Students applying for graduate schools will face new challenges as the Educational Testing Service updates the Graduate Record Exam to include a writing assessment test and the American Medical College Application System struggles with electronic setbacks.
The GRE change, finalized at the June meeting of the GRE Board, will take effect October 1, 2002 and affects the General Test, required for admission into most graduate programs in America.
The writing portion was introduced in response to graduate schools' interest in a way to measure "critical reasoning and analytical writing," according to the ETS website. ETS representatives had not responded to The Dartmouth as of press time.
The exam consists of two essays: a 45-minute perspective piece and a 30-minute critique. For the perspective piece, students will be asked to address a topic, randomly chosen from several hundred pre-written prompts, from any point of view and provide proof.
The argument portion requires test-takers to analyze an argument based on its logical basis and provide supporting evidence without taking a side.
The essays are scored on a six-point scale by professors who have been specially trained and whose work involves teaching writing-based classes.
The General Test is now composed of multiple-choice verbal and quantitative portions, along with the writing assessment. The current analytical portion has been removed from the test.
Students who register to take the assessment will be provided with free test preparation software beginning September 1.
Medical students, too, face new challenges this year. The online application system run by the AMCAS has been experiencing bugs since it was first released in May.
These issues were resolved by early July, according to Pamela Cranston, Associate Vice President of the Association of American Medical Colleges. The problem now lies with troubles in electronic distribution of student information to schools.
According to Cranston, problems have ranged from bugs with the software to schools not having the right equipment to networking issues.
AMCAS is releasing another version of the software this Friday which it hopes will fix the problems, Cranston said.
AMCAS is run by the AAMC and acts as a centralized service. Students send in their information, which is standardized and then distributed to all the medical schools to which a student applies.
In light of these difficulties, many schools are requesting that students print out their online applications and send them in by mail, along with their secondary, school-specific applications, rather than relying solely on the AMCAS service. Information for individual school procedures can be found under the Nathan Smith Premedical Society BlitzMail bulletin.
