GMAT 2011: What to Expect From the GMAT Exam in 2011

Recently, the Graduate Management Admissions Council (the authors of the GMAT exam) announced that a new section would appear on the GMAT in 2012. This section, Integrated Reasoning, is currently under development by the GMAC. However, for the time being, the GMAT exam in 2011 will retain the same format it has had since it switched to a Computer Adaptive Test in 1997.

That being said, students who take the GMAT in 2011 should be aware of some broad trends. First of all, the median GMAT score has been trending upwards in the past five years; currently, the median GMAT score is 540. Interestingly, this upward trend has been observable since 2005; in the previous five years, the median GMAT score remained steady at 520.

I can think of two possible explanations for this trend. First, 2005 was the year that Pearson VUE took over administration of the GMAT exam from ETS. This switch may have caused GMAT scores to reset to a higher baseline. Secondly, a number of excellent new test prep companies have gained popularity since 2005. Along with new GMAT test prep materials, additional GMAT study options have become available. In particular, online GMAT test prep and online GMAT tutoring has become more accepted. The wealth of high-quality test prep materials and greater access to skilled GMAT instructors may be contributing to the rise in GMAT scores.

Another trend is the rising number of non-US citizens taking the GMAT exam. In 2009, the majority of examinees sitting for the GMAT exam were non-US citizens. Although US-based programs are still the preferred destination for most MBA applicants, business schools applications in other countries have been growing astronomically. Since 2005, MBA applications have more than doubled for schools located in India, Singapore, and Spain.

Although US schools are losing “market share”, the absolute number of applicants is still rising due to the rise in the overall level of GMAT examinees. In 2009, 263,000 examinees took the GMAT, compared to 200,000 in 2005. This represents a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of about 7%. At this rate, the GMAT 2011 will have just over 300,000 examinees. However, it should be noted that historically, the number of GMAT examinees increases most rapidly during economic recessions. This seems to be true in the latest economic cycle. In 2006 GMAT test-takers only increased by 4,000, while in 2008 and 2009 GMAT examinees increased by more than 20,000 each year.

One ratio appears to be holding constant. Since 2000, the ratio of male to female examinees on the GMAT exam had held steady at 60/40. Since this ratio has held steady for the past ten years, it is likely that it will be roughly the same for the GMAT 2011.

Overall, since the new section of the GMAT exam won't be added until 2012, current test prep materials remain valid. Students certainly should not delay taking the exam until 2012 because of the new section. The right time to take the exam is when you can devote 2-3 months to studying, while leaving yourself with ample time for application essays and recommendations.

For more information about the GMAT 2011, visit The Gmat Tutor.

Does a GMAT score of 750 increase your chances of acceptance more than a score of 700? (part 2 of 2)

In the last post, I used data from the Kellogg School of Management to demonstrate that admissions committees put a premium on a 750+ Graduate Management Admissions Test score, as compared to a 700-740 Graduate Management Admissions Test score. The question then becomes: is it worth spending the extra time, effort, and money to improve your score to a 750+ level? The answer, of course, is “it depends.”

The Graduate Management Admissions Test continues to persist in MBA applications because it’s the only standardized metric for adcoms to compare students from different backgrounds. However, it is only one part of your overall application. An admissions officer at UCLA Anderson writes,

“Beyond the [GMAT] lies such qualitative measures as leadership and teamwork skills, managerial experience, initiative, ability to learn and growth from mistakes, introspection, ability to articulate clear reasons for an MBA and career goals going forward, contributions (to school, work, and/or community), etc. It is here that the bulk of time of applicant evaluation is spent. Although less quantifiable dimensions than the GMAT, they are equally important.”

My takeaway from the above quote is that the incremental effort to boost your GRADUATE MANAGEMENT ADMISSIONS TEST score is better spent working on your essays, career, and extracurricular activities. If you start your MBA application process early enough (January of the year you are applying), you should be able to make relevant progress in these areas. Once you reach a Graduate Management Admissions Test score of 700+, your other strengths will differentiate you from other applicants. A comment from an GMAT forum:

“I would think that the law of diminishing returns kicks in after a while. If you're not good enough for them at 730 then what makes you better at 750? GMAC says that scores can vary by as much as +/- 30 on any given day. Basically, if you're a 720 scorer you could go as high as 750 and as low as 690 just based on the variability involved. Even HBS Admissions Director Dee Leopold says that once you get over 700 you have "checked the box" for GMAT.”

