PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The Graduate Records Examinations General Test, which is required for admission to many graduate programs, will be changing as of next fall.

One notable difference will be the time required to take the test, which will increase from two and a half hours to four hours. The structure, content, scoring and administration of the test will also change.

The Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE, is “making the most significant changes to the exam in its 55-year history,” according to Susan Kaplan, director of graduate programs for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.

In addition to “requiring a lot more stamina on the part of the test-taker,” the new version of the test will no longer be computer adaptive, Kaplan said. For the current test, the difficulty of each question is dependent on the test-taker’s success on the preceding question.

The new test will include the same range of questions for each test-taker, according to Kaplan.

“This change is going to require that ETS is going to have to add in a lot more questions at a variety of difficulty levels” to each test, said Kaplan, because all test-takers will respond to questions at all levels of difficulty.

Kaplan said the computer-adaptive method accurately reflects the results a student would receive in a longer, more comprehensive test. She added, however, that some test-takers have expressed the belief that the computer-adaptive method is unfair and support the idea of a new test that will be the same for each student.

Brown University senior Arielle Baskin-Sommers, who took the GRE in August, voiced criticism of the computer-adaptive method.

“The most unfair part was not material — you can study for that. (The test’s) scoring is unfair, not indicative of what test-takers know and how they will perform in graduate school,” Baskin-Sommers said. She added that she believes “the first 10 questions determine your score … (They) weigh more heavily than the rest of the exam.”

But senior David Meisner, who plans to take the GRE in the future, said, “I don’t think really the adaptive versus not adaptive … is such a big deal.”

The new test will include two sections of verbal reasoning, each 40 minutes long. The current exam has only one 30-minute verbal section. The quantitative section will also be changing from one 45-minute section to two sections lasting 40 minutes each.

The analytical writing section will be called “Critical Thinking and Analytical Writing” and will be shortened slightly. The new section will still include an argument and an issue essay, but both will last 30 minutes. This change will shorten the length of the issue essay by 15 minutes while leaving the argument essay at its present length.

Changes to the general test are not just structural. “ETS wants the exam to more accurately predict how students will do in graduate school,” Kaplan said.

The new verbal sections will depend less on vocabulary knowledge alone, use higher-level cognitive skills and have more text-based material, according to the GRE Web site. These are changes from the current test, which includes analogies, antonyms and sentence completion, all of which rely heavily on memorizing vocabulary, according to Baskin-Sommers.

The test’s new quantitative reasoning section will have a reduced proportion of geometry questions and an increased proportion of questions involving “real-life scenarios,” word problems and data interpretation. The test also will provide an on-screen four-function calculator for test-takers on that section, according to the GRE Web site, and will continue to test understanding of concepts in algebra, statistics and probability.

The change is welcome to test-takers like Baskin-Sommers, who said she “spent half (her) summer relearning geometry” from high school for the GRE.

One prospective GRE-taker, senior Heather Peterson, was glad to hear of the change to the content of the quantitative reasoning section of the test, commenting that “minimizing the geometry portion will be a good thing because I haven’t done geometry since I was 14.”

Questions on the analytical writing portion of the test will be more specific than in the past, according to Kaplan. The current essay questions are broad enough that students have, in rare instances, reproduced prepared memorized essays on the test, she said.

Scoring for the quantitative and verbal sections of the test will both change from a 200- to 800-point scale to a new scale with a mean of 150 and a spread likely ranging from 130 to 170, according to Dawn Piacentino, associate director of the GRE program at ETS.

Scoring for the essay section will remain the same, ranging from zero to six at half-point increments, but graduate schools will now receive test-takers’ essays along with the scores.

Piacentino explained that the change to the scaling system was made “because an equivalent score won’t mean the same thing in a test in which skills are measured differently.”

Test-takers who sit for the exam in one of its first three administrations will not receive their scores until November to allow for scaling. In November, ETS will also release a table comparing old exam scores with new ones, according to Kaplan.

Because scores are good for five years, the score reports of test-takers who took the old version of the exam will include both their original scores and an approximate score equivalent when the new test debuts, Piacentino said.

While the GRE general test is currently administered nearly every day, there will be fewer than 30 administrations of the exam each year as of next September, and ETS will compose a completely original exam for each sitting to prevent possible cheating, according to Kaplan.

All administrations of the test will still be computerized in the United States and most of the world. ETS is expanding the area covered by computerized testing sites, but paper-based tests will still be available in some areas of the world where ETS cannot establish secure Internet access, according to Piacentino.

Chad Galts, communications director for the Graduate School, said some graduate programs require the GRE general test for admission, while many recommend the test and others do not ask for scores at all.

Galts also said the Grad School will “educate the departments on the changes to the exam (and) provide them with a score equivalency table.”