What the GRE changes mean to you: the essays, and where should your b-school road lead you?

Like the current GMAT and GRE, the new GRE will offer two writing tasks as part of its “Analytical Writing Assessment.” Unlike the current GMAT and GRE, the new test is planning to deviate from the practice of inserting a standard set of directions into each prompt. Instead, variable instructions more or less unique to each prompt will be provided. You can access the 17 or so published examples and more examples are expected to be revealed over time.

What this means in practice can be illustrated by a simple example. Suppose you’re asked to write an argument in response to a publishing company’s proposed initiative to reorient its business around electronic media delivery. (That kind of proposal has been a standard on both GRE and GMAT for years.) On the new GRE, it would not be a surprise to see the following sentence inserted within the directions:

Be sure to consider the possible consequences of continuing to rely on the print medium exclusively.

Such a sentence would force examinees to think about the alternatives to getting involved in e-media, whereas on today’s GRE and GMAT – which offer no such “customized” instructions – only those examinees who happen to think of those alternatives will bring them up. See the difference?

On the downside, customized directions mean that one really can’t pre-plan one’s structure or approach much in advance. On the upside, one’s brainstorming will be given a specific and directed jump start, which is the surest way to ensure an interesting, substantive essay. Business schools, in particular, will be interested in seeing the results of a more directed kind of thinking process.

What won’t change is the edge that a GRE examinee will possess if she has a strong command of basic writing skills and a practiced affinity for argument. And those skills can and should be learned and improved, well in advance of Test Day.

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We began this deconstruction of the proposed GRE with the basic principle that the GRE is hoping to muscle in on the GMAT’s turf by offering business schools a superior assessment tool, their means of doing so the addition of newly-thought-out question types and better usage of the computer format’s features. Naturally, it’s way too soon to decide when (or even whether) the entrenched GMAT will take much of a hit in this regard.

We do know that some business schools have already begun to accept the GRE in lieu of the GMAT. We can also be pretty sure that the GRE folks wouldn’t embark on this complicated and expensive process if they didn’t feel they had a reasonable prospect of achieving their goals. (Those goals include a better, more predictive test, of course. But the goal of giving the GMAT a run for its money can’t be forgotten.)

Above all, we know that unless there’s an enormous, undetectable sea-change in the wind, the odds of any business school’s totally dropping the GMAT in favor of the GRE – at least in the near term – are long indeed. So just as aspiring college students are free to submit either the SAT or ACT for admission purposes, b-school applicants should be in the enviable position of examining two tests, taking practice tests in both, and then submitting only one real score to a business school. Right now, Kaplan’s advice to the precollege student is to take a prep course for one of the exams – the one s/he feels most comfortable with – and then to take both the ACT and SAT for real. In time, this may very well be our advice to those eyeing business school as well.

The watchword for now is: Knowledge is power. Keep an eye on both the GRE and GMAT websites as these next few months roll along. Take note of individual b-schools’ announced or proposed admissions requirements, especially those in which you have an interest. Don’t be afraid to call a business school or two, and ask them (politely) how they are feeling about this new GRE, and whether they anticipate they’ll accept its scores. And keep watching this space for Kaplan’s take on future developments.

The new GRE will be much less of a mystery by the time it’s first offered. So will the policies of each business school, as it does its own assessment of the terrain and decides what scores, or combination thereof, will suit its purpose: to assemble the very best first-year class it can.

What GRE changes mean to you: Success at a keystroke?

Of all of the changes to the GRE, the one that excites most students is the addition of an onscreen calculator on Test Day. They are elated at the prospect of a reduced need for scratch paper, not to mention the reduced likelihood of errors caused by freehand number crunching. Today’s students are, of course, generally comfortable with new technological solutions to a challenge, and many students are inclined to welcome them unquestioningly.

At the same time, ETS is almost certainly looking forward to the calculator as a clear point of differentiation between the GRE and the test whose business the GRE is looking to steal a big chunk of: the calculator-free, scratchwork-dependent GMAT.

Yet it’s possible that, for examinees at least, the calculator will not be an unmixed blessing. For one thing, it’s quite likely that the GRE testmakers will write problems with the calculator in mind. Quantitative Comparisons will doubtless involve more variable manipulation, bringing them closer (interestingly enough) to Data Sufficiency “Yes/No” questions on the GMAT. In a similar vein, Problem Solving questions are likely to get tougher now that the writers can incorporate more complex calculations than before. It’s a good bet that when the dust settles after a few months, GRE watchers will agree that the difficulty level of the Quantitative Section will have risen, perhaps significantly so.

At the same time, there will surely be many GRE math problems that don’t lend themselves to calculator use. Those students who unquestioningly welcome technological means can be expected to rush to the calculator, even when doing so is inappropriate or when calculating by hand would actually be faster. All standardized tests are set up to reward examinees for their number cleverness, not for a lumbering cranking out of solutions, and sometimes on the new GRE it will simply be cleverer not to use the calculator.

So will the calculator have an effect on scores? If so, the effect isn’t likely to be profound, once the problems themselves are adjusted to compensate for the ability to make quicker calculations. Thinking – that is, the ability to decide the best approach for a given problem at a given moment – will remain the skill the GRE is most eager to assess, a trait it shares with the business school entrance exam that GRE hopes to supplant.

In my final posting, I’ll turn my attention to the forthcoming changes in the Analytical Writing Assessment.