Ignoring for a moment the terrifying idea of sitting in a room for four hours instead of two and a half to take the GRE, the changes that will take effect in the fall should actually turn out to benefit students.

Every student who applies for a graduate school program must take this exam, which is expanding from five sections to seven sections and will be set up in a new linear form, according to Monday’s Kernel article.

“This is the biggest change in the 55-year history of the test; it is going to affect every aspect of getting into the graduate school of your choice,” said Jung Lee, GRE program manager for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, in the Kernel article.

Considering how big of a change this is and how long it’s been since the GRE has had such a change, Lee and his colleagues probably debated the pros and cons extensively before making the final decision.

And a change like this, while sometimes hard to accept, deserves some respect from those it will affect.

The current version of the exam is set up in an adaptive form, so that the difficulty of each question asked is based on answers to previous questions. As a result, a student could potentially flop a question and never make it to other questions that he or she would be perfectly capable of answering.

Security issues are also a problem with the current version.

“The current test has a pool of questions each test draws from and some students would post the questions on the Internet,” Lee said in the Kernel article. “The new linear form prevents repetition of questions.”

The new linear form also gives students a chance to answer all the possible questions on the exam. Focusing on higher cognitive and reasoning skills, it should give a better prediction of how successful a student will be in graduate school.

Other changes, such as the decreased number of testing times during the year and the different scoring scale, will take some getting used to, but shouldn’t have a negative effect. Although the test will be administrated only 30 times each year, there will be more testing locations, and students should be able to plan ahead in order to schedule their test day without much difficulty.

As for the increase in time, well no one really wants to sit down and take a four-hour test, but the test should be more accurate and more fair as a result. And as students who plan on getting into medical school or law school would probably argue to those whining about the added time, the MCAT lasts over five hours and the LSAT lasts three hours, so the new GRE length is not as ridiculous as it appears.

All in all, as much as the idea of a four-hour GRE makes most students who plan on taking it cringe, it should be worth it.