Beginning in November, students taking the GRE may see one of two new types of questions on their tests, though the questions will not initially count toward their test scores.
The Educational Testing Service, which produces the test, announced in April that a comprehensive redesign it had planned for September would be dropped. Instead, the service decided on a gradual phase-in of some of the redesign’s components.
The Graduate Record Examination “measures verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and critical thinking and analytical writing skills,” according to the testing service website. Performance on the test is a significant factor in many graduate school applications.
The two new types of questions that will appear in November are text completions and numeric entries. The text completions will feature sentences with multiple blanks and three choices of words to fill them in. For the numeric entry, test-takers will have to enter the answer to a math problem in a box. ETS spokesman Tom Ewing said these changes won’t make the test harder but rather they will simply make the answers more indicative of a student’s knowledge.
But Susan Kaplan, director of graduate programs for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, disagreed.
“It’s going to be more difficult, because [test-takers] won’t have the guidance of answer choices” for the math questions, and the text completions will offer no partial credit, Kaplan said.
Caroline Egan, an undergraduate academic advisor in the English department, said she agrees the new questions sound harder. But she said the format will put math and English majors on an equal footing.
Egan said the math section has been easier than the verbal section, and the new questions make the math section more challenging while the verbal section won’t be changed much.
One popular stategy students employ on the math section, she said, is to take possible answers and work backward. Egan said that the new math section changes take away the students’ ability to use these strategies, which will make the new questions more challenging.
The verbal section, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have gotten much harder. The questions are still multiple choice.
Another of the originally planned changes was to reduce the number of days on which the test was available from six days every week to just twice a month, which Ewing said could have overloaded the test centers if the other new changes were implemented simultaneously.
“We realize that there were not enough Internet-based testing sites to meet demand,” he said.
That worry led the testing service to postpone implementing the changes all at one time; now, ETS will introduce the new aspects piecemeal, to eventually arrive at a similar product.
Only some test-takers will see one of the new questions. No test will include both types, and none will be immediately factored into students’ scores. The changes are being field-tested so the ETS can collect “an adequate sample of data from the operational testing environment.”
Ewing would not speculate as to how soon the new questions would be graded, nor as to when other changes will be phased in. But he and Kaplan recommend the questions be treated as if they count, even before they do.
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