New York, NY (Feb. 3) – In six months, aspiring graduate school and business school students will

face a vastly different and more difficult GRE® – one that will be about an hour longer than the

current exam. Beginning Aug. 1, the new GRE® will feature the following major changes.

“
New York, NY (Feb. 3) – In six months, aspiring graduate school and business school students will

face a vastly different and more difficult GRE® – one that will be about an hour longer than the

current exam. Beginning Aug. 1, the new GRE® will feature the following major changes:

• The current 200 to 800 point scoring scale, in ten-point increments, will be replaced by a

• The Quantitative section will include less geometry, but more data analysis. It will also

• An on-screen calculator will be available for test takers, which will likely mean more

• The new GRE’s® Verbal section won’t include antonym and analogy questions, but will

include in-context questions that test reasoning skills, in addition to vocabulary.

• The current GRE® is adaptive at the question-level: answer a question correctly, and the

next question is more difficult. The new GRE® will be adaptive at the section level: the

better a test taker performs in one section, the more difficult the next section will be. This

new format will also allow test takers to skip questions within a section and come back to

Application deadlines are a key consideration for students deciding whether to take the current

GRE® or the new one. Because ETS, the exam’s administrator, needs to collect a statistically

significant sample size of test takers to ensure score accuracy of the new test, test takers who take

the exam in August, September or October won’t receive their official scores back until November

– meaning they’ll have to wait up to three months for their official scores. This will force many

to miss application deadlines, and create undue stress for scrambling to retest if they’re not happy

with their scores. If you need your score before November, you must take the current GRE® before

July, said Liza Weale, executive director of pre-business and pre-graduate programs, Kaplan Test

Prep. Our advice to students: if you can take the current GRE®, do so – it’s to your advantage.

According to Kaplan Test Prep’s 2010 survey of graduate school admissions officers at top

programs across the United States, a GRE® score is the most important admissions factor, ahead

of an applicant’s undergraduate GPA, work experience, letters of recommendation and personal

For more information about the upcoming changes to the GRE®, please contact Russell Schaffer at

Kaplan Test Prep (www.kaptest.com), a division of Kaplan, Inc., is a premier provider of

educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses. Established in 1938, Kaplan

is the world leader in the test prep industry. With a comprehensive menu of online offerings and a

complete array of books, Kaplan offers preparation for more than 90 standardized tests, including

entrance exams for secondary school, college and graduate school, as well as English language

and professional licensing exams. Kaplan also provides private tutoring and graduate admissions