Students taking the Graduate Record Exam Thursday can expect new challenges, but with only one or two changes per test, some may not take notice.

The GRE, a required entrance test for masters and doctoral programs, will add two types of questions: a numeric entry question in the quantitative reasoning portion and a revised text completion question in the verbal reasoning portion of the exam.

“We’re trying out new question types,” said Karen Bogan of Educational Testing Service, the company that created the GRE.

“Most students wouldn’t be able to recognize them because they are so similar to the other questions,” she said.

The announcement to gradually introduce new questions came from ETS after the decision to overhaul the test was thrown out earlier this year in April. The new question types, which are variations of current questions, will not be scored until sometime in 2008, according to Bogan, who said the questions were “not a big impact.”

“ETS is gathering research, and once we have enough data we will validate (the questions),” Bogan said. “We want to make sure the test is measuring what it is supposed to measure.”

Kaplan test preparation’s GRE program manager Jennifer Kedrowski said the ETS’s decision is “big news for students because they need to be prepared.”

Kedrowski, who previously taught GRE preparation courses, advised students to take the exam sooner rather than later before more changes are permanently made to the exam.

Kedrowski encouraged practicing well in advance for the test, saying “I want to make sure students are familiar with the questions so they are not thrown off.”

University senior Nadia Farra has been preparing for the GRE for the past two months.

“I think the math questions will definitely make the test harder,” Farra said. “At least before you had a 25 percent chance of answering correctly, and now one decimal point could get you a wrong answer.”

Farra said she understood the need for more challenging questions, especially when looking into graduate programs for next fall.

“I think the grad school admissions are becoming more competitive so they need to make the GRE a more competitive test,” she said.

For more information on the GRE, examples of the new question types and how to study for the exam, go to www.ets.org/gre.