Changes to the GRE for 2011

Prospective online graduate school students will soon have to purchase a new Graduate Record Exam (GRE) study guide. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which authors and administers the standardized test, has recently announced that they have completely revamped the exam for 2011.

The GRE is an admission requirement for most online graduate schools in the U.S. It measures an applicant's critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, verbal reasoning and analytical writing skills that are not related to a specific field of study. The standardized test is used by admissions committees to supplement undergraduate grades, letters of recommendation and personal essays.

The ETS has spent the last 18 months designing, testing and marketing a new version of the exam in an effort to compete with the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), which is widely regarded by business schools as the best intelligence assessment tool for their field of study. The redesigned GRE is expected to be more relevant to MBA applicants, which will likely affect students who are interested in liberal arts or socials science programs on the graduate level.

Beginning in the fall of 2011, all three sections of the GRE - verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing - will be modified. The verbal reasoning portion of the exam focuses on the test taker's ability to analyze and evaluate written material. Next year, this section will no longer include antonyms and analogies questions, which are highly regarded by test takers with a strong vocabulary, and commonly derided by those who have a more accomplished background in mathematics. In their place, more reading comprehension questions will be added. This change is a reflection of the ETS push to make the GRE more like the GMAT in terms of the skills that it evaluates.

Meanwhile, the quantitative reasoning portion of the standardized test, which measures a student's problem-solving ability, will have its geometry section trimmed down to add more questions related to data analysis. Moreover, the new format will allow test takers to use an online calculator throughout the exam in an effort to shift the emphasis away from arithmetic and toward analytical and problem-solving abilities, according to MBA Game Plan.

Finally, the analytical writing section, which evaluates critical thinking and articulation abilities, will include two questions; one asking for a logical analysis and the other seeking an expression of the test taker's personal views, according to The Economic Times. "The biggest difference is that the prompts the students will receive will be more focused, meaning that our human raters will know unambiguously that the answer was written in response to the question, not memorized," said David Payne, executive director of the GRE program. Furthermore, the ETS will modify the "computer adaptive" nature of the test. Currently, a correct answer on the exam will subsequently lead to a more difficult question, while an incorrect response will lead to a simpler one.

With the newly designed exam, each section will be static. However, a successfully completed grouping of questions will prompt a more difficult section to follow. This will allow students to skip a question and come back to it before moving on to the next portion of the exam, something that they cannot currently do. Looking beyond the content itself, the GRE will grow from three hours to three hours and 45 minutes. Also, the scoring system will be significantly modified. The range for each section will change from 200-800 - with score increments of 10 points - to a scale of 130-170 with increments of one point.