College seniors looking to go to graduate school may be in luck.
A revised version of the Graduate Record Examination, featuring changes in content and format, will be launched Aug. 1.
"I think it's a very positive thing," said George Flowers, professor of mechanical engineering and dean of the graduate school. "I think it will make the GRE much more useful as an assessment tool for us being able to predict the success of a given student in a particular graduate program."
Graduate schools and business schools use the GRE as a common denominator among applicants for admission.
Approximately 675,000 students in more than 200 countries take the exam each year, said David Payne, vice president and chief operating officer of the Higher Education division at the Educational Testing Service.
Payne said ETS had three goals in mind for the revised GRE: test questions that accurately reflect skills a student would need in graduate programs, a friendly test-taking experience and a scoring system that admissions boards can easily interpret.
The three sections of the GRE are verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and critical thinking and analytical writing.
In the verbal reasoning section, the revised GRE will omit questions about antonyms and analogies.
"If we think about the experience a student has in graduate school, it's unlikely that on a day-to-day basis, they're going to be doing verbal reasoning at the ability of verbal vocabulary items out of context," Payne said.
The antonyms and analogies will be replaced with verbal questions that are more relevant to graduate-level skills, as well as more reading comprehension questions.
"We wanted to make sure that the skills that are measured on the test are closely aligned to those skills that are required to succeed in graduate schools or business programs at the graduate level," Payne said.
Removing the antonyms and analogies may be helpful especially to international students, said Jessica Nelson, director of recruiting and marketing for the graduate school.
"It does seem that they're trying to make it more applied rather than academic, which I think generally is helpful for all students," Nelson said.
For the quantitative reasoning section, students will now have access to an on-screen calculator.
Students frequently take the GRE via computer.
The current exam uses computer-adaptive technology, which means the computer chooses which questions to give students based on their previous responses.
This format is designed to give students questions that reflect their proficiency level.
The revised exam will still use this technology, but whole sections, rather than individual questions, will change based on previous answers.
Test takers will now be able to skip around within a section and go back and change answers.
"We designed the test so when a student takes the test, their test-taking experience does not place any additional burdens on them above and beyond what they would normally experience if they were taking any test," Payne said.
The current GRE uses a score scale of 200-800 points in 10-point increments.
Payne said problems arose when admissions boards perceived differences in scores between candidates to appear more significant than they actually were.
For example, scores of 710 and 720 aren't significantly different, but the 10-point increment may be somewhat misleading.
"In some cases, 10 points may be the difference between answering a single question correctly or incorrectly on the old system," Flowers said.
To combat this problem, the score scales for the verbal and quantitative sections will change to 130-170 points in one-point increments.
The critical thinking and analytical writing section will remain on a scale of zero to six points in half-point increments.
Payne said the most important thing for students to know is that scores for the August exam will be reported in early November.
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