Info on CAT,GRE TOEFL,IELTS,GMAT,PTE Academic

At the close of 2009, BusinessWeek devoted an article to the ongoing competition between the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), which owns the GMAT, and Educational Testing Services (ETS), the publisher of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). According to the BW article, some business school applicants don’t know which exam they should take as part of the process of applying to business school.

Clear Admit’s own Graham Richmond contributed to the article, sharing with BW that fewer than 10 percent of his clients here at Clear Admit have taken only the GRE to apply to business school. “The GMAT is still the gold standard,” Richmond told BW, adding that he has been telling clients to take the GMAT unless they are dual-degree candidates who are applying to graduate schools that require the GRE.

To better understand Richmond’s position, we thought we’d take a few minutes to outline the full story behind the current GMAT/GRE debate.

Basically, ETS had been the test service provider for GMAC since 1954, when the GMAT test was first introduced. At that time, “ETS provided the only option for the development and delivery of secure, objective and valid high-stakes assessments,” according to a release issued by GMAC. But half a century later, several other very competent testing services had joined the field, and GMAC elected not to renew its contract with ETS when it expired in December 2005, partnering instead with Pearson VUE and ACT, which it believed could provide new test security measures.

For ETS, this represented a huge loss. “Roughly 250,000 people take the GMAT in a year – and more than 267,000 this year – so that’s more than $66 million in revenue,” Richmond pointed out. “That’s the revenue ETS lost when GMAC said they would be taking the exam over to Pearson,” he continued.

So it should come as no surprise that ETS has since been scrambling to regenerate revenue, including courting business schools to accept GRE scores in lieu of GMAT scores. “Basically what they did – and this is brilliant on their part – is they said to the schools that if you want to get the best candidates you should accept both tests,” Richmond said. ETS also offered to create a converter that would make it easy for schools to compare GMAT scores to GRE scores.

And some top business schools have indeed decided to accept both tests, including Harvard Business School (HBS), Stanford Graduate School of Business and MIT Sloan School of Management.

“In the near term, I absolutely understand what the schools are doing,” Richmond says. “They are saying, ‘We want the best applicants from a range of backgrounds so why not take another exam?’”

By accepting GRE scores, HBS, Stanford and Sloan, among others, hope to capture talented younger applicants who may be considering fields other than business but who will apply to business school if it doesn’t involve preparing for an additional exam. “Good people always manage to shine whether they take the GMAT or GRE,” Rod Garcia, director of MBA admissions at MIT Sloan, told BW. The GRE also costs $100 less than the GMAT and is available in more geographic regions, making it accessible to a wider applicant pool.

But this stance concerns Richmond on two levels. First, he says, in an era in which business education is often under attack in the popular press, schools risk fueling the fire by saying you can take whatever exam to get in. “It kind of supports the common criticism that you don’t need a license to practice business,” he said, adding that law schools haven’t begun to accept the GRE in lieu of the LSAT. “I see it as a short-term gain with the potential for long-term harm,” Richmond added.

Richmond also suspects that the schools who have publically stated that they will accept either exam in fact have a particular candidate in mind when they say that. “Some schools are willing to accept the GRE, particularly from candidates who are also considering other graduate degrees or from early-career folks who took the GRE at the end of their college years, but I don’t necessarily view that as an invitation to the average applicant not to take the GMAT,” he said.

So while several top business schools have indeed begun to accept GRE scores in lieu of GMAT scores, those of us here at Clear Admit urge prospective applicants to think long and hard before opting for one exam over the other. If it’s simply a matter of convenience and ease, consider what kind of message that might send to the school to which you are applying. Getting into business school is hard work. Be willing to work hard for it.