Revised GRE General Test
Educational Testing Service (ETS), the creator and administrator of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), has announced major changes to the GRE General Test that will take effect on August 1, 2011. The GRE General Test is designed to assess a student's competence in the skills necessary to succeed in a graduate or business program, such as reading comprehension, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing. While there are several Subject Tests that focus on knowledge in specific fields of study such as chemistry, mathematics, and psychology, the General Test is intended to measure skills that are common to all disciplines.
Here is a quick rundown of the major changes that will be seen in the Revised General Test:
Verbal Reasoning Antonym and Analogy questions will be removed completely, so there will be less emphasis on vocabulary words in isolation. There will be more Reading Comprehension questions, and also several new types of questions, such as Text Completion questions (requiring the completion of multiple fill-in-the-blanks within a sentence) and Sentence Equivalence questions (requiring the selection of two different words for the same blank that result in equivalent sentence meanings).
Quantitative Reasoning The same basic math skills will be tested, but there will be greater emphasis on data interpretation and "real-life" scenarios. An on-screen calculator will be provided, reducing the emphasis on manual calculation skills. There will also be some new question types, including multiple-choice questions that require selection of more than one correct answer, and Numeric Entry questions that require the student to type the answer into a box rather than selecting it from a list.
Interface The revised test will have a number of improvements to the user interface, including features to allow students to preview and review questions within a section, tag questions and return to them later, and change answers within a section. The Quantitative Reasoning section will also have a new on-screen calculator.
Scoring Scale Currently, scores for the Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning sections range from 200 to 800 in 10-point increments. On the revised test, scores for these sections will range from 130 to 170 in 1-point increments. ETS says that the new scale will make it easier for schools to compare scores among students.
Visit the official ETS GRE page for more information.