The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which conducts the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), is all set to change the pattern of the test form 2011. The decision was taken at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools in San Francisco in December last year .As per the ETS these changes are the “the largest revisions”in the history of the test.
The revamped test will be lengthier than its previous avatar and will be graded on a new scale of 130 to 170.As far as sections are concerned GRE will retain three different sections viz. reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing though each section is being revised . The duration for the test will be of three and a half hours.
The new verbal section will focus more on the reasoning ability than on straight questions which test your vocabulary power. Straight antonyms and analogies questions will be totally done away with .This means that whatever vocabulary questions that will be asked will be based on the context they are being used. For the quantitative section most important change is the addition of online calculator. Apart from this there will be increase inthe proportion of questions based on data interpretation and real life scenarios. The writing section will still have two parts, one asking for a logical analysis and the other seeking an expression of the student’s own views.
There are changes in Computer Adaptive testing feature which is used in GRE as well .Now a Multi Stage Test (MST) design is being introduced which is more flexible. Now test takers can move freely within a section and edit or change responses .Note that questions will still be adaptive in nature in that correctly answering a question will mean that the next question is more difficult and incorrectly answering a question will mean that the next question is simpler.According to David G Payne who looks after the GRE program for the ETS “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” .