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Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

                Chris Elliott                        Zach Lee                  Christian Palmer
                Geronimo Rodriguez       Blake Whitaker       Kristen Young

Delay in new GRE great for students

The release of the new Graduate Record Examination General Test has been pushed back to Fall 2007.

A spokesman for the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE, said the move was intended to give test officials more time to try out the new format to minimize any "glitches" that may not yet have been worked out, and students considering graduate school should be grateful.

Working out any kinks in the test's new format is an important venture, but the delay also allows more time for students to get ready for the new format -- something subtle but important.

It's easy to forget how significant the format of a test can be, but to those who have been taking practice GREs since high school, a new format can drastically affect their score -- in more ways than one. Among time limit changes and expansions of certain sections, the scoring system has been changed dramatically. The traditional point scale of 200 to 800 per section will be changed to 40 to 50 points per section. 

Students need enough time to adapt expectations and strategies to fit the new system, and another year seems like enough time for them to do that. 

For students, there is nothing to lose in having the ETS wait to implement the changes until 2007, but the ETS avoids a year of potentially terrible test scores by giving students more time to get ready for the changes.

There will more than likely be some students, perhaps as parts of a general trend, who do not do as well on the GRE when the changes are first implemented, but the scores should level out in the following years. On the other hand, some students will undoubtedly perform better under the new system. Though some have complained that the new format is friendlier to ETS coffers, the basic fact that the GRE is changing was never a problem; tests should continue to change to better analyze the skills and knowledge they aim to test.

The main problem was that students were not given the time they needed to adapt to those changes, for better or for worse. ETS has solved that problem, however by giving students another year to prepare.