The New GRE

What you need to know about the Revised Graduate Record Examination

Many big changes have occurred in the last 60 years, but little alteration has been made to the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). In December 2009, Education Testing Services (ETS) announced to the public they would create a revised GRE, which would be the most significant modification to the exam in six decades. The revised test debuted in August 2011.

Although previous adjustments have been made to the GRE, a standardized test used for evaluating graduate school applicants, this time around the exam is different in just about every way possible, says Lee Weiss, the director of graduate programs at Kaplan Test Prep. “The GRE is a test that has been around for a long time,” Mr. Weiss explains. “It’s accepted at over 3,200 graduate schools around the world and it’s now accepted as an alternative to the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) at over 600 business schools around the world.”

Why the change after all of these years? Sharon Lawler-Sudell, brand director for the GRE program at ETS, says the GRE program consulted with graduates, deans, faculty members, admission committees and the GRE board when determining whether a revision was needed. “Our job is to provide the best assessment to help graduate and business schools make admissions decisions,” Ms. Lawler-Sudell says. ETS held a number of focus groups and meetings in order to determine the needs of today’s universities.

“We wanted to make a test that would be much more aligned with the types of thinking that students are doing in graduate and business school [today].” With the GRE now being recognized as an acceptable substitute to the GMAT, Mr. Weiss points out another reason for ETS to revise the GRE. “ETS also used to create the GMAT, but they lost that account a few years ago,” Mr. Weiss says. “I’m sure what they were saying internally was, ‘We’ve got this knowledge; we know how to make a test for business programs. Why not use that knowledge and create a competitor to the GMAT?’”

Ms. Lawler-Sudell reports there are three main areas that the test has changed: content and question types, the scoring scale and new test-taker friendly features. “One of the most noticeable [changes] is that antonyms and analogies are being removed from the test and they’re being replaced with more reading passages,” she says. “The other is in the quantitative section. There’s more emphasis on critical reasoning and an addition of an on-screen calculator.”

The previous scoring scale was 200-800, but that has been adjusted to 130-170 in order to distinguish performance differences among candidates, she explains. Ms. Lawler-Sudell says perhaps the most valuable difference from the test-taker’s perspective is the new “test-taker friendly” quality of the exam. This includes allowing the test-taker to move forward and backward within a section, which was not an option before. It permits the test-taker to use more “traditional test-taking strategies” throughout the exam.

But the decision to revise the GRE has resulted in much more than modifications to the exam itself – major revamping of test preparation resources was also required. From the first day announcements of the GRE’s revision were made, Kaplan took every piece of information that ETS released and analyzed it closely, Mr. Weiss says. They reached out directly to ETS whenever questions arose and employed psychometric experts and a vast technology team in order to prepare test-takers for the exam.

Mr. Weiss believes the revised GRE does have more challenging features, but overall, the exam is fairer and more realistic. As long as students take time to prepare, he says, there is no reason test-takers cannot succeed. “The GRE is not a test that you want to cram for or spend a lot of hours studying the week before. It’s advisable to spend two to three months preparing for the test, practicing an hour to two hours, four to five days a week,” he recommends.

Of course, with the exam being so new, there are some remaining questions. One setback for those who have taken the new GRE is that a score standard has not been set. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to say what exam scores admissions will be looking for as of yet, Mr. Weiss says. The test-maker will need to have gathered a large-enough sample size before they can determine scores students should aim to achieve. Official scores will be released for the revised GRE in November.

As far as any possible flaws in the new exam, Ms. Lawler-Sudell doesn’t foresee any issues. “There was so much thought and care put into the development of the test,” Ms. Lawler-Sudell confirms. “We really focused not only on making sure that we were providing the strongest, most valid test assessment possible, but also that it is was a good experience for test-takers.”

It’s been almost two years since the announcement regarding the revision of the GRE. During that time, ETS has carefully considered how the alteration will affect everyone involved. “I think it’s a tremendous change,” Ms. Lawler-Sudell observes. “It’s going to help both graduate and business students demonstrate their capabilities and it will help score users be able to make the best admissions decisions – it’s a win-win for everyone.”