The Graduate Management Admission Test — the dominant test for MBA entrance, but one that is facing competition — will soon have a new section, designed to test the ability of would-be business students to analyze multiple kinds of information.
The new "integrated reasoning" questions will present test-takers with a spreadsheet, a table, text and other information and then ask either single or multiple questions. While the answers will be multiple choice, there will likely be multiple correct answers, with test-takers asked to list all correct answers. These new questions will replace one of the two GMAT essays and will be reported in a new score, while preserving existing scores for the essay and the verbal-quantitative total. The new section will be added in 2012.
Testing experts see the move as a sign that the Graduate Management Admission Council, an organization of business schools that owns the GMAT, is trying to make the test more focused on MBA entrance and management education, probably as a means to fend off competition from the Educational Testing Service's Graduate Record Examinations. In 2003, ETS lost the contract to manage the GMAT, and in recent years ETS has pushed the GRE as an alternative test that business schools might use, setting up the GMAT-GRE competition as one of the hottest in the world of standardized testing.
The reason that the GMAT was open to a challenge is that it is not a test specific to business schools, but rather features general verbal, quantitative and writing sections. While designed to test someone's ability to succeed in a business program, the test itself doesn't stress economics or accounting or any specific business school skill set — or at least that has been the case until now.
The changes reflected a broad evaluation of the existing test, as well as interviews with business school faculty members. Sarathy said that what the review found was that test-takers generally earned very similar scores on each of the two essays, so having two essays as opposed to one was adding little information. What faculty members wanted was more of a test that resembled the kind of analysis that business school students actually perform, and that new MBAs might do in their jobs.
As an example of the kind of questions that might be on the test, the GMAC said that students might receive a spreadsheet with data on the number of passengers and flights in and out of 21 airports, and then be asked to respond to a series of statements about the data and/or other information with regard to the various airports. Many of the questions may not be factual, but may be about trade-offs raised by certain choices.
The new questions will take 30 minutes and — with the elimination of the essay — will not add to the time of the test (currently 3.5 hours). The changes reflected a "continuous evolution" of the GMAT in an effort to try to better predict which people would succeed in business school.
The relative strength of the GMAT and GRE is the subject of much debate among their partisans. More b-school applicants take the GMAT, but the GRE has made inroads in terms of the number of business schools that will accept the test as an alternative.
No comments:
Post a Comment