Alison Sikora ’06 is currently suffering through studying for her Graduate Record Examination (GRE), but she says she feels lucky.
Despite what Sikora calls “two and a half hours of debilitating misery,” she will not have to suffer through next year’s GRE, which will be revamped and extended to four hours, according to David Payne, executive director of the GRE program for the Educational Testing Service (ETS).
“I can’t imagine taking the test for that long,” said graduate student Diana Polzer, class of ’05. “Most people who take the current version are nervous and anxious to begin with.”
The new test will start being used in October 2006 as an effort to thwart cheating and to better measure the ability of the 500,000 students who take it each year.
ETS, which administers the test, said that cheating has been on their minds since 2002 when students in China, South Korea and Taiwan found Web sites that had the questions posted by students who had already taken the GRE.
“Even though it will be hard to sit through, if the new one stops people from cheating, it’s a good idea,” said Polzer. “It’s not fair to the people who studied for months and put the time and effort into their undergraduate studies.”
The new test will be taken at different times in the different time zones so students who have finished the exam will not release information to those who have not taken it yet. It will also only be offered about 30 times as opposed to the hundreds of times it is administered now.
After the new test is taken, the questions will be discarded and new ones will be made for the next test takers.
ETS has been testing the new exam for the past month.
While each section of the test will be revised, verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing will still be included in the test.
However, subject-matter tests will not be changed.
“Thank God for that,” said Sikora, who plans on taking the biology test.
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