No GRE Changes For Now

A lot of my GRE subscribers have written to ask me about the ETS’s recent decision to cancel its planned overhaul of the GRE.

The decision is certainly puzzling to those of us in the test-prep industry.  Always ready to knock a testing company, Fairtest.org released an article called “New GRE Cancellation Reveals ETS Flaws,” which you can find here.  The article says, with little substantive proof, that the new GRE was just a chance for the ETS to make more money.  Fairtest seems to think that everything any testing company does is a ploy to make more money.

While I’m no fan of ETS, Fairtest’s accusation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense here.  If the ETS is as money-obsessed and inept as Fairtest would have us believe, then why didn’t they just go forward with the new test?  And that begs a bigger question: How does releasing a new version of the GRE make more money for ETS in the first place?  ETS already has a monopoly on the GRE, no matter which version of the test it uses, so it doesn’t stand to increase revenues by spending a lot of time and money on developing a new version of the test.  In fact, the new GRE was going to reduce the number of testing days in a given year, which would almost certainly have reduced the number of test-takers, thereby reducing revenue in another way.

Instead, I think ETS is in a big hurry to get away from its current CAT format, which is poorly designed and very susceptible to the proper test-taking strategies, even though most test-prep companies give you the wrong advice for it.  (For more on that, check out the free sample chapter from my guide on the GRE.)  At the same time, ETS doesn’t want to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.  If they’re cancelling their latest overhaul, it can only be because that overhaul would have been horrendous.

Nobody wants to see the current GRE CAT stick around.  It’s an embarrassment to the idea of standardized testing.  Today’s students may not know about Amy Cuddy, but those of us in the industry still do.  I hope ETS will get its head together and go back to a paper-based format like most other tests.

Despite Fairtest’s opinion, I really think ETS may have been trying to achieve something revolutionary with the GRE CAT.  Unfortunately, the experiment has clearly failed, with two results: Uninformed GRE-takers are suffering the consequences, and well-trained GRE-takers are scoring higher than they should be.