Applicants of the Chinese mainland looking to attend graduate school abroad will be able to take the brand-new computer-based Graduate Record Examination (GRE) beginning on Saturday, according to the Educational Testing Service (ETS).

Featuring a new design and new types of questions, the revised GRE test more closely reflects the kind of thinking students will do in graduate or business schools and demonstrates that they are ready for graduate-level work, according to ETS' website.

The new test allows students to skip questions and revise their answers within a section. Students are also given an on-screen calculator for the quantitative reasoning questions.

In the verbal reasoning section, antonyms and analogies have been removed, meaning that students are no longer tested on vocabulary out of context.

The new test adds questions aiming to assess how students will respond to scenarios they may encounter in campus and in the workplace.

The overall testing time is extended to about three hours and 45 minutes. Students can elect to finish all three sections in one day.

Scores for quantitative and verbal reasoning sections will be administered on a scale of 130 to 170 in 1-point increments, instead of 200 to 800 in 10-point increments. Analytical writing scores will continue to be given on 0-6 score level, in half-point increments.

The revised test will be held once or twice per month on the Chinese mainland instead of just twice a year.

The scores of students who take the revised GRE test in August or September will be available in mid-November due to the grading changes, while scores of previous GRE tests will still be accepted by American universities.

The GRE test is the most widely accepted graduate admissions test worldwide. Each year, about 675,000 prospective graduate- and business-school applicants from 230 countries and regions take the test, according to ETS.