A federal test administrator announced last week that Education Testing Service will not be implementing a new version of the Graduate Record Examination this year as previously planned.

ETS previously announced it would stop administering the current exam July 31 and start administering a new test in September. However, ETS officials reevaluated the situation and changed their minds.

"In going through their final evaluation, they made a determination that they were not confident they could provide access to the test for all 500,000 students that will be looking to take it over the next year," said Ben Baron, vice president of Graduate Programs at Kaplan Test Preparation and Admissions for ETS.

The GRE is currently available to students almost every day, but the new test would have only been available 35 days per year.

"In terms of testing sites and availability, they weren't ready, and the risks of not being available to all students outweighed the benefits of the changes they were planning to make," Baron said.

In addition to changing the test's duration from two and a half hours to four hours, ETS had also made significant content changes. The company wanted the exam to better measure critical thinking skills instead of measure vocabulary that a student could simply memorize.

"ETS wanted to make the test … a better predictor of how a student will do in graduate school," Baron said, adding Kaplan recommends students start preparing for the exam about three months in advance.

Baron also said Kaplan has not yet started preparing students for the new exam but has begun preparing a new course for those students that would take the new version in the fall. They will now continue on with their current course.

"At Kaplan, we were advising students that as long as they had time to prepare, they should go ahead and take the test before it changed," Baron said.

University of Wisconsin senior Josh Juedes said he is planning on taking the GRE at the end of May. He said that the changes to the test partially affected his decision of when to take it.

"It was a factor," Juedes said. "I didn't want to be a part of that first guinea pig group … that could ultimately affect my getting admitted to a graduate school."

Juedes added he has not enrolled in any preparation courses but will study on his own.

"I'm planning to get some books from the library," Juedes said. "And the ETS website gives you a great prep packet."

Although students like Juedes do not need to worry about the new format of the exam, it is still possible students in the future will be affected by changes to the GRE.

"ETS has not made any specific announcements about when they will introduce changes to the exam," Baron said. "But given that they spent four years working on the (new) test, it's reasonable to assume that they will be making some changes to the exam."