Staff Report
Educational Testing Service canceled changes to the GRE that would have made the test almost two hours longer starting September.
The company made the announcement April 2.
The changes might have made it difficult for some students to take the test, according to a news release from the company.
"ETS officials did not believe that full access to the general test for all students could be confidently assured," the release stated.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The company was going to make the test Internet based, with 3,200 testing centers. About 9,000 testing centers can give the current format of the test.
The new test would have been given only on certain days, instead of continuously.
All students who took the new test on the same day would have been given the same questions, instead of questions drawn randomly.
The Internet-based approach was meant to make the test more secure, said Ben Baron, vice president of graduate programs at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.
Some students copied questions from the old GRE and posted them on the Internet, Baron said.
The new test would not have repeated questions.
"By abandoning the changes, the security issues still exist," Baron said. "It's still a concern that the test won't be fair for some students."
Kaplan encouraged students to take the test before it changed.
Students shouldn't let the changes discourage them, Baron said.
"For those students who had already started to prepare, they might as well take the test and get it out of the way," he said. "In case you don't get the score you want, you can still go back and take it again. For students who were going to wait to take it, this is kind of a nonstory. They can just be happy the test will be shorter."
ETS also planned to change the content of the test.
For example, some questions would be fill-in-the-blank instead of multiple-choice, and the verbal section would have more reading comprehension and sentence completion.
Baron said ETS will probably change the questions eventually.
"They've not announced any plans at this point, but it's likely that they'll try to get that new content in over time," he said. "They've spent quite some time developing it, and I don't think they'll just abandon it."
