The debut of the revised Graduate Record Examinations General Test, originally slated for Oct. 2006, will be delayed one year, the Educational Testing Service announced Wednesday.

An estimated half million students take the GRE each year, and the General Test is required for entry to nearly all graduate-level programs of study.

ETS’s GRE Board believes the delay will ease the transition into the new exam for both students and graduate schools, according to an ETS press release.

ETS announced last fall that it was overhauling the 55-year-old exam for security purposes, as well as to increase the validity of the GRE as a measure of readiness for graduate school.

Many admissions officers do not view the GRE as relevant, saying the exam is a poor test of the skills needed to excel in graduate school, according to a press release from The Princeton Review.

ETS announced additional changes to its revision last month.

The revised GRE will double in length, making it over four hours long, and will omit antonyms and analogies in favor of more questions focused on

verbal reasoning and critical analysis.

The revised General Test will also be administered over a secure Internet connection, as opposed to the proctored paper- or computer-based exams currently offered.

The Internet platform that will be used to administer the new GRE is already in use, and was first developed by ETS for the recently revised Test of English as a Foreign Language.

ETS has more than 9,000 test sites worldwide and has announced that it plans to open several thousand more in the next two years.

“The new launch schedule will enable us to complete the expansion of Internet-based testing operations worldwide,” said Mari Perlman, ETS senior vice president for higher education, in a press release.

While ETS is adding more test sites to increase the accessibility of its exams, it will also significantly scale back the number of test dates offered in an attempt to prevent cheating.

Currently, students can take the GRE almost every day of the year, but the new exam will only be offered about 30 times annually.

The dramatic decrease in the number of test dates will allow ETS to use an entirely new exam on each test date, with no repeated questions from prior tests.

Test preparation companies viewed the delay and the announced changes with skepticism and said the change in the launch date may negatively affect some students who were already planning to take the exam in the near future.

“Though the year-long delay in the change to the GRE may wreak short-term havoc on aspiring graduate students’ test-taking considerations, it’s ultimately a good thing, as it gives students additional breathing room and more time to take the current shorter version of the test,” said Matt Fidler, GRE program manager for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, in a press release.