After four years of research and planning, a revamped Graduate Records Exam will be a better judge of students’ knowledge among graduate school applicants, test administrators say.

The changes signal what the Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the test for graduate school admission, calls “the most significant overhaul of the GRE General Test in the test’s 55-year history.

David Payne, executive director of the GRE Program, says that the new test format will include more scenarios that closely mimic true life as well as more questions pertaining to data interpretation. “The new test will emphasize complex reasoning skills that are closely aligned to graduate work,” Payne said.

ETS says the new changes will also improve the validity of the GRE. Like the SAT, the GRE will include a section that is not scored but used for calibration purposes.

The Verbal Reasoning section will place greater emphasis on higher cognitive skills and less emphasis on vocabulary. The Quantitative Reasoning section will include fewer geometry questions and more real-life scenarios. Analytical Writing will be 15 minutes shorter and will include more focused questions.

Also, the test will increase to more than four hours, up from the current two-and-a-half-hour exam.

The changes will be in effect for the test's October 2006 administration.