Revised GRE ***For 2011***

[djiboutilicious]

Is this news to anyone else?

http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/about/experience

"No antonyms or analogies"?! Now you can go back and review past questions?! Or skip them?! ETS has a conscience?!

Edited July 17, 2010 by djiboutilicious

[fadeindreams]

I don't understand why anyone would be excited about the change. Maybe you will get a better raw score because the test is more tuned to your abilities, however, in the end the most important score is your percentile. Percentile is a measure of how you compare to others who took the same test as you. Again, I don't get the excitement.

All the same, yeah, the test sounds potentially easier.

[Mr. Wonton]

The Quant section also looks like it's going to become annoying. I can imagine that the new multiple choice questions that can have more than one right answer - and makes you select all of them to get the question correct - will lead to a lot of messy second-guessing.

[milestones13]

I'm not sure why ETS is deciding to get rid of analogies and antonyms because doing so seems to undermines the GRE's ability to discriminate verbal ability at the high end. Analogies and antonyms have stayed with the GRE verbal for eons because this has been shown to be the case study after study, despite opinions and criticism to the contrary -- to wit, that the test itself does not measure what graduate students are supposed to be doing in graduate school. Well, the whole idea behind the GRE verbal is to provide a verbal intelligence test for the schools to look at in conjunction with all the other info that they have that point more closely to a scholarship potential...While the GRE is billed neither as an achievement test nor an intelligence test, it exists a sort of strange crossbreed between the two....antiquated, at that. ETS has now decided (if they follow through this time), to cut ties with intelligence testing (analogies/antonyms) and make it a test that mirrors more in the way of scholar-activity. There are good things to be gained from this, but the downside is that high ability applicants will not be as neatly demarcated as before...(even then, there is room to argue that the demarcation currently is unfair -- as with ESL students having to knock back rococo English word lists like tequila shots. This stuff is supposed to be (in theory)....slowly...accumulated over one's educational life.

Here is an ETS study from 1985 that backs up the high ability difference (link and abstract provided) ...straight from the horses mouth, back in the days when the horse had a mouth ;-)

http://www.ets.org/M...-85-29-Lord.pdf

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to compare the contribution to

measurement accuracy of the verbal score of each of the four verbal item

types included in the GRE General Test. Comparisons are based on item

response theory, a methodology that allows the researcher to look at the

accuracy of individual points on the score scale. This methodology is

based on the assumption that the four verbal item types measure the same

verbal ability. Since the results of the study do indicate that the

reading comprehension item type measures something slightly different frc

what is measured by sentence completion, analogy, or antonym item types,

only tentative conclusions may be drawn.

The antonym item type contributes the most accuracy of the four item

types for scores above about 550. Analogy items contribute to the

measurement accuracy of verbal ability throughout the score range. This is

especially true when item types are matched on verbal difficulty. These

results suggest that the analogy and antonym item types are useful for

maintaining accuracy of the verbal score scale at the upper levels.

Eliminating these items might have a serious impact on the validity of the

GRE verbal score in the upper regions of the scale. Studies of the

validity of item types at the upper score range using external criteria

would be necessary to understand the exact contribution of the item types

to the validity of the test.