Students seeking to further their education at the graduate level have a new challenge awaiting them – a more difficult Graduate Record Examination.
Beginning in August, students taking the GRE, the test required by most graduate programs, will encounter a test with a more focused essay prompt, making it harder to provide prepared answers, and less time to write it, according to GRE preparatory group Kaplan Test Prep’s website.
Andrew Mitchell, director of pre-business programs at Kaplan, Inc., a prominent test preparation corporation, said the main motivation behind the Educations Testing Service’s revisions to the test is to more accurately gauge a student’s potential for success in graduate school programs.
“ETS has said that there will be more data-style interpretation questions,” Mitchell said. “So what you get now is more working with data, less about computation, more about evaluating data. And this is more common in graduate work.”
The test will also be scored differently, as it will now be scored from 130-170 in one-point increments, in contrast to the test’s current grading scale, 200-800 with 10-point increments, the website said.
Elizabeth Aversa, professor and director of the School of Library and Information Sciences, said a student’s score on the examination is not an element that totally excludes an applicant unless the score is truly terrible.
“If all other parts of the application are good—undergraduate and previous graduate GPA, statement of purpose, professional and academic references—we may ask the applicant to retest and to reapply to the Masters program of choice,” Aversa said.
Alex Welch, a former UA student, said he now regrets having put off attending graduate school so he could travel after receiving his bachelor’s degree.
“If I would have known that test makers would be making the test more focused and harder to prepare for, I would have applied back when I graduated,” Welch said. “I’ve read about all the changes and am having a hard time understanding why they changed it in the first place. I guess we’ll see how it goes, but I’m not too confident.”
In addition to the new scoring system, the GRE will also become an hour longer, as students will now have four hours to complete the test. Also, applicants who are interested in retaking the test now have to wait 60 days before doing so, a change from the current policy of taking the test once every month, according to Kaplan’s website.
A final change, Kaplan’s website reports, is that the new GRE will allow test takers to skip around freely and go back and change their answers, as well as use an on-screen calculator to assist with the math portions of the test.
Lisa Lindquist Dorr, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the department of history, said what she would like to emphasize is that the GRE score of a graduate applicant is merely one small part of a graduate application.
“While it offers a quick and dirty way to differentiate among students from a wide variety of institutions, it otherwise doesn’t tell us a whole lot about an applicant’s abilities,” Dorr said.
Educational Testing Service, the group that gives the test, reported that more than 700,000 students seeking admission to graduate schools across the country took the GRE last year, a 5 percent increase from the year before.
“I have read that some people think that the changes will make the GRE easier for us when we take it, and, although I don’t see that happening, I’m interested to see how the first groups that take the test do,” Welch said. “I’m not going to register for another few months. I don’t want to be the guinea pig group that goes it and takes the first edition of the new GRE. I’m sure something will go wrong and they’ll need to make more adjustments.”
