GRE to change in 2011

Princeton students leaving through FitzRandolph Gate for graduate school in the future will face a new step in the application process: a revised, longer version of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) announced last Friday at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools that the exam will undergo major changes before it is released in its new form in 2011, The New York Times reported last weekend.

The GRE is required for admission into many graduate programs across the nation, including most of Princeton’s degree-granting graduate programs. (The graduate program in finance also accepts the Graduate Management Admission Test as an alternative.)

David G. Payne, a vice president and chief operating officer for the Princeton-based ETS, which administers the GRE, told the Times that the new test will last three-and-a-half hours, instead of three, and have a grading scale from 130 to 170. Possible scores in the old test are multiples of 10 between 200 and 800.

The content in each of the three sections of the exam — verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing — will also be revised. Antonyms and analogies will be eliminated from the verbal reasoning section, and prompts for the writing section will be crafted so that graders will clearly be able to see that “answers will be responses to the question, not memorized,” Payne said.

Students will also be able to skip back and forth between exam questions. The exam, which is computer-based, currently determines succeeding questions based on the test-taker’s success with previous ones.

Olivia Kang ’09, who graduated with a degree in psychology, took the current version of the GRE in October. “I think the test would be much, much easier to skip around and go back to question[s],” Kang said in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian, adding that this “would allow for a more efficient use of time.” Kang is currently working as a research assistant for two labs in Princeton’s psychology department as she applies to five Ph.D. programs in social cognition and neuroscience.

Kang questioned the validity of the exam in its current form, though. “Good GRE scores are a reflection of a good SAT math review, good vocabulary cards, and how lucky you are in the vocabulary questions you get stuck with on the test,” she said in an e-mail. “Personally I don’t really think the GREs measure readiness for grad school at all. I mean, when you think about it, how well did SAT scores correlate to readiness for Princeton?”

Kang added, though, that the revised version of the exam may address some of these concerns. “Changing the writing section will be a better measure of readiness, if indeed they can do it such that merely memorizing an essay will no longer answer the prompt,” she said.

Diana Chien ’10, an ecology and evolutionary biology major, took the GRE twice as part of the process of applying to graduate school. “I always thought that the antonym/analogy section was quite arbitrary,” she noted in an e-mail. “I’m not sure that it tested anything other than memorization abilities for most candidates, so I’m glad to see that they’re removing it.”

She added, “The GRE changes should reduce the need for time-consuming memorization. I don’t think that the updated GRE will hurt Princeton students’ graduate school admissions. The GREs are pretty much glorified SATs, and we all got through the new version of the SATs fine, after all.”

Correction:

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Council of Graduate Schools announced the change at their annual meeting, in fact, it was announced by the Educational Testing Service.