Changes to the Graduate Record Examinations – the standardized test most students applying to graduate school take – that will make the test more like linear paper tests and bring greater emphasis to cognitive skills have been postponed from fall 2006 to fall 2007.
“(The tests will be) much more comparable to what they are used to with their normal test-taking in their classes,” said David Payne, executive director for the GRE program with Educational Testing Service, the company that created the GRE test roughly 50 years ago.
David Espinoza, the coordinator for the University’s official ETS site, said postponing the changes was “responsible and wise,” because the proposed changes have faced problems, he said.
“Their plans were ambitious and some of their assumptions have been challenged,”
Espinoza said. “The decision is a big deal. Obviously there are problems, the scope of which were not anticipated a couple of years ago when they decided to make this decision. Frankly, I’m not surprised.”
The current test, which has been in place for roughly 10 years, uses a computer adaptive model, which means that it draws from a database of questions. Questions are selected by a computer for each individual test-taker based on their performance on previous questions, Payne said.
If a test-taker does well on early questions, more difficult questions are given to provide an accurate depiction of their knowledge through fewer questions, Payne said.
Payne said security problems arose with this present model because students and test preparation companies would take the tests and memorize questions from the database and teach them to other students before they took the test.
Because the computer adaptive model asked fewer questions, by learning in advance only a few of the more difficult questions, cheating was easier.
“If you only get three or four questions right that you wouldn’t have gotten right normally, that drastically inflates your score,” he said.
The new linear model will be a standardized test that will be re-written more often and won’t rely on a database of questions, Payne said.
ETS is going to have close to 30 administrations per year, Payne said, and they will have to write a lot of questions.
Currently, students can sign up to take the test at any time during the week, but because the new tests have a standard version given to all test-takers, tests will have to be administered on certain days and times during the week.
Testing labs, which would normally spread testing throughout the week, will now be required to offer the GRE at specific times, overloading their facilities and necessitating the use of University computer labs.
“If you’re restricting your testing to three or four days a month that used to be on a continuous basis, you simply do not have enough seats to meet that demand,” Espinoza said.
He said University computer labs aren’t always available and the testing center will be expected to hold tests on Fridays and Saturdays, which costs overtime, and the University’s ETS testing center is being forced to subsidize that. Espinoza said their testing center could lose $30,000 to $35,000 per year with the new model.
“ETS made an assumption that student labs and classrooms would be available to them whenever they wanted it,” Espinoza said. “That’s just not the case.”
Because the labs are funded through student fees, Espinoza said it would be unfair for a third party such as ETS “to shut down those labs and deny student access to what they’ve paid for.”
Espinoza also said the proposed changes to the GRE have already been made to the Test of English as a Foreign Language, and they haven’t been successful, primarily because they haven’t been able to administer as many tests as with the old system.
“We were doing about 30 to 40 TOEFLs a month, and we’re down to probably half to a third of that.”
Besides changes to how the test is administered, the new test will see major changes to its verbal section that will remove single item vocabulary questions such as analogies and antonyms, and will bring a greater emphasis on higher cognitive skills and less dependence on vocabulary, according to the ETS Web site.

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