Juniors looking to go to graduate school should get their act together soon, the vice president of a national test preparation company said.
The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) is undergoing several changes that will go into effect next October - and the changes may determine how students perform on the test. The changes range from making the test longer to making it the same for everyone who takes it.
The GRE is the standardized test required for many arts, sciences and engineering graduate programs across the country, and it is run by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) - the same company that runs the SAT and TOEFL, which were also changed this year.
The current version of the test is two and a half hours long: two analytical writing sections, one 30 minutes and the other 45 minutes, a 30-minute verbal reasoning section and a 45-minute quantitative reasoning section.
Beginning next October, though, the test will run four hours. According to the ETS Web site, the writing section will be cut to two, 30-minute essays with more focused prompts. The verbal section will be expanded to two, 40-minute sections with less emphasis on vocabulary. The math section will also be two, 40-minute sections, and it will have less geometry and more real-life problems.
Not surprisingly, a longer test is not always a welcomed change.
"Everyone prefers a shorter test," Christy Fisher, a Fletcher School student who took the GRE before graduate school, said.
ETS has not yet specified what will be in each subsection or exactly how the questions will be different. The subsections will also change the scoring of the test. The current version scores the verbal and math sections in a range from 200 to 800 each. ETS trial runs next month will determine the exact range for each of the subsections, according to the company's Web site.
Ben Baron, the vice president of graduate programs at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, said students who have prepared for the test should take it before it changes. He expected a rush of students taking the test before the changes went into effect, so he recommended signing up early.
Kaplan plans to change its GRE preparation courses to accommodate the new format over the summer, Baron said.
The test will also change from an adaptive form to a linear form. The GRE is taken on a computer at various testing sites around the country. In the test's current form, questions increase in difficulty as more questions are answered correctly. The new version, though, will give the same questions to everybody.
"I wish I could go back and take the new GRE," history and museum studies graduate student Adair Swain said. The new version will allow students to go back to questions they skipped or change their answers. It will be more familiar to students used to the longer, linear SAT, Swain said.
She is planning to take the test again, but before the changes go into effect.
The old format required ETS to write many more questions, so some questions had to be reused, even though they had been posted on the Internet. With the change, students will not be able to memorize past questions.
Decreasing the number of written questions will also decrease the number of times the test is offered - from nearly every day to about 30 times a year.
Nearly all graduate programs in the School of Arts and Sciences and at the Fletcher School require the GRE for admission. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Associate Director Alida Poirier and Fletcher School Director of Admission Laurie Hurley declined to comment about the effects of the changes to the GRE for the admissions process without more specifics on the changes.
Scores from the test are valid for five years, so students who have already taken the GRE will not have to take the new version.
