The new GRE Revised Test for Graduate and Business School. More Opportunities for Success.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The new GRE Revised Test for Graduate and Business School. More Opportunities for Success.

Th GRE® revised General Test: Easier or Harder Than the “Old” GRE

“A new test-taker friendly design for the computer-based test that lets you edit or change your answers, skip questions and more, all within a section — giving you the freedom to use more of your own test-taking strategies. Another new feature: an on-screen calculator

New types of questions in the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections, many featuring real-life scenarios that reflect the kind of thinking you’ll do in today’s demanding graduate and business school programs.”

Educational Testing Service (ETS)

No doubt the majority of test-takers will find the new GRE to be more test-taker friendly.

Gone from the GRE Verbal Section are Antonyms and Analogies, two question types that were not at the top of the list for many GRE test-takers. Text Completion and Sentence XXXXXalence questions will be added to the new test and Reading Comprehension questions kept from the existing GRE.

There will be no more questions that test vocabulary out of context and there will be a greater emphasis on critical reading and reasoning, long a mainstay of our preparation courses.

On the Quantitative side of things there are only additions, no subtractions. Two new question types, Multiple Answer and Numeric Entry, have been added. The multiple-choice questions for Problem Solving and Data Analysis remain.

Some have opined that the Quantitative Section of the new GRE will be a more challenging section since ETS has been pushing to have the GRE accepted in lieu of the GMAT for business school applicants. Having prepared XXXX GMAT and GRE test-takers we are well positioned to prepare you to meet that challenge.


The “old” GRE has a score scale of 200 to 800. When the GRE was first developed it was probably intended that the means and medians would be around 500 with a normal (bell curve) distribution of scores. At present the median for the Verbal section is about 450 (yes, that is low) and for the Quantitative section it is about 610 (yes, that is high).

XXXX the Verbal and Quantitative sections of the revised GRE will have a score scale from 130 to 170. I would expect that the revised GRE results which are due to be first released in mid-November will have Verbal and Quantitative medians to be about 150 – right in the middle of the scale.

So how can you compare old and new results? Well, the same way Verbal and Quantitative scores should be viewed when you are looking at the scores required by the schools you are applying to.

You’ve heard “it’s not the heat it’s the humidity?” For the GRE it’s not your score it’s your percentile ranking – how does your score compare with all of the other test writers.

View all scores old and new, verbal and quantitative as percentiles for purposes of comparison.

That said how will you fare on the test? As I said in my last posting the revised GRE test is more test-taker friendly. But it will probably be for the vast majority of test-takers. While some may do better on one version than on the other, most test-takers will probably stay in relatively the same position on the curve – i.e. same percentile ranking.

So remember, it’s not your score it’s your percentile.

Wayne Barkel

Universal Edu | High Learning Consultant and Services