Students looking to attend graduate school will have to adjust to curveballs thrown by the LSAT and GRE exams. Both tests are undergoing significant changes that will affect those who plan on taking them next year.

Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), the organization that administers the LSAT, is instituting two changes to the content of the exam, which is taken by aspiring law students. One affects the reading comprehension section and the other involves prompts given for the writing section.

Starting in June, the reading comprehension section will include six or seven brand new comparative reading questions. Unlike traditional reading comprehension questions which ask questions over a given passage, these will require the test taker to look at two shorter passages given side by side, explained Ben Baron, vice president of graduate programs at Kaplan, a test preparation company.

“While six or seven out of 101 questions do not seem like a lot, it can have a meaningful impact on any individual’s score,” said Baron.

The writing section, which does not affect the total score of the exam in any way, will be simplified in the new LSAT. In the current test, there is the possibility of receiving either an argument or decision prompt. The new version of the test will only ask a decision prompt.

This change would appear advantageous, but it does have a downside.

“There will only be one type of question to prepare for, but the bad news is if students are better at the other they lose those questions,” said Baron.

Senior Jonathan Lane, who took the LSAT in September, can see the comparative reading section as being an additional hurdle for students when studying for the test. “One thing that will be frustrating for those taking the new exam is that there will probably be no more than a few practice critical reading sections that will be made available before the new section debuts,” he said.

Lane suggested that doing the necessary preparation to get the highest possible score is incredibly important to getting into one’s preferred school.

“The LSAT is by far the single most important aspect of a law school application. It is significantly more important than the SAT or ACT for undergraduate admissions, MCAT for medical school, GRE for Ph.D. programs or GMAT for business school,” said Lane.

There have not been any significant changes to the LSAT in the last 15 years, contrasting the frequent changes made to most other tests for different types of graduate school.

The GRE, which is an important aspect of applications for Ph.D. programs, is undergoing the biggest change in the history of the exam. The changes will be put into effect September 2007. The GRE will be nearly doubling in length from two and a half to over four hours.

“Certainly the new test will require much more stamina on behalf of the test taker,” said Susan Kaplan, director of graduate programs for Kaplan.

The way in which the test is given is also going to be significantly different. Currently, the GRE is a computer adaptive test. When the student is taking the test, the computer evaluates performance on certain difficulty levels and gives questions based on this data. In other words, a student who does poorly on difficult questions will be asked easier ones and vice versa.

A pitfall of this format was that the same questions were given in different administrations. Rarely, said Kaplan, students could have been tested on a question that they had already seen posted on the Internet. The linear exam will have entirely new questions for each administration.

The new GRE will focus much more on reasoning based problems. The verbal section will minimize questions testing vocabulary, instead opting for more critical reading and complex reasoning questions.

Higher-level math will be featured in the quantitative section on the new exam. The questions will deal less with geometry and more with data interpretation and word problems.

In the midst of these changes, it is only logical that the scoring scale also dramatically changes. Instead of the current 200-800 point scale, the new GRE will be based on a 130-170 point scale. The ETS will release a table that allows schools to compare scores on this test to scores on the previous version.

Kaplan explained that the ETS, the same service that administers the SAT, is making these changes because it believes this format will better predict students’ success in graduate programs.

The changes to these critical tests will undoubtedly be frustrating for many students. Baron and Kaplan both stress that understanding the changes is crucial. In the end, however, it is still the same game. From there, preparation can go on just as it always has: one agonizing practice problem at a time.

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