GRE to change in 2011

 The Educational Testing Service announced a series of changes to the Graduate Record Exam last month. When implemented in 2011, the changes will affect more than half-a-million test takers and constitute the largest revision to the GRE in its 59-year history.

Currently, the GRE is administered to an estimated 600,000 students annually. It is often used as an admissions tool for a wide range of graduate programs.

“This is going to be a significant test change,” said Andrew Mitchell, Kaplan Test Prep’s director of graduate programs and admissions.

Revisions include a narrower scoring scale, the elimination of the antonym and analogy sections, the addition of an online calculator, a longer format (by 30 - 45 minutes) and the ability to skip ahead and return to questions within adaptive sections.

The announcement to change the GRE’s content, scoring scale and navigation comes after several years of experimental GRE sections, logistical complications and at least two recently failed ETS proposals to revise the exam.

According to the test makers, the new GRE will more accurately measure an individual’s likelihood of success in graduate school. The verbal section of the new test, for example, is less vocabulary-intensive, focusing instead on reading comprehension and analysis of arguments. Similarly, the quantitative portion of the exam will contain geometry and concentrate on testing data analysis skills.

“When you’re in grad school and you’re crunching numbers, you have a calculator,” Mitchell said. “And you’re probably not doing geometry; you’re probably working with data.”

Mitchell said the changes may also reflect ETS’s desire to compete with the Graduate Management Test, the exam most widely used in the admissions process of business schools. Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, for example, requires MBA and PhD applicants to submit GMAT scores.

In the case of most graduate programs, however, students have no option but to take the GRE.

“I really don’t want to do it, but I have to,” said Luis Laitano, a senior and cellular molecular biology major.

Laitano said he plans on taking the GRE this year. Like most students, he wonders whether the revised GRE will be easier.

“It’s a bit of a trade off,” Mitchell said, pointing out that while the some of the changes may lessen test takers’ anxiety, they may also result in more complex questions.

Statistical trends show that score averages drop after test changes, Mitchell said. In 2002, when the GRE was revised, the average score dropped by seven points and continued to decline for the next five years. Similar score drops were seen after revisions to the SAT in 2005 and the MCAT in 2007.

While the current GRE’s Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning scores range from 200 - 800 points in increments of 10 points, the new exam would be scaled from 130 - 170 points in single unit increments. Narrowing from 61 to 41 possible scores will result in tighter scores, leading some students to worry about differentiating themselves to competitive programs.

Michael Kuczynski, the director of graduate studies in the Tulane English department, said the new exam would not drastically affect the way graduate programs look at prospective students.

“It’s a good statistical measure, but it doesn’t give you the kind of sense of a student’s quality of mind that you get from looking a transcript, meeting a student face-to-face or having a conversation with them,” Kuczynski said.