By Kim Sung-jin
Staff Reporter


The official admissions exam for entering graduate schools in English-speaking countries will be revamped and lengthened in October 2006.

The Princeton, New Jersey-headquartered Educational Testing Service (ETS) recently announced that it will launch a revised Graduate Record Exam (GRE) next October to more accurately measure the academic competency and potential of students.

ETS is a non-profit organization that administers tests to gauge the English language competency of applicants worldwide to undergraduate and graduate schools in Western countries, mainly the U.S. and Canada.

The revamp is aimed at preventing students from cheating, especially by those in Asian countries, and enhancing the security of GRE test questions.

Security has been the one of the biggest concerns for the ETS since it discovered that an undetermined number of students in China, Taiwan and South Korea raised their GRE verbal scores in 2002 by logging on to Web sites in those countries, memorizing the test questions and answers posted by previous test takers.

Some Chinese organizations are also reportedly hiring people to take digital photos of GRE questions at test centers to capitalize on the ``computer adaptive test system,’’ which reuses the test questions.

Two Columbia University undergraduate students were also arrested the same year for sending out test questions on the Internet.

Next October, the GRE will no longer be computer adaptive. Every student taking the test on a particular day will get the same questions and the questions will not be reused.

Moreover, the duration of the newly proposed test will be lengthened to about four hours from two and a half hours and all test sections _ verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and analytical writing _ will be revised.

``We have not received any guidelines from ETS headquarters yet. And we also don’t know whether the ETS will revamp other graduate school entrance exams such as the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT),’’ said an employee of the Prometric Center’s Seoul branch.

Prometric Center is a test registration agency for ETS exams.

She added that there will be a sweeping change in Korea’s test centers next year as the ETS reportedly plans to alter its test registration agency and test operators in Korea.

On the new exams, the verbal reasoning section will consist of two 40-minute sections rather than one 30-minute section, and the questions will place less emphasis on vocabulary and more on higher cognitive skills.

The quantitative reasoning section will grow from one 45-minute section to two 40-minute sections, with fewer geometry questions and more on the interpretation of tables and graphs.

And the analytical writing measure, which had a 45-minute essay and a 30-minute essay, will now have two 30-minute essays.

The ETS said about 500,000 students worldwide, 20-25 percent of them non-U.S. citizens, take the GRE each year.

The ETS began field-testing the new exams earlier this month.

However, skeptics criticized the ETS’ move, arguing that changing the length, range and format of the test all at once could prompt the same kind of backlash among students and admissions offices as the new Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

sjkim@koreatimes.co.kr