At one cut-off date, the Graduate Administration Admissions Check (GMAT) was the de facto examination that college students took to get into enterprise college. However in 2006, the creators of the GMAT, the Graduate Administration Admissions Council (GMAC), determined to sever ties with the Academic Testing Service (ETS), who up till that time had administered the examination. This transfer, which ended the non-compete clause that the GMAC held over the ETS, allowed the ETS to problem the stranglehold that the GMAC had on enterprise college testing.
Since 2006, the ETS has been campaigning faculties to simply accept the GRE as an alternative choice to the GMAT. In line with a press launch by the ETS, “About 450 MBA applications worldwide now settle for the GRE take a look at, together with 45 p.c of the U.S. Information & World Report’s high 100 U.S. applications and 7 of the highest 10 international MBA applications based on The Monetary Instances.” These faculties embody among the top-ranked enterprise faculties on the earth, akin to Harvard, Stanford, Wharton at UPenn, Stern at NYU, and Sloan at MIT.
Moreover, the revised GRE, coming in August of this yr, is partly meant to make the examination extra enticing to enterprise faculties. The ETS web site states, “ETS has revised the take a look at to higher mirror the sort of pondering you will do in graduate or enterprise college and enhance your test-taking expertise. New kinds of questions now extra carefully align with the talents you’ll want to achieve as we speak’s demanding graduate and enterprise college applications.” Eradicating analogies and antonyms, as an illustration, shifts the main target away from memorization and in direction of evaluation and understanding.
It is no shock that an increasing number of faculties are beginning to settle for the GRE. The ETS estimates that there are roughly 700 GRE testing facilities in 160 nations world wide; distinction this with a 2010 GMAC press launch, which estimates that there are 500 testing facilities in 110 nations. Colleges that determine to simply accept the GRE can develop their applicant swimming pools by making it extra handy for worldwide candidates making use of to US enterprise faculties on this period of globalization. Moreover, the transfer to simply accept the GRE is useful to college students as properly. Those that try to determine between going to graduate college and going to enterprise college haven’t got to decide on one over the opposite or fear about taking two assessments (and paying two registration charges) — they’ll merely take the GRE and apply to each. Testmasters recommends that potential college students take each assessments and submit the upper rating.
With the upcoming launch of the brand new GRE and the momentum that the ETS has constructed up over the previous a number of years, we will anticipate to see an increasing number of enterprise faculties accepting the GRE for admissions. After all, the GMAC shouldn’t be merely twiddling its thumbs because the ETS courts its main market — the GMAT is scheduled for a serious facelift in 2013 to provide the examination extra business-specific content material.
However who is aware of? By then, it could be too late.
