“The changes are designed to reflect more of what they already know, which is a good thing,” said Wendy Smiseck, Wittenberg University’s associate director of career services.
Kaplan is already planning for the change.
“We’re redoing all of our materials,” said Andrew Mitchell, director of pre-business programs for Kaplan. “This is quite a big change to the GRE, every aspect of the test is being overhauled.”
Mitchell said practice materials for the new test will be available before the change in August.
Online courses for prospective test takers will be available soon, and on-site classes in Dayton will start in May, said Rosally Lumanec, campus director for Kaplan Test Prep. She works with Greater Dayton area schools such as Wittenberg, the University of Dayton and Cedarville University.
Wittenberg and Cedarville career services departments help students with graduate school applications, including personal statements and resumes, according to officials from both schools. Neither hosts its own GRE prep courses.
“What we do is contract through Kaplan and offer the classes here on occasion depending on what the demand is,” Smiseck said. “Most classes are held in Dayton and online through Kaplan.”
GRE changes
The current 200 to 800 point scoring scale, in 10-point increments, will be replaced by a scoring scale of 130 to 170 points, in one-point increments.
The math portion of the test will include less geometry, but more data analysis. An on-screen calculator will also be available for test takers, which means more complex math problems.
Instead of antonym and analogy questions, the new test will include in-context questions that test reasoning skills, in addition to vocabulary.
The test will have new "strengthen/weaken" reading comprehension question types.
The new version will be adaptive at the section level, meaning the better a test taker performs in one section, the more difficult the next section will be. The current version is adaptive at the question level.
Test takers can skip questions within a section and come back to them.
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