Students who plan to attend graduate school will have to take a revised version of the Graduate Record Exam beginning Sept. 10.
The current version of the GRE will be administered for the last time July 31. There are no testing dates in August this year.
Several aspects of the GRE will change.
Jeffrey Meanza, Princeton Review’s national director of graduate programs, said the test will focus more on “real-life scenarios” than in the past.
“The changes aren’t to what’s being tested,” he said. “It’s how it’s being tested.”
The current version of the GRE is a computer-adaptive test, which starts test-takers off with a midrange difficulty question. If they answer it correctly, the computer proceeds with a more difficult question. The revised GRE will be a computer-based, linear exam and will give all test-takers the same set of questions despite how the previous questions were answered.
Meanza said the revised GRE will be about twice as long as the current version. He said the test should take a little more than four hours to complete.
“It’ll be a pretty long day for test-takers,” he said.
The time distribution for each section will also change, splitting it into two 30-minute essays, two 40-minute quantitative sections and two 40-minute verbal sections.
The scoring scale for the GRE will also change. The current GRE has a scale that ranges from 200 to 800 for the quantitative and verbal section. The revised GRE will have a scale ranging from 130 to 170.
The revised GRE will have about 35 standard test dates each year instead of the year-round dates it has now.
Meanza said the Princeton Review recommends students take the GRE before it changes in September because of the new test dates. He said about a half a million people take the GRE each year.
“It’s very important for students who have deadlines for graduate school applications due before November because they could potentially miss their deadlines,” he said.
Sarah Masters, textiles, apparel and merchandising sophomore, said she plans to take the GRE next year. She said she wants to go to graduate school at the University for apparel design.
Masters said the changes to the GRE are “ridiculous.”
“That makes me not even want to take it, but I’m going to anyway,” she said.
Meanza said the Princeton Review will launch a free online test that will help students further prepare for the GRE. He said they also plan to run free events for students to improve their testing skills and techniques.
The revised GRE is in a stage of development, and new information will be available upon release.
—–Contact Angelle Barbazon at [email protected]