Aspiring grad school and law school students will soon see some changes in the upcoming GRE and LSAT, respectively.
According to Susan Kaplan, Director of Graduate Programs for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, “The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the organization that administers the GRE, has introduced the most significant changes to the content, length and format of the exam in many years.” Changes to the GRE will take effect in September 2007 and aim to give a more accurate prediction of students’ aptitude for graduate school.
The major changes to the GRE include the extended test time from two and a half hours to four hours. A second major change includes a new verbal reasoning section, to test higher cognitive and reasoning skills. The section will have less emphasis on vocabulary and more on complex reasoning and passage reading. A third major change will be a new quantitative reading section. This section will test basic mathematical skills and will have less focus on geometry and more focus on real life scenarios and data interpretation. A fourth major change will be the new critical thinking and analytical writing section. This section will test how well the test taker can put together complex ideas in an understandable manner. For this section, the graduate schools will not only see the score report but the essays as well. A fifth major change includes new verbal and quantitative score scales. Currently the score range is from 200-800; the new score scale will be from 130-170. In early 2007, ETS will produce a scale to compare the old exam scores to the new score for easy comparison for graduate schools.
For the new GRE, the computerized format will not adapt to the test taker’s ability based on previously answered questions; all students will have to answer the same questions Another change will be that the exam will be offered only thirty times per year. To compensate, ETS expanded the Internet-based test taking to 3,500 sites worldwide.
Some strategies offered by Kaplan include: