The Daily Cardinal, Online newspaper of University of Wisconsin-Madison

Students planning to apply to graduate school next year can expect to take a revised entrance exam.

The Graduate Record Exam is used by a variety of graduate programs to gauge a student’s potential to perform in graduate school. At UW-Madison, individual graduate programs can determine if the GRE is required for their program, according to Assistant Dean of Graduate School Education and Administration Lois Beecham.

Starting Oct. 2006, the Educational Testing Service will administer a new GRE in an effort to better represent the complex reasoning skills required for graduate school. Critics of the current GRE say it relies on memorization of vocabulary and formulas. The test’s duration will also increase from 2.5 hours to over four hours.

The GRE will still consist of verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing.

The quantitative reasoning section will reduce the number of geometry problems and increase the number of data interpretation problems and real-life scenarios. These problems do not require the memorization of formulas and better represent the demands of graduate school, according to powerscore instructor and assistant course developer Jon Denning.

“You could approach it without a background of math and still do OK,” Denning said.

The test’s verbal reasoning section will focus on analytical reading rather than vocabulary-based questions such as antonyms, analogies and sentence completion. Denning said this could benefit well-qualified students for whom English is a second language.

“It wasn’t a test of your ability to read well and construct these complex ideas. It was simply a test of the words that you know,” Denning said. “Even if there was one word they weren’t sure of, they could still understand what they read and answer questions about it.”

The GRE currently uses a computer-adaptive format, where higher-level questions are given to students who correctly answered the previous question. Each question is pulled from an ETS computer data bank, so some students may have already seen some of the questions. The computer adaptive format may also reward students that guess the correct answer by giving them higher-scoring questions.

“The questions in the beginning count a lot more toward your final score than the questions toward the end,” Denning said. “You dig yourself in an early hole and it’s hard to get out of.”

The revised GRE will use a linear format giving each student the same questions. Each version of the test will only be used once to avoid repeat questions. The test will only be conducted 29 times a year instead of constantly.

“Instructors can get more involved in the way that they teach people as opposed to simply putting all the burden on the student to memorize,” Denning added.