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New GRE Questions Coming in November

New GRE Questions Coming in November
10/2/2007
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Scholarships.com Staff
The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the GRE administrators, will be making small changes to the GRE next month. After dropping their plans to vastly alter the GRE, the ETS decided to go for something smaller.

Instead of creating a new grading scale, different formats and a new time limit (as was originally planned), ETS decided to begin by introducing two new question types, one for verbal reasoning and one for math. The remaining questions will remain the same, and the students’ answer to new questions will not count towards their score—at least not yet. David Payne, Associate Vice President of Higher Education at ETS, announced that, “We will begin counting these question types toward examinee scores as soon as we have an adequate sample of data from the operational testing environment."

But for now, students are safe.  Those who encounter the new math question will be asked to type their answer in a box rather than to select it from a set of provided choices. Those who see the new verbal reasoning question will be asked to choose two or three, rather than the standard one, answers to complete a phrase. Each test taker will only be shown one new question, if any.

Both changes, once officially employed, will make the test harder for most. Because many graduate schools heavily weigh GRE scores when making admissions decisions, it is best to prepare as early as possible.
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