Earlier today, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the nonprofit organization that owns and administers the GRE test, announced the GRE’s testing time would be slashed to just under two hours. The “testing casualties” will include the analytical writing task, 46 questions from the GRE test’s quantitative and verbal reasoning sections, and, finally, the unscored section. How the unscored section had survived this long has been a topic of animated discussion among test prep companies and tutors.
The other change to the GRE will be a faster release of test scores. The new, shortened test with the faster score release will start this September.
In their release, the ETS explained, “These changes are intended to provide test takers with a better experience that values their time and reduces anxiety and fatigue.”
We have no doubt that these changes are also driven by the steep drop in GRE registrations. In 2017, the GRE was administered 541,750 times. By 2021, the most recent year with fully available data, the GRE was only administered 341,574 times. That’s made even more significant given the inroads the GRE has made in law school admissions as well as its wider acceptance among graduate business schools. Quite simply, graduate schools across the board are increasingly dumping standardized testing requirements.
We don’t think this simple change will reverse the registration declines. Instead we believe the best hopes of ETS are that it will encourage more applicants to choose its test for those programs that either still require a standardized test or that have test-optional policies.
