Four years, $12 million and the fates of hundreds of thousands of test takers were at stake. And once again, the Educational Testing Service has decided that the Graduate Record Examination, despite its many failings, will have to be good enough for now.
Citing concerns about ensuring full access to the test, the ETS abandoned plans to introduce an overhauled GRE for this fall. Previously, it had said it would introduce the new test in October 2006.
Repeatedly setting these dates only to push them back is not only unnecessary, but it also makes life difficult and confusing for the students and graduate schools that will be using them.
Even more troubling are the problems that ETS admits have plagued its test, including susceptibility to cheating and the accuracy of the test.
These are apparently problems that millions of dollars and four years couldn’t solve, which puts ETS in a very tough spot.
Since students can currently take the GRE almost any day, the same test questions must be reused many times.
But in 2002, ETS found that in China, Taiwan and South Korea, some test takers were memorizing the questions and answers and posting them online.
So, the new test would have been administered 35 days a year, which would have allowed ETS to develop a completely new test each time. This would eliminate much of the cheating.
Now the ETS says it couldn’t be certain the test centers could handle all the students who would want to take the test if it were all focused on just 35 days a year.
“ETS determined that, despite the aggressive development of our Internet-based testing network, we could not guarantee complete access to all students needing to take the exam,” said David Payne, executive director of the GRE Program, in a statement.
The proposed changes also would have lengthened the test from two and a half hours to four hours and revamped many of the test sections in an effort to make the test a more accurate predictor of students’ success in graduate school, ETS said.
Many have criticized the GRE and other multiple-choice tests for their questionable ability to accurately predict a student’s performance in graduate school.
Studies have come to differing conclusions about the GRE’s validity, but the fact that ETS wanted to change the test format after performing its own research indicates that it could be improved.
Clearly, there are some major problems with the GRE the way it is currently operated.
The testing service should not sit idly by for four years and counting, while problems of cheating and validity plague its test.
ETS has $12 million of research sitting around, and it ought to do whatever it can to put better testing techniques into practice now.
They say they want, first and foremost, to ensure everyone has access to the test. But what good is access to the test when ETS has admitted it is in a form that is susceptible to cheating and isn’t even completely valid to begin with?
The testing service needs to do what it takes to fix the GRE, and it needs to do so without further delays.
And if ETS continues to botch the restructuring of its exam, then it falls upon graduate schools to focus on more useful measures of their applicants’ academic abilities.