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New GRE could affect prospective graduate students

Students planning on taking the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE, this fall can expect a wide range of changes to the test’s format and question types as part of the biggest overhaul the test has seen in 60 years.

The new test is aimed at providing a more comprehensive test of students’ skills through the addition of more analytical and critical thinking questions and a more rigorous set of quantitative reasoning questions, according to the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE.

Test-takers have given the new version mixed reviews since its debut in early August, with many citing the math section as significantly more difficult than the test’s predecessor.

Second-year Iowa State University graduate student Brice Pollock has been studying for more than a month and plans to take the test in the next few weeks. Pollock took the previous version of the GRE before applying for ISU’s graduate mechanical engineering program three years ago, but he plans to take the new version before he applies to Ph.D. programs at other universities.

“This time around, instead of just taking practice tests, I started with review material first and targeted areas that may be more difficult for me,” he said. “I want to get in to some high-ranking schools so I’m trying to put all the effort out there.”

He said the biggest changes to the test seem evident in the verbal and reading comprehension sections. The new test gets rid of analogy and antonym questions and replaces them with more context-based questions.

“For the math I feel like it is generally the same … For the verbal stuff, before it was reading comprehension and then it was also vocabulary and analogies, which frustrate me to no end,” he said. “But now, they contextualize it. They have synonyms and things like that, but they contextualize it within a sentence … so I like it a lot better.”


The computerized test also includes a number of new features, including an “adaptive” method that gives students more or less challenging questions in later sections based on how well they do in early sections. The test allows test-takers to skip questions and return to them later or change their answers within a given section.

Students can also expect to see changes to the GRE scoring system. In an attempt to better align GRE scores to percentile ranges, the verbal and quantitative reasoning sections are now scored on a scale from 130 to 170 in one-point increments rather than a 200 to 800 scale in 10-point increments.

William Graves, associate dean of ISU’s Graduate College, said he has heard representatives from the Educational Testing Service speak about the GRE a number of times and said he is confident the new test will more accurately measure students’ skills.

“It is clear that the changes are based on extensive research and consideration, and the new score scale is intended to allow for better resolution of differences among test-takers,” he said. “So I am optimistic and hopeful about the new GRE.”