Plans that had been underway to make changes to the Graduate Record Examinations have recently been cancelled by the Educational Testing Service, in consultation with the Executive Committee of the GRE Board. This announcement has reversed its previous decision to make the largest set of changes to the GRE in the past 55 years.
ETS announced the change on April 9, informing students, “While ETS and the Board remain committed to improving the test, on balance, GRE officials said they believe problems guaranteeing complete access to the new Internet-based test outweighed the benefits of immediately moving to the new format.”
The new exam was planned to be introduced in September; however, the current exam will be continued until further notice from ETS. There are still discussions, though, regarding a change to the GRE in the future; it is unclear what will eventually become of the test.
Some of the proposed changes called for almost doubling the length from two-and-a-half to four hours, and significantly decreasing the number of times the test is offered from six days per week annually down to only to 35 days per year. The exam would also not have been offered in August to allow time for the change over to occur. Additional changes included revised content in all three sections of the test—verbal, analytical writing, and quantitative—and changing the grading scale of the test’s quantatative and verbal sections from 200-800 points to 110-150 points. The most prominent alteration to the exam would have been the elimination of the computer adaptive scoring algorithm.
The exam will continue to be offered worldwide in its current computer-based, continuous testing format. Registrations in India, China, and Japan, which had been closed, will be reopened in the near future to accommodate application deadlines, and registrations for the current GRE General Test will continue elsewhere.
The ETS website stated, “The primary reason for cancelling the launch of the revised GRE General Test was test taker access.” ETS had planned for the revised test to be delivered over the new worldwide network of 3,200 Internet-based testing centers. Despite the network’s size, officials decided that, “full access to the General Test for all students could not be confidently assured.”
“While the graduate community supports, and in fact helped develop and pilot the revised GRE General Test, they have also stated that they are satisfied with the current GRE General Test, until such time as improvements can be gradually implemented. ETS is being responsive to their best interests,” said David Payne, Executive Director of the GRE Program at ETS. “The decision to cancel the revised GRE General Test best serves the interests of test takers and the graduate institutions that use those scores to make admissions decisions.”
ETS officials are working with the GRE Board to continue pursuing many of the planned test content improvements in the future without the access issues that it currently faces.
Payne said, “After much debate and evaluation, it became clear that the current format offers students more convenient and flexible opportunities to test when and where they choose, while still providing score users with valid predictors of test takers’ preparedness for graduate school study.”
