News

GRE® General Test to Include New Question Types in November

Educational Testing Service® (ETS®), in consultation with the Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) Board, announced today plans to include two new question types in the computer-based GRE General Test beginning in November.

The new question types are part of the first phase of improvements endorsed by graduate school educators. Plans for launching an entirely new test all at once were dropped, and ETS decided to introduce new question types and improvements gradually over time.

"These question types have already been through extensive field trials, and the results indicate that the questions are functioning as intended,” explains David Payne, Associate Vice President of Higher Education at ETS. “We will begin counting these question types toward examinee scores as soon as we have an adequate sample of data from the operational testing environment."

Test takers may encounter one of these new questions in the Verbal Reasoning or Quantitative Reasoning sections of the computer-based GRE General Test. The new Verbal question type is a text completion question that requires the test taker to fill in two or three blanks within a passage from separate multiple-choice lists. Currently, the Verbal section contains text completion questions that require test takers to fill in one blank within a passage from a single multiple-choice list. The new Quantitative question type will be a numeric entry question that requires test takers to type their answer as a number in a box, or as a fraction in two boxes. Test takers can review sample questions and additional information about the  question types on the GRE website.

"This is an important step towards revising the General Test to offer improved measurement of the skills and knowledge required for graduate study," says Suzanne Ortega, Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost, University of Washington, Seattle, and Chair of the GRE Board.