Changes To Graduate Admissions Test Prompts Reflection
Courtney Hagen | May 10, 2006 01:46 PM | Link
People who take the Graduate Record Examination starting in the fall of 2007 will notice some big changes to the format of the exam. Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the exam, is revamping it to provide more accurate information about the capabilities of test-takers.
The exam has long been used by many graduate schools and programs to measure a student's aptitude for succeeding in graduate coursework. Dawn Piacentino, associate director of GRE client relations at ETS, said that the new GRE exam will place more emphasis on real-life scenarios and include more diverse reading passages in some sections. To make the exam more relevant and valuable to graduate admissions departments, ETS will eliminate analogies and place less dependence on vocabulary. The new exam will rely on a fixed format to create a standardized benchmark for determining success.
"The revised exam will better focus on skills that are necessary for success in graduate school, Piacentino said. "In both the verbal and quantitative sections, test-takers will be responding to test questions that are closer to the kinds of activities they will be involved with regularly in graduate school."
Source of graph data: Educational Testing Service
Most graduate programs at the University of Kansas require GRE scores for admission consideration, with the exception of some music, art, and design programs that put more emphasis on portfolios or work completed in the field, instead. The School of Journalism prefers GRE scores from applicants but will accept LSAT and GMAT scores for certain graduate programs. GRE scores are combined with grade point averages, letters of recommendation and other evidence of academic work and experience to determine admittance into programs.
The revised exam is also intended to help administrators in these programs better select graduate students in the application process. Carole Ross, assistant dean of the graduate school and international programs at KU, said she hopes the changes will provide more accurate information to the University.
"We hope it will teach us more about the quality of our graduate students," Ross said. It might provide faculty with better information of the applicants skills and abilities."
The exam will change from an adaptive format to a more fixed format. Questions on the original exam once used computers to modify questions to suit the difficulty levels of each test-taker as they answered more questions on the exam. The new exam will not adapt to each test-taker, but instead will create more of a standardized benchmark to gauge a test-taker's ability.
- "On the verbal section, the main problem is people getting down to two answers and then not finding the right one. They might feel that one is more arbitrary, but there is always a specific reason why one answer is right and one answer is wrong."
- "On the math section, at first, people think that they just need to review math facts, but the facts are not what make the test difficult. The difficult questions on the GRE overwhelm your ability to organize math questions."
- "You have to learn a wide range of simple intuitive strategies to overcome challenges of the test."
- "On the computer-based test, the better you use your time, the better your score will be."
- "If you are thinking of specific graduate programs at certain schools, it is always good to call those schools and ask what kind of GRE scores they require."
The new exam will also tackle security issues. The original exam relied on the same pool of questions for all the tests given throughout the world. Piacentino said that five years ago ETS discovered that test-takers in Asia were memorizing questions as they took the exam and then posting them on the Internet for test-takers in different time zones to view. In response to this issue, the revised exam will use a brand new test form and set of questions each day the exam is given, preventing memorization.
The new exam was slated to begin this year, but Piacentino said its release was pushed back to 2007 to accommodate for the extensive changes.
The changes will prompt an increase in the price of the exam, too. Though the new exam won't hit testing centers until 2007, this July the price of the exam will increase from $115 to $130. The increase will allow for greater accessibility. The revised exam will be administered on 29 different dates and will increase from being given out in 600 testing areas worldwide to 2,500 areas worldwide, to include test-takers who live in more rural areas that originally did not offer the exam.
"More people will also be able to take it now," Ross said. "Not as many students will petition for admittance into graduate programs because they dont live in an area where the test was given."
Ross said the inability for students to take the test because they lived in rural areas is most common in international students. Ross said 6,000 international students are currently enrolled in graduate programs at KU. International students who are already enrolled as undergraduates at KU can take the exam on campus. The exam is also offered in Hays, Overland Park, Pittsburg, Topeka and Wichita.
Over 500,000 people take the GRE worldwide each year. With the increase in testing facilities those numbers are expected to go up. ETS hopes the increase in test-takers will make the exam even more valuable to programs and students.
While the changes are expected to improve the exam, they have also prompted faculty members and students to question the previous validity and relevance of the GRE. John Poggio, professor of psychology and co-director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation in the School of Education, said the significance of the GRE to graduate admissions processes should be considered to determine the benefit of the changes.
"The exam serves a small slice of the pie about trying to determine a person's readiness for graduate studies," Poggio said. "The real question is how much weight do you give it, because if you made the exam 180 degrees different and it has relatively little weight, who cares?"
Poggio said the School of Education has a minimum combined score it likes to see when examining applicants, but has a history of sometimes disregarding the scores of some students that fall below the mark, if other elements of their application make up for it.
"We don't use it as one single hurdle that must be passed," Poggio said. "It is just one piece of all the information that we consider in the admissions process."
While the GRE is intended to measure the abilities of a student, Poggio thinks the exam misses out on measuring some crucial components that contribute to the overall success of a test-taker. He said that it can't predict the persistence of students who have been successful in their undergraduate careers.
Amber Hall is one person who thinks the exam is an inaccurate predictor. Hall, Spring Branch, Texas senior, will graduate with honors and distinctions in psychology and applied behavioral sciences in May and she will attend a graduate program in family and child studies in the fall. Though Hall exhibited strong academic skills throughout her classes and activities at KU, her mediocre GRE scores failed to reveal the same strengths.
"Obviously my lower score does not reflect how capable I am as a student," Hall said. "If they could make an examination to measure how hard of a worker you are or the perseverance you had when it came to school, I think it would be a different story. A standardized test can't predict how hard you will work as a student no matter how smart you are."
Hall said she thinks the exam could be improved for potential graduate students if it was more tailored to suit the different areas of real-life graduate study. She said she thought the old GRE used analogies, vocabulary and math problems that she will never see in her graduate coursework. She said the exam didn't correctly reflect all the work and learning she accomplished during her time as an undergraduate.
ETS hopes they have an answer for Hall's concerns when the new GRE exam rolls out next year.
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