. Sample questions for the new format will be posted on the ETS website, http://www.ets.org/, by the end of this month and an entire practice test will be posted next spring.