Major Changes to the GRE

“ETS has designed the GRE revised General Test to be friendlier, more flexible and more focused on the skills needed for graduate and business school.” – ETS.org

• Test length extended from three to four hours
• 200-800-point scale changed to 130-170
  “Compressing the reporting metric produces scores that don’t exaggerate small performance differences between examinees.” – ETS.org
• Multi-stage test rather than computer-adaptive test
  “provides greater flexibility—so test takers can move freely within each section” – ETS.org
• New on-screen calculator

Students planning to apply to graduate school in the next year will be the first to experience major changes in the Graduate Record Exam.

The new test, which is set to launch Aug. 1, 2011, aims to serve as a better indicator of graduate school readiness. The maker of the GRE, the Educational Testing Service, will implement a wide array of changes that they hope will accomplish this goal.

These changes affect the timing, scoring scale and question types on the test.

“These are the biggest changes in the history of the GRE,” said Lee Weiss, the assistant director of pre-graduate programs at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.

The duration of the exam will be extended from three to about four hours, making testing endurance more important.

“You’re just going to have to do a bunch of practice tests. If you’re training for a marathon, you have to build up your endurance. It’s the same thing for preparing for a four-hour test,” Weiss said.

Exam scores will be shifted to a 130-to-170-point scoring system in one-point increments, a change from the current 200-to-800 scale in 10-point increments. The new scoring system is designed to highlight larger discrepancies in scores in order to match them more accurately with percentiles.

The grading for the analytical writing section will remain unchanged. Scores range from zero-to-six.

In the current version of the GRE, a perfect 800 on the math section equates to only the 94th percentile.

The new GRE will be a multistage test, and correct answers in a given section will lead to harder questions and a higher scoring band and incorrect answers will have the opposite effect.

The user interface of the test will also be getting an updated look. A new built-in calculator function of the exam, while potentially helpful for test-takers, might also signify a more challenging math section.

The essay portion of the test will be reduced from 45 to 30 minutes in length, and the prompts will be more focused, making it harder to prepare for the writing portion in advance.

Last spring, Amy Heath-Carpentier, a career development specialist and pre-graduate adviser in the Career Center, attended a conference put on by the test makers to address the revisions.

Since then, the Career Center has run several workshops to prepare students for the new format, including a GRE prep session at last year’s Junior Jumpstart event in May.

“I don’t necessarily recommend going to Kaplan or any of the test preps for the GRE unless you’re scoring incredibly lower than you’d expect,” Heath-Carpentier said. “Most students with the books and the sample tests will prep enough to do well.”

Students who take the current GRE receive their scores on the Quantitative and Verbal Reasoning sections almost immediately. While the Educational Testing Service collects enough data to set up scoring for the new test, there will be a delay in score reporting of about two months.

As a result, students who take the revised test in August may not receive their scores until November or December, so those who plan to apply to graduate schools in the fall will need to take the GRE before the new test takes effect so they don’t miss application deadlines.

Students will also see a change in the frequency with which they are able to re-take the GRE, decreasing from the current once every 30 days to only once every 60 days.

For students who are not on deadline, the new GRE will offer graduate school hopefuls an opportunity to save money; during August and September, the test will be offered at half-price. The GRE currently costs $160, although that amount could change along with the test itself.

“They’re really trying to get a lot of people to take the new test because they need those data points in order to get the scores ready,” Weiss said.

Although Weiss recommends taking the shorter and more predictable old test if possible, the new test may have its own advantages. He said that some students may find the revised version easier to prepare for and more straightforward.

The new GRE also allows more flexibility. Test-takers can now change answers to previous questions. Although this new feature offers test-takers more freedom, it might also create pacing issues.

Because GRE scores are valid for five years, Weiss recommends that students who plan to take the GRE in the next few years consider studying to take the old version now. Based on research conducted by Kaplan, the best scores are typically reflected in students aged 21 to 22 years; however, anyone is eligible to take the test.

Washington University students have conflicted feelings about the new GRE.

Senior Emily Podany is planning to apply to psychology Ph.D. programs in the fall. She is unsure of how graduate school admissions officers will judge the new exam.

“The problem is I am getting conflicting information about how grad schools are going to feel about the new GRE,” Podany said. “Are they going to see it the same way? Are they going to ignore it?”

Podany is currently debating whether to take the GRE before or after the changes come into effect.

