More than 10 years after taking her SATs, Candy Chang recently found herself sitting in a nondescript testing suite on 34th Street, her head crammed with trig formulas and obscure definitions, waiting to take the Graduate Record Examination.

Three hours later, she emerged from the testing room, her mind reeling.

“It just seems so foreign to all the things that I do as a person in the real world,” Ms. Chang, 28, now a graduate student at Columbia University, said. “It made the test seemed a lot more ridiculous to me than when I was a kid in high school.”

Each year, roughly a half million graduate-school applicants take the GREs, hoping to do well enough to gain admittance to their top choices. The format is similar to the SATs. Each section flashes on the screen, verbal analogies appear, cylinders disappear, the time limit flickers, and then – the final score.

But compared to its well-publicized cousin, its role in admissions decisions is less clear, leaving many applicants, like Ms. Chang, to view the exam, and the seemingly useless task of recalling the Pythagorean Theorem, as nothing more than a three-hour test in patience.

Admissions counselors and university officials for years have echoed Ms. Chang’s concerns, questioning whether the exam does justice to applicants who have acquired a broad range of skills through several years of work experience.

“The problem is that measuring verbal and quantitative ability can only tell you so much about a person, especially at the higher education levels,” a professor of education and director of testing at the University of Maryland, Bill Sedlacek, said. “The exam is an artifact that we keeping want to pretend is working but it does not. And it is the only thing we have.”

And compared to undergraduate institutions, graduate admissions tend to be less centralized, more specific in their requirements, and less dependent on standardized evaluations. At NYU, for instance, each graduate department determines its own requirements, evaluates each applicant independently, and makes the final admissions decision.

“Each program looks for very different things in their applicants,” the director of admissions for the graduate school of arts and science at NYU, David Gionvanella, said. “The exam is just one part of the application. We look at the statement of purpose and depending on the program, what kind of research they have done.”

While NYU does require applicants to take the GREs for the university wide application, it does not require minimum admittance scores, Mr. Gionvanella said. “There are no cut offs. Everybody is looked at and every application is read, regardless of the GRE scores,” he said.

According to Terence Peavy, assistant vice president at the New School University, GRE requirements are determined by each department or division, and in some cases are not even required.

“The biggest myth that applicants have to battle is that not having a perfect score is not going to get you into a certain institution,” Mr. Peavy said. “Honestly, I think looking at just scores pulls away from the most important part, which is looking at the entire student.”

Still, the test is required by more than a thousand graduate programs nationwide and often is seen as an integral component of the admissions process. And while universities like NYU and the New School may be more open to alternative methods of applicant evaluation, there are hundreds of universities that rely on the exam as part of a weeding-out process.

One of the main reasons is necessity.

“Standardized testing, for better or worse, has become part of the education culture,” the spokesman for the American Association of Collegiate Registrar and Admissions Officers, Barmack Nassiran, said. “The problem is that in the U.S. we don’t abide by a national curriculum, and the test offers a basic evaluation, even if it is questionable.”

In addition, it’s convenient for institutions because the applicant has already paid for the test. All the school has to do is require it, said Mr. Sedlacek.

Similarly, many universities view high GRE scores and minimum score requirements as a surefire way to boost a program’s reputation. And a good reputation often directly translates into more research funding, the lifeblood of most universities, Mr. Sedlacek said.

In this respect, a low score on the exam can in some cases hurt an applicant’s chances, especially when applying to highly competitive programs. “Places that have more applicants then they can accept don’t want to accept someone with a flaw because they see that as a risk factor,” a professor of psychology at Yale, Bob Sternberg said.

Still, most universities are more willing to consider the nuances of the application. “Don’t get hung up on test scores,” Mr. Sadlacek said. “The test can shed some light, especially at the extremes, meaning very high and low scores. But a 20-point increase does not necessarily indicate your intelligence. Twenty points is within the margin of error.”

The Education Testing Service, which administers the GRE exam, has recently stepped up efforts help dispel examination myths and educate admissions officer on the evaluative strengths and weakness of the test.

“The GRE program has been very clear that admissions decisions should not be made on single scores,” the executive director of the GRE program for ETS, David Payne, said. “We do not believe scores alone should exclude people from admittance.”

Mr. Payne advises that students take time to become familiar with the test, learn the format, and practice each section. Old tests and real-time GRE tests given on the computer are offered for free through the organization, along with a selection of study aids and material guides. The most expensive material they have is $21, he said.

Practice and familiarity also will help alleviate pre-test jitters. “The standard clinical approach to anxiety is to put yourself in the anxiety-provoking situation and do it a couple times. Taking a real-time practice test a couple times can help in the same way,” he said.

Some applicants may choose to take one of the pricey test prep courses and Kaplan offers a variety of options from online courses to private tutoring. However, most admissions counselors agree that a prep course is not essential to improve your score. “It’s like losing weight,” Mr. Nassiran said. “It is certainly possible to do it on your own, but it is going to be easier if you pay a professional to [help] you.”

And for those like Ms. Chang, who are left questioning the value of the exam, there is help on the way.

In October 2006, ETS plans to implement a number of sweeping changes to the test’s format, tailoring it to better evaluate the skills related to graduate work, such as critical thinking and complex reasoning. The idea is to target more research-oriented skills.

This initiative comes less than two years after ETS swapped the previous logic section for a writing assessment to help graduate programs better evaluate an applicant’s ability to build and express a logical argument.

The new test offers expanded reading-comprehension sections, more data interpretation questions, such as evaluating statistics, and places a stronger emphasis in “real-life scenario” problem-solving questions such as percentages and proportions.

In exchange, ETS plans to eliminate the verbal analogies and decrease the number of geometry questions. There will also be some changes to the writing assessment, such as offering the same time limit for both essays and adjusting the questions to reflect the shortened writing period.

But one of the most significant changes will be to the test’s structure itself. Now, the computer-based test operates by customizing each question according to the outcome of the questions before it. This adaptive process allows each computer terminal to customize each test to its taker.

The new test will revert back to the previous, linear version, in which all tests offer the same questions, in the same order. The examinee can skip questions, move ahead, and then return to them at a later time. And everyone will take the same test.

The drawback of returning to the old system is a greater number of questions. The advantage is that it heightens security measures. “Everyone will be taking the same test at the same time, all over the world,” Mr. Payne said. Once used, those questions will never be used again. “It decreases the chances to access questions beforehand,” he said.

Mr. Payne advises against trying to beat the test. “There are no techniques that will help you achieve scores higher than your ability levels,” Mr. Payne said. “So if they want to take that approach, I urge them to ask themselves is that what is going to help you be a successful graduate student.”