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America's Best Graduate Schools

In the market for another sheepskin? First you've got to prove your 'inferential reasoning' skills on the new GRE

By Alex Kingsbury

Posted 4/1/07

A graduate degree promises an enlightened mind and greater earning power at the cost of innumerable greenbacks and some stressful years buried in books—not to mention the fact that however prestigious the institution, going back to school still has eerie hallmarks of the day you walked into first grade. America's Best Graduate Schools is designed to help you decide if that journey is right for you and how best to pack for it. But be warned: If your path to a bright future leads back to the ivory tower, the road will become a bit steeper this fall.

The GRE General Test, the bane of many applicants, is about to get more challenging. A much-delayed revamp debuts in September with changes designed to make it more relevant—at least according to Educational Testing Service, the people who dreamed it up. (The last date to take the current GRE, by the way, will be July 31, 2007.)

The new exam will clock in at over four hours, up from 2 1/₂. There will be more critical reading questions in the verbal section and more interpolation questions in quantitative reasoning, and, like the SAT, the GRE will jettison analogies. What's different? Consider the verbal section. Instead of all multiple-choice questions, the new test will ask students to highlight relevant sentences in a passage, for example. Other developments include a shift toward "inferential reasoning," that is, deciphering what something means not by memorizing vocabulary but by arriving at conclusions from complex sets of facts.

One thing is certain: Scores will plummet. From 1600 possible points (plus a score of 0-6 for analytical writing), the new test tops out at 240 (the writing score remains unchanged). Most important, the computerized test will no longer alter the question pool along the way according to the test taker's performance. Everyone will face the same set of questions.

Like the SAT writing test, the longer GRE will take some getting used to. Schools will need a few years to figure out how well the new GRE predicts student success at their institution and thus, how much weight test scores will receive in the admissions process. That's not to say the scores won't matter, but it probably means that admissions officers will be looking harder at other areas of your application. As deans of admissions love to say, grad school candidates are considered holistically.

This story appears in the April 9, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.