Tag Archives : GMAC

The Graduate Management Admission Council recently released its statistics for GMAT exams taken through June, 2010, and the data show that applicants are sending GMAT scores to European schools in numbers never before seen. According to the GMAC report, European MBA programs received 85,000 GMAT scores in the one-year period ending June 30, 2010, compared to about 45,000 in the year ending five years earlier. That 90% growth compares to global growth of just 30% in the number of times the GMAT was taken, over the same period.

Have that many more Europeans recently decided to apply to business school? Actually, nearly two-thirds of the scores sent to these schools came from applicants outside of Europe, with India and China leading the way. It seems that the wave of Indian and Chinese applicants that hit the U.S. in the early and middle part of the last decade (and has since softened a bit) is now washing over Europe.

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has announced that those who take the GMAT between November 19 and November 24 will be among the first to see examples of the GMAT’s new Integrated Reasoning questions in a live test setting. This will strictly be for the purpose of evaluating the questions, and will have no bearing on students’ official GMAT scores. Anyone who completes the sample questions and fill outs a short online survey the next day will receive a $25 credit for their time.

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has announced that it will host an online admissions fair featuring admissions representatives from dozens of top MBA programs next month, on November 22 and 23. The GMATCH Virtual Fair, which will take place entirely online, is being billed as the “the first truly global virtual fair” for business school applicants and admissions officers.

As you likely know, the GMAT is a computer-adaptive test (CAT), in which your score is calculated by an algorithm that provides you with harder questions (and higher score returns) when you answer previous questions correctly, and with easier questions (and lower returns) when you’ve answered previous questions incorrectly.

Have an idea for how the world’s top MBA programs should train the business leaders of tomorrow? Think you can do it better than business schools currently do it? Your idea could be worth $50,000. The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has invited anyone to answer this question: What one idea would improve graduate management education?

Last Friday the Internet was buzzing with news that the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) will drop one of its AWA essays and replace it with a new question type, called Integrated Reasoning, in June, 2012. The new question format was designed, in GMAC’s own words, to “measure people’s ability to evaluate information from multiple sources.” (BusinessWeek and Inside Higher Ed both turned to Veritas Prep’s own Chad Troutwine for his take on the new question type.)

Despite an employment environment that remains stubborn, new MBA grads are growing more confident about the economy, according to a new survey released by GMAC this week. Somewhat surprisingly, this increase in optimism actually comes despite a drop in the percentage of grads who have jobs compared to last year.

GMAC recently announced that it has expanded its GMAT fee waiver program for the coming year. The new program builds on an existing initiative that helps people cover the cost of taking the GMAT.

Much has been made of Educational Testing Service’s announcement that it will introduce significant changes to the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) test in 2011. With the market for grad school-related standardized testing heating up as GMAC and ETS butt heads, these changes are sure to be closely watched.

A couple of weeks ago we posted some key learnings from the GMAC Test Prep Summit in New York City. While we wanted to post the most GMAT-relevant information as quickly as possible, there were a few more insights that we picked up that we wanted to share here.

Last week dozens of key players in the test preparation space converged on New York City for the Graduate Management Admission Council’s third biennial Test Prep Summit. Four members of the Veritas Prep team flew to New York to attend what some of us called “The Oscars of Test Prep.” While there were no red carpets or $10,000 dresses, we really enjoyed attending this “who’s who in test prep” event to meet our peers and to hear directly from GMAC about what they have planned for the GMAT and other programs.

Late last week the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) announced a new partnership with the nation’s Historically Black College and University (HBCU) business schools to attract more African Americans to MBA programs nationwide. The partnership will include more recruiting efforts by schools, more marketing of the value of an MBA to black students, and fee or significantly discounted GMAT preparation services for those students.

Perhaps motivated by ETS’s push into the MBA admissions market with the GRE, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) recently announced that it will introduce an upgraded GMAT in 2013. Dubbed the “Next Generation GMAT,” the new exam will be designed to overcome the business school community’s largest objections to the current exam.

One common criticism of the GMAT is that has a strong bias in favor of Western culture, in part because it is only offered in English. While this does create some built-in unnatural advantages and disadvantages based on a student’s native language, one strength of this “single language” approach is that it makes it easier to compare GMAT scores of students from anywhere in the world. If, with the new exam, Student A scores a 720 in English and Student B scores a 720 in Mandarin, will an MBA admissions officer really be able to make a direct comparison between the two? It will be interesting to see how GMAC tackles problems such as these.

According to the results of a new survey published by the Graduate Management Admission Council, most business school grads agree that an MBA is well worth the investment.

In the 2008 MBA Alumni Perspectives Survey, nine out of 10 grads from the Class of 2008 reports that their graduate business education met or exceeded their expectations. Additionally, 80% of MBA grads in the workforce believe that they couldn’t have obtained their first job without their degree.

Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik just wrote a story about the Educational Testing Service’s push to replace the GMAT with its own GRE exam as the standardized test for business school admissions, and he turned to our own Chad Troutwine for his take on this budding competition:

According to a recently released survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), the growth in applications from female applicants continues to be strong.

In this year’s survey, 65% of full-time MBA programs said application volume from women grow vs. last year, compared to 57% of programs saying this in 2007. That growth was especially strong in several core disciplines, including part-time master’s programs in accounting and master’s programs in finance.

Apparently, the Scoretop scandal isn’t the only case of cheating that the GMAT has experienced lately. Another form of cheating has been going on, where students pay others to take the GMAT for them. GMAC president David Wilson won’t let on the extent of this form of cheating, but he did say that 590 cases of “proxy” test-taking broken up by federal authorities “underscored the problem.”

(If you haven’t heard about the Scoretop scandal yet, you might want to check out our earlier posts on the subject: GMAC Addresses GMAT Cheating Scandal and More on the Scoretop Scandal)

This month the Graduate Management Admission Council released a report showing that demand for business school graduate remains strong even as the economy shows signs of weakness.

The report, produced by GMAC in partnership with the MBA Career Services Council and European Foundation for Management Development, shows 6% growth in the percentage of employers making offers to MBA grads, and an 11% increase in the average number of hires by each hiring company.