Students planning to take the Graduate Record Examinations in November will be faced with two new additional question types, one math and one verbal; however, there is no need for them to panic. Educational Testing Service announced yesterday that the two new question types will not be scored for this crop of test-takers.
Tom Ewing, spokesman for ETS, said the new questions will be used for ETS testing purposes only in an effort to assess the validity of the new questions.
"The questions that are going to be introduced in November have been field tested and studied, but there's nothing like trying them out in actual tests," Ewing said. "We need to ensure completely that they are measuring what we want."
According to Susan Kaplan, the director of the graduate program at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, the first question type is called Numeric Entry and will appear on the quantitative portion of the exam.
"Typically for GRE questions there are multiple answer choices," Kaplan explained. "Instead, for this new type of math question the test taker will need to fill in a blank."
This new test format has the potential to increase the difficulty of the GRE exam because of its open-response nature, Kaplan said.
The second new question type, known as Text Completion, will be included in the verbal section.
"Test takers will need to fill in two or three blanks within a passage, and the correct answer for each blank will be from separate multiple choice banks," Kaplan said.
In the past, the answers for the blanks came from only one multiple choice bank.
Ewing said he expects to see these new questions permanently integrated into the GRE in the future.
"These are the kind of improvements the graduate community told us they wanted, so they're all coming, but they will come gradually," Ewing said.
According to Aaron Mills, associate dean for graduate programs at the University, these changes will not affect graduate admissions in the near future.
"We were promised that the new questions will not have any relation to the score ... they are experimental only," Mills said. "At present I don't see anything that's going to change our practices at all"
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