For those wondering how to get accepted into an elite school with a below-average Graduate Management Admissions Test score, I recommend researching a phenomenon called the Superstar Effect. The Superstar Effect proposes that if you are able to distinguish yourself enough to become a top expert in a particular field, you can bypass some of the traditional acceptances criteria (GPA, GMAT, etc.) Students that are admitted to elite universities with below-average test scores often fall into this category.

Keeping the above in mind, a Graduate Management Admissions Test score of higher than 750 can definitely come in handy for two things:

1. It may get you a partial or full scholarship at some schools. Usually, these will be schools ranked in the second tier or lower. However, if you are smart enough to score a 760 on the Graduate Management Admissions Test, you probably also know that an MBA from a second-tier school is worth much less than an MBA from a top-20 school. So, the savings on your up-front tuition investment must be measured against the possible future benefits you are giving up by attending a lower-ranked school.

2. It qualifies you to teach the GMAT for a test-prep company that requires you have a 99^th percentile score. These jobs can be quite lucrative; however, they are also very competitive. You’ll still have to go through the interview process and compete against other 99^th percentile scorers, some of whom may have more teaching experience. Also, I don’t imagine you are applying to business school with the hope of teaching the GMAT. J

Ultimately, whether to spend the effort to achieve a 99^th percentile score is up to the individual applicant. While the raw numbers indicate that 750+ scorers are favored over 700-740 scorers, the incremental effort to boost your score may be better spent elsewhere.

I'm a GMAT Tutor based in Los Angeles, CA and the author of the DVD Advanced Tips for Data Sufficiency Success. Contact me for in-person GMAT tutoring in Los Angeles or online GMAT tutoring worldwide. I can be reached at support@thegmattutor.com or through www.thegmattutor.com.

Does a GMAT score of 750 increase your chances of admission more than a score of 700?

Most students think that a GMAT score of 700 is the magic number for acceptance into a top-ranked business school. Many applicants aren’t comfortable until they have that magical “7” in the hundreds digit of their score. However, you may be wondering if an even higher score - a 99^th percentile score - will differentiate you from the other applicants to top MBA programs. Increasing your score from a 700 (94^th percentile) to a 750 (99^th percentile) may require a great deal of additional study at a time when you are swamped with essays and applications, and you may wonder if it’s worth it.

To answer this question, I used data published by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In 2009, Kellogg had a total of 5,795 applicants, and 689 students enrolled. That’s an 11.8% enrollment rate.

Now here’s a key point: the enrollment rate differs from the acceptance rate. Not every student will accept an offer, so adcoms have to admit more students than will actually enroll. These two figures are related by what is called the yield – the percentage of students that accept their offer. The most recent data I could find for Kellogg indicates their yield is 57%. This means that 1,208 students were actually given offers in 2009, an acceptance rate of 20.8%.

Kellogg is kind enough to give us the GMAT score distribution of their applicants, as well as the distribution of the students who actually enrolled:

Score	Up to 640	650-690	700-740	750-800
Total Applicants	14%	24%	45%	16%
Enrolled Students	8%	24%	46%	22%

With a few more calculations, I used this data to back out the chance of acceptance at each GMAT score level. I will spare you the math, but here are the results:

Score	Up to 640	650-690	700-740	750-800
Total Applicants	811	1391	2608	927
Enrolled Students	55	165	317	152
Offers Made	97	290	556	266
Acceptance Rate	12%	21%	21%	29%

The data in this second table indicates that you have a 29% chance of admission with a 750+ score, as compared to a 21% chance of admission with a 700-740 score. So there does appear to be a small but legitimate advantage. However, here’s the kicker: this table assumes a flat 57% yield across all GMAT score levels. This may not be an accurate assumption. The adcom at Kellogg knows that if they extend an offer to a <640 scorer, that applicant is much more likely to accept than a 750+ scorer.

