Students planning on applying to graduate schools from now on will face a reformatted and longer Graduate Records Examination, which went into effect in August.
The GRE, a standardized test administered by Educational Testing Services, is an admissions exam required by most graduate programs in the U.S. and for many abroad.
"The GRE revised General Test replaced the GRE General Test," ETS announced on its website, adding the new incarnation is now "the most widely accepted graduate admissions test worldwide."
The new GRE format affected its 700,000 annual test takers as it changed from a three-hour long exam to a four-hour one, Russell Schaffer, spokesperson for Kaplan Test Prep, said in an email. The new test features a new scoring scale and is based on a format which is adaptive at the section level, meaning "the better a test taker performs in one section, the more difficult the next section will be," Schaffer said.
Lee Weiss, director of graduate programs for Kaplan Test Prep, said ETS changed the test to respond to criticism from a variety of graduate programs who said the old test was not "the best indicator of success in graduate school."
"Featuring the new test-taker friendly design and new questions, the revised test more closely reflects the kind of thinking you'll do in graduate or business school and demonstrates that you are ready for graduate-level work," the ETS website states.
The previous version of the test included an antonym and analogy section, but "having a great vocabulary doesn't necessarily make you a better graduate student than someone who doesn't memorize words as well as you do," Weiss said.
The Verbal section on the new exam includes in-context questions which test reasoning skills as well as vocabulary to replace the previous antonym and analogy questions, Schaffer said.
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