Admissions experts are also trying to assess how valuable the GRE is to the admissions process.

Starting in August of last year, Kaplan conducted its first Graduate School Admissions Officer Survey in an effort to reach out to some of the nation’s top programs and get an idea of what matters most in admissions.

“What we found is that, more than any other factor, they consider the GRE the most important for admissions. Two-thirds of those admissions officers also said it is a huge factor in getting financial aid packages like grants, teaching assistantships and fellowships. It plays a big role both in your admissions decision and your financing decision for graduate school,” Weiss said.

According to Heath-Carpentier, however, the test might not be as important as students think.

“If there’s one thing I’d say is important for students to know about the GRE, it’s that, of the components of the application, this is the least important for 90 percent of students. It’s far more important to have solid letters of recommendation, a solid transcript and a good personal statement. Those are the most important things,” she said.

A free practice of the old GRE will be offered through Kaplan at Washington University on Saturday, Feb. 19. After the test, students will receive a link to a practice test of the new GRE to take for comparison.

“This is a unique opportunity to figure out which test is [right] for you,” Weiss said. You can get a feel for which [test] you like better and which one you’re more comfortable with.”

It is not a test for applicants to take, but rather a tool for recommenders meant to complement traditional letters of recommendation. Up to five recommenders rank the student in a series of 24 statements about soft, or non-cognitive, skills on a scale from 1 (below average) to 5 (truly exceptional). Statements include “produces novel ideas,” “meets deadlines,” “works well under stress,” and “is worthy of trust from others.”

The results are distilled into a report on six traits, including knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity. The report also displays recommenders’ comments on each category.

Very few graduate programs have adopted the tool this year. The tool, called the “Personality Potential Index (PPI),” was introduced only this summer, and most schools did not hear of it until September, although Virginia Tech is one school that is using it during this application cycle.

Dean Richard Smith of Washington University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences said that the University is not adopting it until it is clear that the index is a good indicator of success in graduate school. He agreed with the intended goals of the test but is waiting for empirical results before adding to the difficulty and expense of graduate admissions.

“They are attempting to deal with a real problem, and that problem is that success…as an undergraduate is a rather poor predictor of success in Ph.D. programs that, like ours, which are deeply research focused, [are] designed to train people to do independent, creative scholarship,” he said.

Another goal of the test is to systematize the recommendation process, he said, since recommendation letters have suffered from inflation recently.

“So if you say in the letter, this is a very good student, you’re damning by faint praise,” Smith said. “The percentage that are in the top 1 to 5 percent greatly exceed 1 to 5 percent.”

But the PPI would mean more work for students, recommenders and admissions committees, so Smith noted it is important to do a cost-benefit analysis if evidence that the tool works does emerge.

The test has met with more skepticism from some. Erik Herzog, associate professor of biology, who has served on graduate admissions committees, questioned the utility of the PPI. He said individual schools’ recommendation forms often ask for similar rankings, but he strongly prioritizes GRE scores and letters of recommendation over them.

Washington University personality psychologist Robert Krueger said the test had the potential to be useful based on his experience, though he has not encountered it yet as a recommender. But like Smith, he is reserving judgment until its predictive power is better known.

Krueger studies the links between individual personality and risk for mental health problems. For instance, people with a more stress-reactive personality, or those who react poorly to stress, are at greater risk of developing depression and anxiety disorders.

In his work, he develops his own measures of personality in addition to using standard tests in the discipline. These include self-report inventories and reports from others, not unlike the basic idea underlying the PPI. Questions are often written in anticipation of the expected responses—he may write statements that he expects anxious people to endorse, for example—in an attempt to figure out if he’s measuring what he thinks he’s measuring, and getting it reliably.

The validity of a given personality test is its success at predicting an outcome, Krueger said. And the more systematic it is, the more predictive it will be.

“It seems like they’re trying to accomplish some kind of organized way of extracting the kind of information you would get from a recommendation…It forces people to consider all of the domains systematically…and my guess is that that’s going to be helpful,” Krueger said.

Students had mixed opinions. David Rheinstrom, a senior planning to apply for M.F.A. programs in a year, said he thought it sounded comparable to other types of application materials and had the potential to be useful or useless.

“I would be inclined to think that somebody’s personality would influence how well you do in grad school,” he said. “It’s probably just another thing to do, but who knows.”