GMAT to be a four-part exam from next month
From next month, prospective business school aspirants who sit down to take the Graduate Management Admissions Test, or GMAT, may notice something different: Instead of a three-part exam testing verbal and mathematical skills and analytic writing ability, there will be a four-part exam with a new section devoted to integrated reasoning.
The new section is designed to test the ability to evaluate and synthesize data from various sources presented in a number of different formats, and to predict plausible and probable outcomes. It is also partly there for security purposes, as reports of cheating have risen.
According to Alex Chisholm, director of statistical analysis for the Graduate Management Admission Council, or GMAC,students from the Asia-Pacific region are expected to make up 61 percent of the international applicants for full-time M.B.A. programs in United States. He added that the new integrated reasoning section was intended partly in order to help assess the new, more global, candidate pool.
Ashok Sarathy, GMAC’s vice president in charge of the testing program, said the exam had undergone “a continuous evolution” since it was introduced in February 1954 by a group of nine business schools in the United States.
They included those at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern.
Unlike the G.R.E., which is offered in electronic and paper-based versions, the GMAT is a computer-adaptive test, meaning that questions answered correctly are followed by more difficult questions, while mistaken answers are followed by easier questions. Also, unlike the G.R.E. or other standardized tests like that SAT, the GMAT does not allow skipping questions or modifying previous answers.
The final score is given on a scale of 200 to 800 derived solely from the mathematical and verbal portions of the test. In 2010, the mean score was 544, while 720 was the median score for students admitted to Harvard and the Wharton School, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania. The new section, which will be graded on a scale of one to eight, joins the analytical writing section, graded on a scale of zero to six, as “a separate data point” outside the composite score.
In part, the new section on integrative reasoning was a response to demand from business schools “asking for a way to evaluate a new set of skills,” Mr. Sarathy said.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com
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