The new Graduate Record Examination (GRE), the standardized gatekeeper for most students applying to graduate school, will debut in October. The revisions represent the greatest change in the test’s 55-year history.

The revised test strives to provide greater validity and information about students’ performance, as well as better security, worldwide access and technological advancements, proponents have said.

The new verbal section will focus on higher cognitive skills — rather than vocabulary — and will emphasize more complex reading. It will also include two 40-minute sections rather than one 30-minute section. The entire test will increase in length from two-and-a-half to a little over four hours and will include one either 30- or 40-minute section that will not count toward the final score.

Students expressed concern over the proposed changes.

“I heard there are no more analogies, and they changed it to twice as long,” said junior Patrick Callier. “I think longer is probably not better but analogies need to go. I think I might try to take it before the change happens. I think it will be harder. The whole idea of the test seems like an endurance trial.”

Senior Chin-Yin Tseng, who already took the test, agreed that the change in length is excessive.

“I’m fine with the things tested, but twice as long is just horrid,” she said. “My eyes went blurry after I took the GRE. I don’t think I could handle more reading passages.”

Quantitative reasoning questions will also include more real-life scenarios with fewer geometry questions. An on-screen calculator will be provided as well. It will include two 40-minute sections rather than one 45-minute section.

The third section of the test — analytical writing — will present more focused prompts that reduce the possibility of using memorized materials. The writing sections will include 30-minute argument and issue tasks.

The new writing section will be 15 minutes shorter than its old version. However, senior Jesse Young, who took the current version, said he wished it had provided more time for writing.

“It would be nice if the GRE allowed more time for the essay sections,” he said. “Forty-five minutes was barely enough for me to decide on an outline.”

The new GRE format will also scale verbal and quantitative scores from 110 to 150, in one-point increments, instead of 200 to 800. A conversion table will be made available in January of 2007 to compare old and new scores. Bert Lain, a lecturer in the Classics Department, said the new scoring system will pose a challenge for departments evaluating potential graduate students during the first year of the new test.

“The first year it’s used, departments will have to figure out how to interpret the GRE,” he said. “The current grad students took a different test and it will be difficult to see if they’re getting the same kind of person, even with a conversion scale.”

The test is currently presented in a computer-adaptive format, meaning that the difficulty of each question is determined by the number of previous right or wrong answers. The new test will present the same questions to all students, and there will be little or no repeat of the same questions on different test dates.

Tseng approved of this move to standardized questions.

“I think I’d like the fact that everyone has the same questions, like the SATs,” she said. “I like it if there’s just this one set of questions, and you get the same number of points for each question that you missed.”

Callier said he plans to study for the new test in much the same way he would have prepared for the old one.

“I don’t think I would necessarily study that differently,” he said. “In terms of preparation it will be pretty much the same except skipping analogies — which anyone would be happy to do. I think I’ll have enough trouble reviewing high school math to begin with. In high school I was more ready to do the whole standardized test thing.”

When asked about their opinions of the changes overall, students were generally pessimistic. Senior Leigh Barnwell, who also took the current test, did not feel that changes would truly improve the effectiveness of the exam.

“I am not sure if I would want to change anything about the test,” she said. “I think most standardized tests are unfair in one way or another, and I am not sure that this one was any more or less unfair than other standardized tests.”

Senior Nick Manov agreed that no matter what changes are made, other factors better reflect a student’s readiness for graduate school.

“The test is really a formality, like the SAT for college,” he said. “It is perhaps a convenience to colleges that people can be separated by test scores, but these mostly reflect general knowledge and test-taking skills. Your application stands out because of experience and grades.”