The race is over.
Students rushing to take the old version of the Graduate Record Examination, more commonly known as the GRE, are out of time.
Saturday was the last day students could take the old exam. Starting Monday, all graduate school applicants are required to take the revised version. From the question types to the scoring scale, every aspect of the GRE is changing.
The test maker, Educational Testing Service, revised the overall GRE to give students a better test experience and to show graduate-level readiness, according to Mubina Dunn, Kaplan's campus director for Gainesville and Jacksonville.
The vocabulary section will be eliminated and a critical reasoning section will be added to better assess higher-level reasoning skills.
"The GRE used to have antonyms and analogies," Dunn said. "But realistically, that's not a skill students need to succeed in grad school."
The test used to be question-by-question adaptive: If the student did well on the first question, the next question would be more difficult; if the student did poorly, the next question would be easier. The revised version will be section-by-section adaptive: how well a student does on the first verbal and math sections will determine the difficulty of the second verbal and math sections, according to John Keenan, the north Florida territory manager for the Princeton Review.
The new test will be about one hour longer and will take about four hours to complete, according to Kaplan. One verbal and one math section will be added.
Instead of receiving unofficial math and verbal scores immediately, students who take the new test will have to wait until November to receive their scores.
About two months ago, Keenan said students who needed their scores immediately rushed to take the old GRE, hoping their scores were high enough to avoid the new test.
"Many applications are due in December or January, and not knowing your GRE score until November is risky," said Samantha Lupu, 21, a UF senior who made sure to take the old test so she could apply to graduate school in November.
Students who register to take the new GRE in August or September will receive a discount of 50 percent on their test fee.
For UF student Angela McCall, 21, the new GRE is an inconvenience. She said her summer schedule did not allow her to take the old test before July, so she is taking the new test in August.
"The timing of the test change really sucks," McCall said. "I was left with only one option."
For tutoring companies like Kaplan, the teachers had to be re-certified to teach the new material to students, Dunn said.
So, is the new GRE more difficult?
"The old GRE is the devil you know, and the new GRE is the devil you don't know," Dunn said.
