The new era of GRE

In order to make the GRE test taking experience more aspirant friendly and more beneficial to graduate and business schools, ETS has made some major changes and relaunched the GRE revised General Test from August 1.“GRE has had a history of 60 years of providing a good way of filtering students for graduate schools, but we thought that we can do a better job,” explained David Payne, vice president and chief operating officer of ETS’s Higher Education Division, who recently visited the city to discuss the revised version of GRE.He further informed, “We wanted to provide test questions that are closer to what the students will be doing in their schools.The revised test questions emphasise on real-life scenarios and there is less reliance on vocabulary out of context, adding to the appeal of the revised test.” The GRE consists of sections on verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing.Explaining another reason behind the changes, Payne added, “In Verbal Reasoning, we have dropped antonyms and analogies because we felt that students could manage those by simply memorising the words and their meanings.This is why we have increased reading comprehension so that they know the meaning of the words and also know how to use them and not merely memorise them.” Apart from that, the new format makes the test the longer, and the GRE now lasts for four hours.With the freedom to move back and forth, edit or change answers, and skip and return to questions, all within a section, candidates have the ability to use more of their own testtaking strategies.New Score ScaleThe new verbal reasoning and quantitative reasoning scores are reported on a scale from 130-170 in one-point increments.This change will enable admissions professionals to better compare candidates’ scores as it makes small differences in scoring look small, while bigger differences will continue to stand out.The analytical writing section continues to be scored on a scale from 0-6 in half-point increments.Verbal ReasoningWith two sections (30 minutes per section), more focus on reading and no more antonyms and analogies, the verbal reasoning section features new types of questions that measure the ability to understand what’s been read and how a test taker applies reasoning skills.Quantiative ReasoningWith two sections (35 minutes per section), increased emphasis on data interpretation and real-life scenarios, this section has new types of questions that require test takers to show their quantitative reasoning ability.To reduce the emphasis on computation, the computer-based test include an on-screen caculator.And, for candidates taking the paper- based test, a calculator will be provided at the test centre.For more information log on to www.ets.org/gre.