Tag Archives : GRE

It wouldn’t be right to start off the new year without some predictions about what will happen with the GMAT and in graduate school admissions in 2011. While last year’s predictions of 3D GMAT classes and a free solar-powered Kindle for every HBS student never quite materialized (we’ve still got our fingers crossed), we’re feeling bold enough to issues some new predictions for the coming year.

Without further ado, here are six things that we expect will happen in the GMAT and admissions spaces in the year ahead:

Education Testing Service (ETS), the group that runs the GRE, has introduced an updated version of the GMAT/GRE score comparison tool that it first announced last year. It provides a slick, easy-to-use interface for applicants to input their GRE General Test scores and see a predicted equivalent total GMAT score.

The changes to the tool look mostly cosmetic, with a Flash-based interface replacing tables and charts, although it does look like ETS also increased the sample size on which the comparison tool is based. The 2009 version of included the results of 525 people who took both exams, while ETS says this version includes data from 893 test takers.

Score one more point for Educational Testing Service (ETS) in its effort to take market share from the GMAT as the preferred test for business school admissions. On his Morse Code Blog, U.S. News Director of Data Research Robert Morse announced that this fall’s U.S. News survey will ask admissions offices detailed questions on GRE test scores and the number and the percentage Class of 2012 students who submitted them.

In an article on BusinessWeek.com yesterday, BW’s Francesca Di Meglio dug deeper into the “GMAT or GRE?” question. She interviewed several leading experts on the subject, including our own co-founder and CEO, Chad Troutwine.

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.

After seeing ETS make some significant inroads into GMAT market share with its own GRE over the past year, GMAC is now hitting back with an article on its site that debunks ETS’s GRE Comparison Tool for Business Schools.

After NYU Stern’s announcement that it will start accepting the GRE as well as the GMAT for MBA admissions, we’ve been getting more and more questions from business school applicants about what top business schools accept the GRE. While we still believe that the GMAT is the best predictor of how someone will do in business school, there’s no denying that ETS has made impressive strides this past year in promoting the GRE General Test as an alternative to the GMAT.

Yesterday Harvard Business School joined the likes of Stanford GSB and MIT Sloan when it announced that its general two-year MBA program will starting accepting the GRE from applicants this fall. This move comes after the HBS 2+2 Program announced in March that it would accept both the GRE and the GMAT this year. While this won’t affect your plans if you have already taken (or are about to take) the GMAT, it will potentially attract a bigger and more diverse applicant pool to Harvard’s two-year MBA program.

In an HBS press release, director of admissions Dee Leopold said, “We are pleased to widen our requirements to give all MBA candidates the option of submitting results from either the GRE or GMAT exams. Since many HBS applicants are also considering graduate programs besides the MBA, there is now no need for them to take the GMAT if they have already taken the GRE. We believe that both the GMAT and the GRE meet our expectations of what a standardized test can tell us about a candidate’s ability to thrive in our MBA Program.”

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.

We’ve previously weighed in on the GRE vs. GMAT question in the media. Now, one more big name among business schools plans to start accepting the test: Harvard has announced that it will accept the GRE for HBS 2+2 Program applicants starting this year.

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: