Beginning in October 2006, graduate school- bound students will be facing a transformed Graduate Record Examination.

In an effort to measure the skill, ability and academic potential of students more accurately, Educational Testing Service (ETS) has made significant alterations to the verbal reasoning, analytical writing and quantitative reasoning sections of the GRE.

“There was a lot of concern that the test wasn’t as predictive as it needed to be, assessing only a small portion of linguistic and mathematical abilities,” said Nancy E. Stamp, vice provost and dean of BU’s grad school. “With the new changes, hopefully the test will better assess problem solving, collaborative, communicative and critical thinking abilities, which are better indicators of how well an individual will perform in graduate school.”

Analogies and antonyms will be eliminated from the verbal-reasoning section and replaced with critical-reading and sentence equivalence questions, testing a student’s ability to paraphrase texts.

“This change was made to better test verbal abilities, while avoiding the pure memorization of vocabulary,” said Tom Ewing, a spokesman for ETS. “This one 30-minute section will now become two 40-minute sections.”

Ewing added that the analytical writing section will be changed to two 30-minute essay questions, shortening the section by 15 minutes. Previously, the essay questions were very broad, leading to very general and unfocused essay responses. The new essay questions will be more specific, to better assess analytical writing skills, officials said.

The current 45-minute quantitative section will become two 40-minute sections, containing less geometry, more data interpretation and word problems. Test takers will also be allowed the use of an on-screen calculator. According to David G. Payne, executive director of the GRE program, these word problems will test a student’s capacity to apply mathematics to “real-life scenarios.”

Further, the GRE will also make a leap from a two-and-a-half-hour test to a four-hour examination.

“The length of the test has certainly increased significantly; get a good night sleep before taking it,” Stamp said.

For years, the test was offered in a computer-adaptive format, which tailors each test according to a student’s abilities. With this current format, the degree of difficulty for each question is determined by whether a student answers the previous question correctly.

“The computer- adaptive format means that ETS has to have large pools of questions sitting in test centers so that computers can constantly pull out questions during tests,” Ewing said. “The longer the pool of questions sits out there, the more students can share and recall answers with each other, and this is quite a concern at ETS.”

The new GRE will be offered in a linear format in which every test taker receives the exact same test questions at the same time, regardless of ability or location. In a continued effort to prevent cheating, the test will now be offered 30 times a year with significantly fewer recycled questions. Previously, the GRE was offered continuously throughout the year.

“The test won’t be harder,” said Ewing. “But it will certainly be more authentic.”