After two false starts, the Graduate Record Exam, the graduate school entrance test, will be revamped and slightly lengthened in 2011 and graded on a new scale of 130 to 170.
The Educational Testing Service, which administers the G.R.E., described its plans Friday at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools in San Francisco, calling the changes “the largest revisions” in the history of the test.
Although the exam will still include sections on verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing, each section is being revised. The new verbal section, for example, will eliminate questions on antonyms and analogies. On the quantitative section, the biggest change will be the addition of an online calculator. The writing section will still have two parts, one asking for a logical analysis and the other seeking an expression of the student’s own views.
“The biggest difference is that the prompts the students will receive will be more focused, meaning that our human raters will know unambiguously that the answer was written in response to the question, not memorized,” said David G. Payne, who heads the G.R.E. program for the testing service.
For security reasons, he said, new content would be introduced and the sequence of questions scrambled every two hours. The new test will be three and a half hours.