IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN WHEN THE GRADUATE RECORD EXAMINATION (GRE) GETS A FACE LIFT.

"I am rushing to take the GRE next month since the exam will change in September. The new GRE will be tougher and it makes more sense for me to appear for the exam now. Luckily the GRE is valid for five years and hence my score will be valid when I apply for admissions," says Raghav Shah, a student planning to apply for admissions to graduate school.

The GRE is a computer adaptive test conducted daily across the world. The GRE is a test needed by most US graduate schools for all programs except business related programs. GRE scores are expected to tell the admission committee whether or not students will succeed in graduate school. Since the exam is conducted daily, there is the possibility of students remembering questions and sharing test questions with friends after the exam. Besides this, the GRE focuses a lot on vocabulary, which forces students to literally eat dictionaries while preparing for the GRE. ETS, the body that conducts the GRE has been plagued with complaints and concerns for the past few years now.

To increase the GRE test validity and reduce the dependency on memorization, ETS is changing the GRE from September 2007. The new GRE expects to increase the ability to predict a student's performance in graduate school. "ETS keeps changing their tests and the scores associated with these tests. This often results in confusion among students as well as schools. When a test changes, there will always be students who take the new test and students who take the old test. In such a situation it becomes difficult for us to compare such students. However, since ETS has monopoly on the GRE, we have no choice but to accept the changes proposed by ETS," says an admission officer from Michigan State University.

New GRE test changes

The New Verbal Reasoning Section
Measures the ability to:
- Understand the meanings of words, sentences, and entire texts; understand relationships among words and among concepts
- Select important points; distinguish major from minor or irrelevant points; summarise text; understand the structure of a text
- Analyse and draw conclusions from discourse; reason from incomplete data; identify author's/speaker's assumptions and/or perspective; understand multiple levels of meaning (such as literal, figurative, text's intent, etc.)

Emphasis on skills related to graduate work, such as complex reasoning Increased emphasis on inferential reasoning Increased emphasis on verbal reasoning in context Increased number of reading comprehension questions based on a greater variety of reading passages Reduced emphasis on vocabulary out of context (no Antonyms or Analogies)

Inclusion of new question formats other than traditional multiple choice (ex. highlighting a sentence in a passage that serves the function described in the question)

Two 40-minute sections

The New Quantitative Reason...