ETS to roll out new GRE in September
Students who want to apply to graduate school next year will not be able to take the Graduation Record Examinations at the end of this summer.
Educational Testing Service — the company that creates and administers the GRE — announced in early February that it is revising the test to be more reflective of graduate-level thinking and analysis.
The last administration of the current GRE will be July 31, and the first revised exam will be given Sept. 10, 15 or 16, depending on location. There will also be a test date Sept. 29.
According to information on the ETS Web site, the changes will make the exam more secure and user-friendly and will reduce students’ ability to simply memorize answers.
Instead of the current adaptive test format, where students are asked different questions based on their performance within the exam, the new GRE will ask the same questions of all test-takers.
Each section of the exam will change in both format and question type, with testing objectives including new, open-ended critical thinking and application-based problems in addition to traditional multiple-choice questions.
Sid Richardson College junior Steve Bryant said he is not planning to go to graduate school but may take the GRE in case he changes his mind.
He said he thinks the old format of the test seems easier because he is used to more multiple choice questions.
“[Asking more open questions] is probably a better way to test people,” Bryant, a mechanical engineering major, said. “It’s more involved, and my guess is you’d be able to distinguish candidates better. At the same time, I don’t really like it because it needs more preparation.”
Jones College junior Martha Farnsworth said she is planning to take the exam before it changes because it will become more difficult in September.
“The length of the exam is increasing to four hours from two and a half,” Farnsworth, a psychology major, said. “Any exam that is four hours is going to be miserable.”
Farnsworth also said she thinks the lack of tests in August will be inconvenient because students generally study during the first part of the summer.
“It’s going to shorten the amount of time people have to study,” she said. “But if they need the time, then they need the time.”
The revised GRE also comes with a new scoring system — the mean of the scores will be 150 on a scale of 130 to 170, with 1-point increments. ETS will provide a concordance table to correlate old and new scores.
Registration for the revised GRE begins July 1. Results for the first exam will be released in early November to allow for score calibration, but subsequent exam grades will be returned 15-16 days after the test date.
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