All You Need to Know About the New, Shorter GRE

In this episode, Rohit Sharma, Sr. Vice President of Global Higher Education and Workskills, explains how ETS made the GRE almost two hours shorter (without cutting any sections) and why that’s a good thing for test takers - and institutions. [SHOW SUMMARY]

Are you wondering what the new shorter GRE is about? What does it mean for you as applicants and test takers? This episode is for you! We’ll be discussing the new shorter GRE format and how it affects test-takers with ETS’ Sr. Vice President of Global Higher Education and Workskills.

An interview with Rohit Sharma,Sr. Vice President of Global Higher Education and Workskills at ETS. [Show Notes]

Welcome to the 531st episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me. Today's show is all about test prep, and I'd like to start with a quick one-question quiz. What is the paradox at the heart of graduate school admissions? Well, I'll tell you. You have to show that you belong at your target programs and simultaneously that you stand out in the applicant pool. Doing so is paradoxical and challenging. Accepted's free download, Fitting in and Standing Out: The Paradox at the Heart of Admissions, will show you how to do both. Master this paradox, and you are well on your way to acceptance. 

Our guest today is Rohit Sharma, Senior Vice President of Global Higher Education and Workskills at the Educational Testing Service, better known as ETS. Rohit earned his bachelor's in engineering from IIT Kanpur in India and his MBA from UVA Darden. He has worked as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group and for over 20 years he has contributed internationally in management and product design and development in the fields of digital skills training, assessment, and higher education. 

Rohit, welcome to Admissions Straight Talk. [2:03]

Thank you, Linda. Thank you for having me.

I'm delighted to speak with you today. So GRE is undergoing some transformations, right? ETS is giving us a whole new GRE. How is the new GRE going to be structured? [2:07]

Great, thank you. First of all, the GRE is going to be similar in many ways to the old one in terms of having the same three sections that we have always had, which is the verbal reasoning, the quantitative reasoning, as well as the analytical writing section. So those three things remain unchanged. But the big news here is that the time that the test used to take previously, which was close to four hours, is going to be reduced in half to just shy of two hours. So that's a big change that we are making.

And then I assume you're not sacrificing any kind of predictability or validity to the test in cutting it in half. [2:51]

Of course, that was almost like I left it hanging there so that you asked me that, but it goes without saying-

I fell for it. [3:09]

Yes, no, thank you. But it goes without saying that as you know, ETS has a very long history of over 75 years that we have been around, and one of the things that we are so proud of is the research that goes behind all of our assessments. So the validity, the reliability of these measures, these assessments, the constructs that they measure continues to remain the same as it was before.

So the total time is much less. You still have the same three sections. So is each section just basically cut in half? [3:32]