Anticipated changes to the Graduate Records Exam (GRE), a common requirement for graduate school admittance, will not take place, despite considerable hype and investment in the issue.
“I think it was a wise and responsible decision,” said David Espinoza, Coordinator of Testing Services. “The model upon which they were building this new system had some serious flaws to it. It wasn’t really until they got closer to the launch date that they began to feel the pressure of those flaws.”
Espinoza said among those complications were access to and format of the test. He said the test administrators inaccurately assumed that universities would have consistent lab availability for testing.
The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the GRE and other standardized tests, hoped to reduce cheating on the exam and more accurately indicate students’ abilities. The changes would have been the biggest the test has undergone in 55 years, according to Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.
The test was to become more extensive and analytical, and take four as opposed to 2 1/2 hours to complete. The verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing sections would all have been revised. Also, the test would have been offered less often – only 35 days a year – to allow the ETS time to reformat the exam for each group of students.
University junior Hannah Earle is glad the GRE will remain the same so she “(doesn’t) have to deal with the changes.”
Pursuing a master’s degree in either psychology or neuroscience, Hannah Earle doesn’t expect the test to be as difficult as the revised one would have been, but she is still taking it seriously.
“I’ll definitely take time to study, it just happens that I can wait an extra month or so to get on that,” she said.
Since the announcement was made in October 2005, the ETS found that the revised test would be too difficult to administer. The new exam was scheduled for release this fall.
“They found themselves confronted with having made fairly ambitious promises to the graduate student community,” Espinoza said, “and then for reasons I don’t know, they realized they had a problem. Their responsibility to the graduate student community prevailed. It took some courage on their part to admit the reality and make this decision.”
Not all graduate students in Eugene would have been affected by the changes. The University Graduate School as a whole does not require students to take the GRE. Instead, individual departments within the school determine whether the test is relevant to that specific program.
“There are certain disciplines where the GRE would not be that useful,” said Marian Friestad, Associate Dean of the Graduate School. “A quantitative test may or may not be that diagnostic for a particular discipline so we really do leave it up to the discipline to make that decision for themselves.”
Andrew Earle is spending his first year at the University’s graduate school after passing the GRE and completing Washington State University’s graduate program. He came to Eugene to pursue his master’s in a different program, for which he was not required to take the GRE again.
“It was actually a little less strenuous than I thought it was going to be,” said Earle, “but it was still difficult.” He studied “pretty intensively” for a month before the test. Like UO, WSU bases the GRE requirement upon that of the department.
One department at the University of Oregon that requires applicants to take the exam is the Department of Architecture.
“It does indicate a person’s ability to some extent, or their readiness,” said Helga Wood, an Office Specialist in the Department of Architecture. “We have a very comprehensive application process, and the GRE is one indicator that we can use to get an overall profile of the student.”
Wood echoed Friestad’s sentiments when she said architecture students, because of the department’s particular focus, tend to be more successful in the quantitative section of the exam. Therefore, it is a more reliable indicator of the student’s abilities for the architecture department.
However legitimate the test is at this point, ETS will most likely continue to brainstorm ways to accomplish its currently unrealized goals.
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