The Educational Testing Service will postpone converting the Graduate Record Examination to a computer-only format for two years, according to ETS Spokesperson Kevin Gonzalez. The conversion, originally scheduled for completion in 1997, will now take place in 1999. Gonzalez said the delay is meant to give students and administrators of the test greater flexibility by offering both the written and computerized versions of the test for a longer time. But representatives of Kaplan Educational Centers, the nation's largest test preparation company, disagree. According to Kaplan Spokesperson Melissa Mack, the delay is a direct result of research conducted by Kaplan that allegedly proves the computerized GRE is easily compromised. Mack explained that the computerized GRE gives all students a question of medium difficulty to begin the exam. Depending on the student's answer to this question, the next question will have either a high or low degree of difficulty. Because of the nature of the test, the possibility exists that students could see the same questions on subsequent exams, according to the Kaplan study. "If you took the test twice in six months, you would know 50 percent of the questions," Mack said. Gonzalez denied the charge, saying there was "no chance" that students could have cheated on the exam by memorizing previous questions because of the size of the question pools. However, future versions of the test will include more item pools, hundreds of additional questions, and increased question-scrambling to address the issues raised by Kaplan, he added. In December, Kaplan presented ETS with a list of recommendations for improving the exam, after evaluating surveys they obtained from students who had taken the exam. ETS suspended the computerized GRE for one week in late December to address these security concerns and also filed a lawsuit against Kaplan alleging copyright infringement. Kaplan claims it never had any intention of disclosing test questions to students and was only seeking to ensure the integrity of the exam. "The problem would be?whether we conducted our research or not," said Mack. "If you can improve your scores by cheating on the exam, obviously it hurts our business." But Gonzalez was skeptical of Kaplan's motives, given that Kaplan's disclosure occurred during ETS's busiest season. "It doesn't matter that they didn't show [the test results] to anybody," he said. "They stole questions from us." In response, Kaplan has charged that ETS has violated federal law by not releasing the exam to students after the administration of the test. "ETS has not been disclosing the tests to students because they were using the same questions over again," Mack said. But Gonzalez denied that ETS was required by law to disclose the test to students, citing a "special administration clause" in the law which ETS claims exempts the computerized exam from disclosure. While ETS maintains that the test has always been secure and will be even more so in the future, officials at Kaplan remain skeptical. "We feel it's good news that they're taking the time to improve the exam," said Mack. "But ETS has not released enough information for us to know whether or not the test is secure."
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