For students looking to apply to graduate programs, the standardized entrance exam required by many admissions boards will look significantly different next year.

The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) will be overhauled in 2011, following what the makers of the test have called the “largest revisions in its 59-year history.”

The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the nonprofit organization that administers the exam, announced last month that the current GRE will be revamped and slightly lengthened to reflect the type of work students will do in graduate schools.

The GRE will still consist of verbal, quantitative and analytical writing sections but each section will be revised in both its content and format. In the verbal section of the exam, antonyms and analogies have been removed and replaced with reading comprehension. The new version will also allow test takers to use an online calculator in the quantitative section.

Another planned change to the test will allow test takers to skip questions within sections and revisit them later on. In the current computer-adaptive version, a test taker must give a final answer to a question before moving onto the next question.

But the biggest change to the GRE is the revision to the scoring scale, which will become much narrower.

“One of the potential challenges is that it will make it more difficult for a student to make a standout test score when there is a much narrower range of score points,” said Arthur Ahn, director of graduate programs for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.

Currently, the GRE is scored from 200 to 800 points in 10 point increments. The new GRE will go from a scoring scale of 130 to 170 in one point increments. There are a total of 61 different iterations a student can have for their score, but in the new test there will only be a possible 41, Ahn said.

The current scoring scale, he said, represents a much clearer way to identify standout scores for admissions boards.

“It is very difficult to make an assessment from a 150 to a 152 [score], whereas it is easier to make that assessment from a 500 to a 540,” Ahn said. “So to really make a standout score on the new GRE, [test takers] will have to make a significantly higher score than their competition.”

The changes in the GRE, however, do not come without a level of uncertainty. ETS officials twice aborted sweeping revisions to the test, once in 206 and again in 2007.

Neill Seltzer, the national GRE content director and GRE expert for the Princeton Review, said ETS officials were overly ambitious with their changes in 2007 and got cold feet just months before the revision would have taken place.

“ETS still needed and wanted to change the test,” Seltzer said, “but they wanted to do it incrementally and prepare their audience for it.”

Seltzer also said that the GRE as it exists today is identical to an older version of the SAT, but it was repackaged for graduate schools.

“The SAT has since changed. The GRE, other than computer adaptive’s, has not,” Seltzer said.

The overhaul to the GRE also comes after ETS lost its contract to produce and administer the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), the required test for business schools. GRE experts have postulated that the aggressive changes to the exam were made in part to attract business school candidates.

“The loss of that contract represented a huge blow to their product offering, “ Seltzer said. “The new changes to the GRE, including the scoring scale, are suspiciously similar to the GMAT.”

Seltzer said marketing efforts and competition on the part of ETS have been at the crux of the changes.

“[ETS] has done an extremely good job of marketing the GRE to admissions folk at business schools,” Seltzer said. “They’ve been working hard to position it as an alternate test for business schools. And in that sense, they are trying to broaden the base of people who will potentially take the GRE.”

Although the test is required for most applicants to U.S. graduate schools, some educators and students doubt the GRE’s capacity to accurately assess the academic success of students.

“ETS is always fighting the rearguard action to continue to justify the relevance of this test,” Seltzer said. “Everyone looks to this test and knows that it has absolutely nothing to do with what students are going to learn in a master’s course.”

Still, this has not deterred the more than 600,000 students from taking the test annually. The number of students who took the GRE in 2009 rose to a record breaking 13 percent, according to a report released by ETS.