David Payne, vice president and COO of the Higher Education Division of the Educational Testing Service, said the Graduate Record Examination test will receive changes that will be enacted in August.
He said the changes have been under development for about three years, and many of the changes reflected on the new GRE came from feedback given by graduate and business school administrators.
Payne said the GRE, which is taken by about 675,000 students each year, is used by graduate and business schools to analyze applicants using a common standard.
He said there are three specific ways the test will change when the new GRE is implemented.
“At the highest level, we are changing all three sections of the test,” Payne said. 
The first change is the skills analyzed on the GRE will now be more aligned with the skills necessary to succeed in graduate school, he said.
Antonym and analogy questions have been removed completely from the Verbal Reasoning section of the test because these were deemed inaccurate predictors of a student’s overall success in graduate school, he said.
The second change to the GRE is it has been made more user-friendly and less stressful to prepare for and take.
“We have worked hard to make the test as friendly as possible for students,” Payne said.
For example, students will now have access to an on-screen calculator.
In addition to these two changes, the new GRE’s scoring scale will be simplified for the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections of the test and will be easier for faculty and administration to analyze and evaluate.
“We think it will minimize score misinterpretation,” Payne said of the changes to the score scale.
Another major facet of the changes made to the GRE will be on the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections,  inwhich questions can be answered in any order. Previously, questions had to be answered in order, and each question was based on whether the previous one was correct or incorrect. On the revised test, students can answer in any order, so they are able to preview and review any question, Payne said.
He also said the new version of the test will be be offered for half of the normal price in August and September to help set the new test scoring scale by getting an average sample of test takers.
Payne said there are many study tools on the GRE website, and the GRE’s Facebook page is a great resource where all students in the test-taking community can benefit from each other’s experiences.
Luke Fowler, president of the MSU Graduate Student Association, is a graduate of  the University of Southern Mississippi and is working toward a master’s and Ph.D. in public policy and administration.
Fowler, who took the GRE twice, said the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections were difficult because unless one knows the definitions of all five word choices, he or she does not have a chance of doing well on the antonym and analogy questions.
Fowler said one positive feature of the GRE is, because the test is worked on a computer, the person taking the GRE knows his or her score upon finishing.
“Compared to the ACT and SAT, I really like the computer-based test version,” he said of this feature of the GRE. “A lot of the stress of standardized tests is waiting four to six weeks for results.”
Fowler said because of the changes made to the GRE, all departments will probably have to go back and reconsider their admissions standards, and some programs may take this opportunity to make their graduate programs easier or harder.
“I think this has important implications,” he said.