After 55 yrs, GRE in for overhaul

MUMBAI: After the SAT and TOEFL revamps, applicants to global universities can now look forward to changes in another major examination. This time, it's the graduate school entrance exam, popularly called the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).
It's for the first time in 55 years that Educational Testing Services (ETS) is looking at an overhaul. The changes are being made following the recommendations of an advisory board consisting of deans of US graduate schools.The new test will come into effect in phases starting in October 2006.
By the time it hits India, it will be 2007. Each year, almost 500,000 candidates take the GRE, 20-25% of whom are from outside the US. The first major change is that the new test will move away from the "computer-adaptive" platform.
Here, how difficult a question ought to be used to be decided by the computer after factoring in how a candidate answered the previous question. In the new system, every student taking a test on the same day will be given the same set of questions.
The queries will not be used again. The test will now be administered on an internet-based platform. Says Sumit Liddle, additional director, ETS, India, "This will reduce the time candidates are made to wait to get their scores. Besides, it will widen the reach of ETS to include smaller countries."
Questions that test quantitative abilities are expected to be closer to skills generally used in graduate school. Similarly, the section on language will focus on "complex reasoning", which will be as close to real-life situations as possible. The emphasis will be on higher cognitive skills and there will be less dependence on vocabulary.
The new test will also have more computer-enabled tasks. For instance, there will be an on-screen calculator in the Quantitative Reasoning section. In the Verbal Reasoning section, the candidate will have to "highlight a sentence in a passage that serves the function described in the question".
As against the 2.5 hours the test lasts now, the new test will extend to four hours. It's still not clear if the new test will be tougher than the earlier one. At the moment, ETS is doing a "dry run" of the new test in various centres, including one in Allahabad.
"ETS is studying the psychometric validity of the new tests. The same set of people is appearing for both the old and the new test in this field study," said Liddle, adding that it would help ETS draw comparisons on the difficulty levels and scores of the old versus the new tests and balance things out.