Prospective graduate students will see changes in the Graduate Record Examinations as early as this November, the exam's administrator announced last week.

The Educational Testing Service announcement followed a late April cancelation of a long-scheduled overhaul to the exams, which would have included two extra hours of test time and limited the number of times the GRE would be administered each year.

The changes are intended to make the exam more challenging, and future examinees might face a numeric entry or text completion sections of the exam.

"These question types have already been through extensive field trials, and the results indicate that the questions are functioning as intended," ETS Associate Vice President of Higher Education David Payne said in a statement.

The new math questions require test-takers to fill in the correct numeric answer in a box instead of the usual multiple-choice questions, while the new verbal questions require students to complete two to three blanks within a passage from separate multiple-choice lists.

According to ETS, students will either encounter both questions separately or none at all, and no partial credit will be granted for the sentence completion part of the exam.

Tom Ewing, spokesperson for ETS, said the adjustments in the exam are the result of reviews and opinions from university deans nationwide, and the graduate community has always been very involved in the design and improvement to the test.

The test will continue to be administered at students' best convenience, and other improvements will be done gradually in the next few years, Ewing said.

However, the new questions will not count as part of a student's final score, officials said.

"We will begin counting these question types toward examinee scores as soon as we have an adequate sample of data from the operational testing environment,” Payne said.

But GRE program manager for Kaplan, Jennifer Kedrowski, said students should take the new exam questions seriously, as ETS may count the scores without previous notice.

The GRE is taken by 445,000 students worldwide applying for master's degrees, Ph.D.s and other graduate programs in English-speaking countries.

Kedrowski said the previously scheduled changes were canceled because of the inconvenience of having fewer examination dates would be bigger than the benefits. She advised prospective students to take the exam before the new questions start counting toward their scores.

"Take the exam sooner rather than later, so you don't have to take those more difficult questions," Kedrowski said.

UW senior Whitney Sweet, who has taken the exam twice, said the GRE is challenging enough because there is no official preparation method.

"Normally, I'm really good at English and verbal stuff, but [the exam] was very hard," Sweet said.