When Xuemei Wang decided she wanted to pursue graduate studies in the United States, she knew she’d have to work hard if she wanted to get accepted to a good school.

For Wang, a native of China, this meant studying for about six months for the Graduate Record Examinations and taking a three-month class to help her prepare for the test.

“I studied a long time and I did okay,” Wang said, an instructional design, development and evaluation doctoral student at Syracuse University, “but I think the GRE is a really difficult test for international students.”

In October the GRE may become even more difficult for both international and domestic students when the analytic portion of the test will be replaced with a writing assessment measure.

Tom Rochon, executive director of the GRE program for Educational Testing Services, said the changes are a result of feedback from university administrators across the country that the analytical section of the test wasn’t helpful in determining whether an applicant should be admitted to graduate school. ETS administers the GRE and other standardized tests, including the Scholastic Assessment Test.

“Many deans and administrators are in celebration that this measure will get us out of the multiple-choice mode and into one which students are able to perform more intelligent thinking,” Rochon said.

In addition to the analytic portion of the test, which tests the ability to understand relationships between concepts, there are also verbal and quantitative sections on the GRE. These sections, which evaluate the test-taker’s ability to analyze and evaluate written material, and measures math skills, respectively, will remain a part of the test.

Rochon said the changes would allow admissions counselors to see how well potential students can argue a subject and support what they want to say.

“Our researcher tells us it’s a great way to measure analytical and writing skills,” he said. “For the first time it gives the test takers an opportunity to show their reasoning skills.”

Peter Englot, director of the Graduate Recruitment Office at the Graduate Enrollment Center, said his office and SU’s graduate school is looking forward to the new version of the GRE.

“It’s my understanding that the GRE board thinks the analytic part is disposable because most people who use the GRE have had questions about the utility of that portion of the test,” Englot said. “They’re not been quite sure of what to do with it.”

While Englot and Rochon are encouraged by the test’s changes, advocates for international students aren’t sure the changes will be fair to those who come from other countries.

“My guess is that it will put a burden on international students because their compositional skills are not as fluent as domestic students,” said Sidney Greenblatt, assistant director for advising and counseling at SU’s Lillian and Emanuel Slutzker Center for International Services. But Englot said he thinks international students will overcome this new hurdle in the application process.

“I wouldn’t sell international students short,” Englot said. “In my experience we’re dealing with a pool of academically strong students.”

Englot said many international students are at the top of their class in their home countries, and that some countries even regulate who can study in a different country than their own.

Wang said that in China there are no governmental mandates that determine which students are allowed to study abroad. Children in China, however, begin standardized testing in preschool, Wang said. The schools students attend are based on the results of these frequent tests, and those who perform well attend better schools and receive better teaching.

“Better students go to better schools,” Wang said. “It’s just the natural way things go.”

Because Chinese students are accustomed to standardized testing, they may find it difficult to adapt to the more open-ended writing measure of the GRE.

“With the other parts we know how to handle those kind of questions. We know straight out if it’s wrong or if it’s right, but with the written it will be more subjective,” Wang said.

Englot said the writing assessment might give international students a voice they may not otherwise have in the application process.

“International students don’t really have the ability to showcase their writing abilities in any other way,” Englot said.

Wang agreed.

“I think they may even prefer this writing part because they can use the words they know and don’t have to memorize and worry about other words that are unfamiliar to them,” she said.

Rochon said to keep the assessment of the writing portion objective, each of the two essays are evaluated by two independent readers who work as faculty at colleges across the United States. Rochon said the evaluators teach in a variety of fields across the curriculum to ensure there’s no subjectivity.

“There’s obviously a subjectiveness to the test but we’ve done everything we can to reduce the subjectivity and ensure we capture the quality of the responses and reasoning,” Rochon said.

He said that in preliminary tests of the evaluating system, the essay readers had a 97 percent match rate in assessing the essays.

In addition to causing difficulties for international students, some fear the new test may also prove troublesome for students with engineering-type backgrounds, who depend on the logistics of the analytical portion of the GRE.

Rochon said the writing assessment may be more difficult for these students, but because they’re not applying for admission to the same programs as students who will excel in the writing assessment, these students should not worry.

“The issue isn’t how engineers do against English majors,” he said. “The issue is ‘Are engineers who compete against other engineering students going to fare well against those other engineering students?’” The writing assessment portion of the test will require test-takers to complete two essays dealing with reasoning. The first will require students to state an opinion and argue why that opinion is valid, while the second requires students to critique a given challenge, make a claim and support it.

There are 150 of each type of question that could be placed on the test. The combined 300 questions are all available online for test-takers to prepare from before the test, Rochon said.

“In principle one could read and review the questions and know they’ll get one of them on the test,” he said.

Wang said she doubted international students would study every essay question that could be on the test, but said she thinks Chinese students who take the test will succeed anyway.

“It will be harder for international students,” Wang said. “But I think once they have the desire to come here they won’t let something like this stop them. They’ll find a way.”

Published on April 2, 2002 at 12:00 pm