With all the debate surrounding the College Board's new, "improved" version of the SAT, you'd think there would be some discussion about the changes that have recently been made to the GRE (Graduate Record Exam). But it's as if the SAT has served as a sort of standardized decoy. While pundits, parents, teachers, and administrators have been duking it out about whether the SAT should test aptitude or achievement, whether it is racially or ethnically biased, whether verbal analogies measure anything worth measuring and whether the addition of a tougher math section and a writing sample will help or hinder those populations that have historically done poorly on the traditional SAT, the GRE has been overhauled in some extraordinarily controversial and potentially destructive ways. And no one, as far as I can tell, has raised an eyebrow.

The GRE is to graduate school as the SAT is college (note skilled use of the much-maligned verbal analogy). If you want to get a Ph.D., you have to take it and report your scores as part of your application. Like the SAT, the GRE has math and verbal sections that read like enhanced versions of their SAT counterparts and are scored, like their SAT counterparts, on an 800 point scale. Traditionally, the GRE has also had an analytical reasoning section and what's known as a "subject test"--a specialized multiple choice exam that measures your knowledge of your proposed field of study. Both of these have also been scored on an 800 point scale.

As of October 1, however, the analytical reasoning section of the GRE will be replaced with a two-part writing section, described on the GRE website thus:

The assessment consists of two analytical writing tasks: a 45-minute "Present Your Perspective on an Issue" task and a 30-minute "Analyze an Argument" task. The "Issue" task states an opinion on an issue of general interest and asks test takers to address the issue from any perspective(s) they wish, as long as they provide relevant reasons and examples to explain and support their views. The "Argument" task presents a different challenge--it requires test takers to critique an argument by discussing how well-reasoned they find it. Test takers are asked to consider the logical soundness of the argument rather than to agree or disagree with the position it presents. These two tasks are complementary in that the first requires the writer to construct a personal argument about an issue, and the second requires a critique of someone else's argument by assessing its claims.

Reading through GRE.org's Q&A on the new format, the rationale for the change seems straightforward enough: writing skills are crucial in academe; too many students arrive at graduate school without the requisite writing skills; the GRE ought therefore to test writing ability. And, indeed, in my quick googling of the issue, I did not find any major objections to the change. A student paper at Arizona wondered whether the new requirement would discriminate against non-native English speakers, but that was about it.

The essay portion of the GRE has been optional for two years, and its format has been borrowed from the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test), which has been using the two-part writing assessment for a number of years. The MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) and the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) also have essay sections. This probably accounts for the ease with which the analytical writing section has been adopted as the new right way to assess how prepared someone is or is not to embark on graduate study. The GRE has long been an outlyer in its failure to test the writing skills of aspiring Ph.D. students. But I think, too, that a lack of analytical reasoning ability has, ironically, had a lot to do with how quietly and decisively the change to the GRE has been made.

Certainly the writing section provides a way to verify a student's real writing skills. Just as the SAT writing section will allow college admissions officers to see what an applicant's writing looks like in its raw, unpolished state, before it has been thoroughly worked over by parents, teachers, and hired consultants, so, too, will the GRE essay section allow the testing service and graduate admissions committees to get a look at a writing sample that is unequivocally the applicant's own work. (The statement of purpose and the writing sample portions of the standard graduate application are, like college entrance essays, notorious for being the much-coached products of collective efforts at packaging.)

But certainly, too, the writing section provides a way of verifying a student's politics. In an overwhelmingly left-wing academy, one where many humanities and social science departments cannot count a single Republican as one of their members and where, as a consequence, the curriculum is heavily and unapologetically biased against conservative and religious beliefs, this is, to say the very least, a problem. There is already plenty of informal (and illegal) gatekeeping going on at the graduate admissions level--now the GRE looks to be making it official.

A paranoid assessment? Not in the least. I'll explain why in part two of this series.

To be continued....