The Graduate Record Exam (GRE), a graduate school entrance test whose scores some business schools are beginning to accept in lieu of the traditional Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), will incorporate a range of revisions beginning in 2011, including a new grading scale and a slightly longer format, the New York Times reported yesterday.
The Education Testing Service (ETS), which administers the GRE, announced the planned revamping at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools in San Francisco, calling the changes the largest revisions in the test’s history, according to the Times. The 2011 test update follows two previously slated revisions, one in 2005 and another in 2007, both of which were ultimately cancelled.
The 2011 exam will feature a grading scale from 130 to 170, a significant departure from the current scoring scale, which runs from 200 to 800. The new scoring scale will have one-point increments, compared to 10-point increments on the current exam that sometimes represent only one additional correct answer.
“We know that some faculty saw a 20- or 30-point difference on the 200-800 scale as more significant than it really was, and we hope that the new scale will make things clearer,” Dr. David G. Payne, who heads the GRE program for ETS, told the Times.
The exam will still include sections on verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing, but each section will undergo some changes, the Times reported. The new verbal section will no longer feature antonyms or analogies, and the new quantitative section will feature an online calculator.
The writing section will still include two parts, one asking for a logical analysis and the other looking for students to express their own views. The biggest change here, Payne said, will be that students will receive more focused prompts for each question, designed to elicit answers that the test’s human raters can know were written in responses to that particular question and not merely memorized.
The new test will be three and a half hours long, up from three hours now. Like the current exam, the new test will be computer adaptive. But whereas the current exam adapts question by question – that is, a correct answer leads to a more difficult subsequent question and an incorrect answer leads to a simpler question – the new test will adapt section by section instead. This change will allow test takers to skip a question within a section and return to it later.
“That’s going to be a real boon to test takers because once you see a question wrong, it’s almost impossible to unsee it, but if you skip and come back a few questions later, it’s more likely that you’ll get it right,” Neill Seltzer, who is in charge of GRE for test prep firm Princeton Review, told the Times.
Seltzer sees most of the planned revisions to the GRE as a marketing effort by ETS to compete with the GMAT exam in the business school admissions process, the Times reports. ETS lost the the contract for administering the GMAT in 2006 to Pearson and has been marketing the GRE to business schools as an alternate test ever since.
For more on the history behind the GRE versus GMAT competition, click here.
