Students gearing up to take the Graduate Record Examinations may soon find that old preparation methods just won't cut it anymore.
The GRE Board's research committee, which is comprised of graduate school deans from across the nation, is currently looking at ways to change the verbal and quantitative portions of the general test so that it is more predictive of students' performance in graduate school.
Lewis Siegel, dean of the Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education, said graduate school deans have long recognized a need to improve the GRE general test.
"It turns out that there is virtually no correlation between the test and graduate school attrition, and we had to ask ourselves if there was a way to make a better prediction of students' success in graduate school," said Siegel, who chairs the GRE Board's research committee.
Siegel said the committee hopes to have the revised verbal and quantitative portions ready for fall 2006.
Jackie Briel, GRE program director for the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE tests, noted that ETS already introduced changes to the general test Oct. 1, 2002. The old analytical section was replaced by a new analytical writing section identical to the stand-alone writing assessment that the ETS introduced three years earlier.
Currently, the research committee is considering a new verbal portion of the general test that does not evaluate rote memorization or other skills that graduate school deans do not believe are useful in a graduate education.
"Right now, the highest variance on the verbal section is for things like the ability to come up with obscure vocabulary or the ability to figure out really tricky analogies. The test doesn't predict what we care about and it's easy to train for that kind of stuff," Siegel said. "The new test will require students to use their verbal abilities to do something more useful. Basically we will give them reading materials and ask them to understand and reason about it."
He added that the test will undergo format changes, incorporating more short-answer rather than multiple-choice questions, making it more difficult for test-takers to guess the right answers. The research committee is also reviewing the general test's quantitative portion.
"Unlike most tests, the quantitative part had no bell-shaped curve: Twenty percent of students were getting only one question wrong or were getting perfect scores," Siegel said. He added that the test does not include much material beyond the 10th-grade level, rendering it practically useless for admissions decisions in such graduate departments as mathematics and physics.
The revised quantitative section is still in the works, as disagreements have arisen regarding the best way to test mathematical reasoning on more challenging content.
Siegel said it has become relatively clear, however, that the test needs to incorporate slightly more difficult mathematical content and more data analysis. As with the verbal portion, members of the research committee have pushed to eliminate multiple-choice questions from the quantitative portion.
Siegel noted that the new verbal and quantitative sections will discourage cheating on the general test because the types of questions will be harder, with solutions that are difficult, though not impossible, to memorize beforehand.
Briel said the research committee's work on revising the general test does not stem from specific complaints regarding the GRE, but is part of a continuous effort by ETS to improve its tests.
"That's where we are right now with the verbal and quantitative measures," she said. "There's nothing definite planned at the moment, but we're in the process of considering some changes."
Siegel said the new verbal and quantitative sections will require new methods of grading the general test, as they will not rely on multiple-choice questions that can easily be graded mechanically.
Currently, ETS collects test fees from over 1.2 million students every year, necessitating the employment of a substantial grading force--especially after the analytical writing section went online.
"It's a challenge to grade what amount to essays from millions of students because the ability to use grammar and highfalutin words is not what's being graded--it's the argument," Siegel said.
He noted that ETS is developing a technique to grade the analytical writing portions mechanically, utilizing a computer program and calibrating the results to the actual grades assigned by human graders.
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