Entrance exam to feature new questions, scoring scale
by Shaeera Tariq
GWU Hatchet
Issue: 1/11/10
The Graduate Record Exam, the entrance test for many graduate schools, will be revamped and lengthened in 2011, the Educational Testing Service announced in December.
Calling the changes "the largest revisions" in the history of the GRE, the Educational Testing Service said at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools in December that the changes will "make the GRE more pleasant."
The objective of the revised GRE is to improve the test in hopes that graduate school programs can assess the capabilities of a student more accurately.
The changes are drastic. The types of questions are different, calculators will be permitted, a new scoring scale - from 130 to 170 - will be put into effect, and the test will be lengthened to three and a half hours. The test was previously three hours.
"The smaller range in the scores, [from] 130-170, is designed to better assess differences between test takers instead of magnifying small differences," GW's Associate Vice President of Graduate Studies and Academic Affairs Dianne Martin said.
The current GRE scoring scale runs from 200 to 800, with 10-point increments that only represent one additional correct answer. The new scoring scale will have one-point increments.
The revisions will affect all sections of the test. The verbal reasoning section will no longer contain questions dealing with antonyms and analogies, which promote extreme memorization of vocabulary, especially among international students. These types of questions will be substituted with reading comprehension exercises.
"The biggest difference is that the prompts the students will receive will be more focused, meaning that our human raters will know unambiguously that the answer was written in response to the question, not memorized," David G. Payne, head of the GRE program for the testing service, told The New York Times.
Martin said the new test would be "a better indication of the actual English comprehension as well as reading comprehension of the test taker [because] memorizing will not help."
Senior Emily Leik, who recently took the GRE, said that the new changes are being made to "modernize the GRE because it is becoming outdated for many programs."
Leik said she believes the old version, with its heavy use of multiple choice questions, does not fully calculate her ability to work with public policy, her intended specialization in graduate school.
"The ETS is a business," Leik said. "Their efforts to reform the GRE to be more relevant to graduate programs will lead these programs to place an emphasis on the exam, leading more people to take the exam, and buying ETS studying materials as well."
