Following the trend of other standardized tests, the Graduate Record Examination will undergo the most significant change the exam has faced in the past 55 years; a recent announcement that there will be no administrations of the exam in August, however, will give students an even shorter amount of time to take it before the changeover.
The already two and a half hour test will change starting around September 10, depending on demand for the test date. The last date to take the old exam is July 31, before the exam is changed over into an even more grueling four-hour format.
The GRE has changed for several reasons, as cited by Susan Kaplan, director of graduate programs at Kaplan Test Prep and Administration. The first of these reasons is that the new exam aims to be a more accurate predictor of a student’s success in grad school. The Educational Testing Service, which is the organization in charge of making the tests, also hopes to reduce the effects of answer memorization as well as to address security concerns.
The content on the exam will be changing to focus on higher cognitive and reasoning skills, according to Kaplan. In the verbal section, there will be less emphasis on vocabulary and more on critical reading and sentence completions, and in the math portion, there will be less geometry and more complex word problems and data analysis. Students taking the exam will also now be able to read the essay that they wrote when they get their scores.
The scoring scale will also be changed from a range of 200 to 800 for each section to instead range from between 130 to 170. The old exam was also adaptive; the new test, however, will present all test takers with the same questions and will not recycle questions between exam dates. This means that there will need to be more questions of varying difficulty. The new test also will not be given as often as the current GRE exam; it will only be given a maximum of 35 times a year.
ETS has also decided for several reasons not to offer the GRE during the month of August, which will affect many students who planned to take the test over the summer. According to Kaplan, one reason was the need for time to transition from the administration of one test to another. She also said that by eliminating August test dates, more students will be forced to take the September date, providing a larger pool to determine a scoring scale.
Another problem with the new test, however, is that because the test-makers need a larger pool of students taking the test to determine such a scoring scale, none of the scores will be released until at least November. This means students who hope to apply for graduate school for the Spring ’08 term should take this into account heavily when deciding when to take the exam.
Kaplan suggested, “Students should take the exam now before it changes over to the harder format, but they should register quickly because these dates will fill up fast.”
She also suggested several resources for students planning to take the tests, such as a free upcoming GRE Admissions and Test Strategy Workshop at the Albany Kaplan Center on March 20 at 6 pm, as well as a free GRE practice exam at the SUNY Albany campus on March 3 from 10 am until 1 pm. Students can register at http://www.kaptest.com/gre/.
Students can also find out more information on the new GRE from the ETS website at http://www.ets.org/.
Kaplan also urged other students who know they will be planning for graduate school to take the old GRE now if they feel prepared. “Scores are good for up to five years, so if you know you want to go to graduate school, it’d be a good idea to get it out of the way now before the harder format.”
