On August 1, Educational Testing Service (ETS) launched the revised version of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) test, the biggest change in the test in years. The test reduces the emphasis on vocabulary in favour of reading skills, apart from new type of questions in verbal and quant sections. There is now also an on-screen calculator and answers can be edited, which means that the test is now adaptive with every section and not every question.

Lately, increasing acceptance of the GRE at top international business schools had positioned it as an alternative test score to the GMAT for applying to top MBA programs. In a quick interview with PaGaLGuY, David G Payne, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of ETS’ Higher education division explains what this means for applicants to top American and European programs and what the future of standardized testing is going to be.

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Although the number of business schools accepting the GRE for admissions has increased, the highest proportion of students admitted through the GRE route has been reported at 7%, that too among a handful of schools. Do you see this changing?

We have a b-school advisory council made of people from some of the top MBA programs of the world who we bring together twice a year to learn what is happening in the b-school market. The last time they came together, we polled them informally and found that they were getting around 10% in terms of the number of applicants applying through GRE. That number is higher than what I thought it was going to be.

What is happening is, now that we have more and more number of b-schools accepting the GRE, it’s now possible for applicants to take the GRE and send it to a large number of schools. Whereas earlier, if you were applying to some of the early adopters of GRE such as the Harvard Business School or MIT Sloan, you could send your GRE score to them but not to Wharton. But now that even Wharton is on board and we have a broader array of b-schools accepting the GRE, the number of people taking the GRE to apply to MBA programs will increase.

The other thing that’s going to bring about a change is that — let’s say you were applying to MBA programs through the GRE. You can now take our new test-taker friendly format, pay less money (than the GMAT), have better access to the test and get free all-day access to our evaluation tool for non cognitive skills that b-schools are now valuing.

A figure of 7% GRE-sourced acceptances in the class is still not very encouraging for an applicant who is comparing the GRE with the GMAT. What do you think will get him out of this inertia and take the GRE instead of the GMAT?

You now see statements coming out of b-schools like Stanford and MIT Sloan saying that the applicants coming out of GRE are doing just as well as applicants from GMAT. At the end of the day, the only difference is the type of score they send in. We also provide a comparison school to b-schools that helps them to take an applicant’s GRE score and predict what their GMAT score would be. During the initial part of the transition to full acceptance of GRE, this comparison is going to be important. From the candidates’ perspective, the schools aren’t discriminating against candidates applying with the GRE at all. There are 7-10% applying through the GRE, but the ones accepted are doing just as well.

In India, adoption of the GMAT is largely driven by ISB Hyderabad and IIM Ahmedbad’s PGPX programs. Are you planning to tap this market by getting these schools on board the GRE too?

As far as the GRE is concerned, what’s really happened among the b-school community is the word of mouth. Once we got the news that Harvard Business School would accept the GRE, there was a slew of leading MBA programs that also made the announcement. So we have not had to do a super amount of outreach. The schools have themselves been making the decisions in their best interest.

Admission tests started out with paper-pencil tests and have now moved to computer-based tests. What is up next?

One of the things that we see happening is the large scale adoption of iPads, tablet devices or netbooks. It’s probably going to be the case that we’ll soon be able to deliver tests on devices that test takers own. I can imagine a scenario wherein the candidates bring their laptops or tablet computers to the testing center where we can monitor them so that they are not cheating. That would increase the access to the test among a different type of test-takers.

How would security and cheating be managed if testing devices are decentralised?

There are two types of concerns here. One is the concerns from a software perspective. How do we ensure that while sending back the test scores from the devices, we are not gonna get hacked? We take this very seriously. At ETS, we have experts who have worked in the financial industry and ensure that we are up at the same level as financial transactions as far as security of software is concerned.

The second issue is — when you send out your tests regardless of whether you are sending them from a tablet or paper-pencil, you need to make sure at the center that everyone is following the same rules and nobody is getting access to the test ahead of time or using any other device or material to help them on the test. This is the part where administration matters and we pay huge attention to that.

What is the next big thing in testing?

I think the next big thing is going to have two forms. We are going to move towards having simulations of what a test is really intended to assess. For example, if you are looking to assess suitability to study an advanced degree in biochemistry, we should be able to have simulation tests about what happens in a biochemistry lab. Or you should be able to simulate the lab environment which you are going to be using in an IT degree to assess programming or networking skills.

If that happens, it’s also the case that our educational experience is going to change. A lot of what can be taught can also be simulated. For example if you are looking to train teachers for a primary school, right now we send people out to actual primary schools for teacher training.

Why not simulate a classroom instead? We can simulate a classroom using bots as primary students in which a teacher can learn to teaching. So that even if the teacher doesn’t do a good job, the students aren’t put at a risk and bots don’t get hurt.

You can simulate a whole range of things like that and testing or assessments can be built right into the system. ETS has been working on this for a number of years and in a couple of years it’s going to be feasible to do this.

Teaching is one of the areas where this would first be implemented. Also in b-school programs, team projects involving real world experience can be implemented as simulations. Students would be interacting with each other on the project on the web and you would be able to capture all that information.