Students taking the Graduate Record Exam should expect a longer test and questions that cover different material starting in October 2006, the Educational Testing Services announced Thursday.
The changes to the test, the SAT of prospective graduate students, are intended to prevent cheating and provide admissions offices with a more accurate measure of students’ abilities.
The test will maintain verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing sections but will be lengthened from two and a half hours to four hours. The new test will be centered on a scale of 120 to 179 points, whereas it has been scored on a scale of 200 to 800 points. The GRE is taken by more than 500,000 students a year.
Verbal analogies and geometry questions will be replaced with reading passages and data analysis to test students on skills needed for graduate school, rather than testing on memorization, said Dawn Piacentino, associate director of the Educational Testing Services higher education division. ETS creates the exam.
Some students welcomed the changes.
“The GRE is the silliest test I’ve ever taken,” said Lauren Lowenstein, a Weinberg senior who took the test in September. “On the analogy section, you either knew the word or you didn’t. You weren’t able to reason. That’s not a test of intelligence; it’s a test of memorization.”
The test was administered “almost every day” in the past but will be offered 29 times a year starting in October 2006 to combat cheating, said Susan Kaplan, director of graduate programs at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. Because the GRE was offered frequently, the same questions would appear on multiple tests.
Students abroad were logging onto Web sites to memorize questions and answers posted by previous test takers, ETS said.
“Individuals in certain Asian countries were memorizing questions and posting them on the Internet, which gave other students an advantage,” Piacentino said.
Under the new test, ETS will provide graduate schools with copies of the students’ essays in addition to their scores. Providing the essays will illustrate a student’s ability and prove that a student earned a particular score, Piacentino said. Previously, only scores were provided.
“Graduate schools will be able to see the essay rather than just the grade,” Piacentino said. “They will be able to know that a student wrote that particular essay because ETS sent it to them.”
The Northwestern graduate faculty “doesn’t want to see the actual tests,” said Simon Greenwold, associate dean of The Graduate School at NU. He said the faculty trusts that its applicants write their own essays.
“We rely on ETS for test scores, but we don’t need anything else from them,” Greenwold said. “If a student gets a 650, I don’t need to see the essay to know they got a 650.”
The GRE is not the most important factor in determining admissions, Greenwold said. Admissions staff look at the student’s undergraduate research, extracurriculars, GPA and recommendations. All of NU’s applicants tend to score high, so admissions depend on other factors, he added. Some of NU’s graduate programs, such as art theory and practice, don’t require applicants to take the GRE.
“The GRE is a way to separate wheat from chaff, but it’s in no way an end-all means for admissions,” Greenwold said. “Some doctoral programs don’t even use the GRE.”
Although The Graduate School at NU looks at “the full package,” as Greenwold said, standardized testing for university admission can be “fair predictors” of university success, said Alfred Hess, a SESP professor who studies standardized testing.
Test preparation companies said they plan to tailor new classes to the changes. They advise students to take the form of the test with which they expect to be most comfortable.
“I would encourage students to pay attention to the change and take the test before it changes if they’re concerned,” Susan Kaplan said.
Reach Margaret Matray at [email protected].
