The Educational Testing Services announced in January that major changes to the Graduate Record Examination will go into effect in fall 2011. With these changes, the GRE, a standardized test required for entry into over 3,000 graduate schools, will feature a different grading scale, different style of questions and last 30 to 45 minutes longer than the current version of the test.
While ETS is confident that students will appreciate the new format for the exam, Georgetown graduate students are divided on the issue.
“After reading through the changes, I would say it seems like they’re dumbing it down, or, if you want to sound nicer, `making it easier,'” Peter Henne (GRD ’12) said. “I’m not sure that more time is needed, and while it will be nice to go back and change answers, knowing you couldn’t [change answers] forced you to focus and, as I saw it, improved the test’s ability to gauge proficiency.”
Lorraine Krall (GRD ’12) said she is impressed by the changes to the GRE.
“The former iteration of the GRE gave you easier or harder questions based on whether or not you answered the previous question correctly,” Krall said. “It seems that the new version will be closer to a written test [the current GRE is an online test] – everyone receives the same questions and is scored based on those questions.”
The scores for the exam will take a different form as well, ranging from scale of 130 to 170 points with one-point increments rather than the traditional scale of 200 to 800 points with 10-point increments.
ETS revealed plans for the extensive GRE makeover more than a year ago. The biggest changes are the elimination of the anonym and analogy questions in the verbal section, and the new quantitative question type – numeric entry – that requires test takers to manually enter an answer into an empty answer box.
“While memorizing vocabulary may be annoying, it’s pretty important in most professions, even the sciences, so removing analogies will only hurt graduate students,” Henne said. “And focusing on data analysis rather than geometry kind of makes sense, but geometry often involves basic mathematical skills that all graduate students should know. Add on top of that the fact that a calculator is offered, and the dumbing down is complete.”
Each year, more than 600,000 prospective graduate school applicants from about 230 countries take the GRE General Test, according to the ETS Web site.
The new question types will not affect students’ GRE scores immediately after they are introduced. Once enough sample data has been gathered from test takers, however, these questions will begin to count, according to Peterson’s Graduate Planner.
ETS is still considering additional changes to the exam that will be announced on a rolling basis.”
