New GRE format does not make the grade
by Maggie Schiller
Issue date: 4/24/07 Section: News
A four-year, $12 million plan to revamp the Graduate Record Examination into a harder and more complex test for students has recently been abandoned.
Jung Lee, GRE program manager for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, said the Educational Testing Service canceled the plan for revision.
"They were going to implement the revised GRE for September 2007," Lee said, "but it was recently announced at the beginning of April that they will cancel these plans."
The popularity of the test caused the cancellation, he said.
"There are currently about half a million that take it worldwide and it is offered almost every day," Lee said. "With the changes, they were going to have to limit the amount of times it would be given throughout the year, and couldn't guarantee that everyone who wanted to take it would get a seat."
The GRE is comprised of three parts, he said. There is an analytical writing section, a verbal section with antonyms and analogies and a quantitative section with basic math problems.
Changes would include extending the test from the current two and a half hour time limit to more than four hours. There would be tougher sentence completions, and more reading comprehension. In the quantitative section, there would be less geometry and more real-life questions, Lee said.
"It would be the biggest change the GREs have gone through in 60 years," he said. "It would be longer and more difficult for students and less flexible in terms of administration. All in all, it's a more challenging test."
Along with content changes, Lee said the test will change from a comparative adaptive test to a linear adaptive test.
"With the current comparative adaptive form, when a student gets a question right, they might see a more difficult question next. If they get it wrong, they might see an easier one," he said. "We want to move away from that to a test where anyone who is taking the test that day will see the same question."
Jung Lee, GRE program manager for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, said the Educational Testing Service canceled the plan for revision.
"They were going to implement the revised GRE for September 2007," Lee said, "but it was recently announced at the beginning of April that they will cancel these plans."
The popularity of the test caused the cancellation, he said.
"There are currently about half a million that take it worldwide and it is offered almost every day," Lee said. "With the changes, they were going to have to limit the amount of times it would be given throughout the year, and couldn't guarantee that everyone who wanted to take it would get a seat."
The GRE is comprised of three parts, he said. There is an analytical writing section, a verbal section with antonyms and analogies and a quantitative section with basic math problems.
Changes would include extending the test from the current two and a half hour time limit to more than four hours. There would be tougher sentence completions, and more reading comprehension. In the quantitative section, there would be less geometry and more real-life questions, Lee said.
"It would be the biggest change the GREs have gone through in 60 years," he said. "It would be longer and more difficult for students and less flexible in terms of administration. All in all, it's a more challenging test."
Along with content changes, Lee said the test will change from a comparative adaptive test to a linear adaptive test.
"With the current comparative adaptive form, when a student gets a question right, they might see a more difficult question next. If they get it wrong, they might see an easier one," he said. "We want to move away from that to a test where anyone who is taking the test that day will see the same question."
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