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The Washington Post

December 16, 1994, Friday, Final Edition

Computerized graduate exam called easy mark

Rene Sanchez, Washington Post Staff Writer

The computer version of the Graduate Review Exam, which more than 100,000 prospective graduate school students take each year, will be shut down for a week this month because officials of the company that administers the test believe it may be too easy to cheat on.

Educational Testing Service, which gives millions of standardized tests each year to the nation's students, announced yesterday that it will not let anyone take the computer version of the GRE during the last week of December because the current program for the test may allow students -- or test-coaching companies -- to memorize and pass on questions. The company said it will spend that week revamping the exam's structure and content.

The decision will directly affect only 1,000 test-takers who had been scheduled for that week, but it raises questions about the vulnerability of the computer exam. The GRE is used by graduate schools as one standard in accepting students.

Yesterday's move marked the first time the test had been suspended for security reasons since the company, in a revolutionary move, began administering the GRE by computer. About a half-million students take the exam each year, but until 1992 they had been able to do so only with pencils and paper. This version of the test is offered four times a year.

The computer version of the exam, however, is administered every day of the year at about 200 testing sites around the country. That makes it more susceptible to security breaches, testing specialists said.

Because the paper version of the exam is given so infrequently, it can be radically altered each time. That makes attempts to memorize large portions of it to pass along to others virtually useless. But because the computer version is offered every day, ETS programs a limited stock of questions into it. That stock does not necessarily change daily or even weekly, ETS officials said.

ETS officials said they decided to shelve the GRE temporarily after the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center, the nation's largest test-preparation firm, disclosed to them that it had acquired large portions of the computer exam. Kaplan is owned by The Washington Post Co.

"This is a wake-up call," said Jonathan Grayer, Kaplan's chief executive officer. "The computer version definitely poses more risks."

After hearing anecdotal evidence of GRE questions being passed along computer bulletin boards, Kaplan officials said that they attempted an experiment: They sent in 20 researchers over a few weeks to try to memorize questions, then compared notes and determined that they had seen many of the same ones.

"We're afraid that now that this kind of procedure is widely known, it could be widely taken advantage of," said Nancy Cole, the testing service's president. "We're adopting much more stringent procedures that will make this technique much tougher."

Grayer said Kaplan has turned in its research to ETS and has vowed not to use it in its test-preparation courses. ETS officials, meanwhile, said that when the GRE's computer version returns, its program will be greatly expanded and frequently changed.

"We've known this has been a potential problem," Cole said. "And we have been working to make it extremely difficult to compromise the security of the exam."

SERIES: Occasional

CORRECTION-DATE: December 17, 1994, Saturday, Final Edition

CORRECTION: The GRE was incorrectly identified in an article yesterday. Its correct name is the Graduate Record Exam.

TYPE: NATIONAL NEWS

Copyright 1994 The Washington Post

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