In addition to many previously announced changes, more modifications to the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) have just been released, affecting the nearly 500,000 graduate school applicants who take the test annually.

With the current version of the GRE, students are permitted to take the test on almost any day of the year.

Starting in October, however, the test will only be administered 29 or 30 days out of the year.

Matt Fidler, GRE programming manager, said the Educational Testing Service (ETS), who makes the test, decided to implement the changes for two main reasons.

Primarily, they feel the new test, which includes content changes, better assesses the skills and abilities used in graduate school.

Security concerns in Asia were also a leading factor in the change.

Fidler said officials had been noticing that students overseas were memorizing the test contents and posting them online.

In response to potential cheating, the tests will be identical for a given day regardless of location.

Once a particular test is administered, it is retired, and the questions will never be used again.

Fidler said this makes the test questions nearly impossible to replicate.

The GRE will also be more expensive, though a definite price has not been released yet. The current price is $115.

Ashley Leasure (senior-archaeological sciences and geography) said she plans to take the GRE in the coming months but has heard about the changes.

"It sucks, but it's not like I'm going to not take them because of it," she said, in reference to the price increase and the fact that the test will be doubling in length, from two and a half hours to nearly four hours.

The actual content of the GRE will also be changing.

For the first time, sentence completion questions will appear on the test, asking test takers to select two of six answer choices that best represent the same meaning.

Analogies and antonyms in the verbal section will be eliminated and replaced with more reading comprehension and critical thinking questions.

In the quantitative section, geometry questions will be reduced, and more data interpretation and word problems will take their places.

There will also be a scoring delay with the new test.

ETS will take the first three administrations of the exam and hold those scores back to finalize the scoring scale, so test takers might not get their scores back right away.

Currently, the test is scored on a scale from 200 to 800, including both verbal and quantitative sections.

With the new test, the scale will probably range from 110 to 150, Filder said.

Another new feature is that the graduate schools will be able to see not only the students' scores on the analytical writing section -- which is the current policy -- but also the actual essays.

Fidler said that historically, people flock to take tests before a big change like this one, so he advises students to register early.

He suggested taking it before the changes come into play if students can sufficiently prepare beforehand.

He said Kaplan would begin offering preparation courses for the new exam beginning this summer.

Victoria Grantham, Kaplan test prep and admissions senior communications manager, said she expects to see an increase in inquiries about the new test and attendance at free practice test events, as well as an increase in test prep enrollment.

Fidler said Kaplan will also talk to graduate schools about how they will implement the changes on a general scale.

However, he advised students to talk to their target schools to find out how they will use the scores specifically.