In other words, the yield for <640 scorers is much higher than the yield for 750+ scorers. A 750+ scorer will likely be weighing admissions offers from a number of different schools, whereas a <640 scorer has a very high chance of accepting the offer to Northwestern. As a rough guess, the yields may look something like this:

<640: 80% likely to accept

650-690: 60% likely to accept

700-740: 50% likely to accept

750-800: 30% likely to accept

This means that the advantage of scoring 750+ is probably even higher than indicated in the second table.

Of course, the GMAT is but one part of your overall application. The important question for an MBA applicant is: is it worth it spending the extra time to reach a 750+ score, or spending that time on the other parts of your application? To be continued…

I'm a GMAT Tutor based in Los Angeles, CA and the author of the DVD Advanced Tips for Data Sufficiency Success. Contact me for in-person GMAT tutoring in Los Angeles or online GMAT tutoring worldwide. I can be reached at support@thegmattutor.com or through www.thegmattutor.com.

Improve Your GMAT Sentence Correction

The two GMAT question types that confound newer test-takers are Data Sufficiency and Sentence Correction. For Data Sufficiency, results often improve after students memorize the answer choices and learn a standardized method. On the other hand, students often struggle with Sentence Correction questions for quite some time.

There are two ways to rapidly improve your results on Sentence Correction. The first is to learn the simple technique of isolating the sentence core. The second is to learn to recognize the different error types.

Isolating the sentence core means to simplify the sentence down to its subject and verb, and check for agreement. The subject must also agree with any pronouns that use the subject as an antecedent. Very often, the GMAT will try to mask the subject by including a prepositional phrase. For example:

Neither of these cookbooks contains the recipe for New England-style clam chowder.

In this sentence, the subject is the singular noun Neither and the verb is the singular verb contains. The prepositional phrase of these cookbooks can be ignored and the sentence core is Neither… contains.

Consider the following GMAT sentence correction examples from the Official Guide:

1. Although a surge in retail sales have raised hopes that there is a recovery finally under way, many economists say that without a large amount of spending the recovery might not last.

(A) have raised hopes that there is a recovery finally
(B) raised hopes for there being a recovery finally
(C) had raised hopes for a recovery finally being
(D) has raised hopes that a recovery is finally
(E) raised hopes for a recovery finally

The key to this example is to recognize that the subject is surge. The prepositional phrase in retail sales can be ignored. Isolating the core of the original sentence gives Surge…have raised hope. This is incorrect, since the singular noun surge requires the singular verb has. Spotting this error leads us to the correct answer (see the end of this article.)

Consider another example:

2. As its sales of computer products have surpassed those of measuring instruments, the company has become increasingly willing to compete for the mass market sales they would in the past have conceded to rivals.

(A) they would in the past have conceded to rivals
(B) they would have conceded previously to their rivals
(C) that in the past would have been conceded previously to rivals
(D) it previously would have conceded to rivals in the past
(E) it would in the past have conceded to rivals

In this example, the subject of the sentence is the singular noun the company. We can tell that the company is singular because it uses the singular verb phrase has become. The sentence core is the company…has become. This sentence core maintains subject/ verb agreement. However, recall that any pronouns that refer to the subject the company must also agree. Therefore, the use of the pronoun they later in the sentence is incorrect. This eliminates A and B. Choices C is needlessly wordy, so we're down to D or E. (see the end of the article for the correct answer.)

Isolating the sentence is the first technique to identify errors in Sentence Correction questions. More important is the second technique: learning to recognize the seven different error types. The key to improving your results on sentence correction is to recognize these errors, and anticipate the correct version of the sentence. 

After doing dozens or hundreds of sentence correction examples, experienced GMAT students will see begin to see patterns and quickly find the correct answer. A focused lesson from an experienced GMAT tutor can help identify these errors.  For more questions, contact support@thegmattutor.com . 

1. The correct answer is D.

2. The correct answer is E. D has the redundant phrase  previously…in the past, so we are left with correct answer choice E.

I'm a GMAT Tutor based in Los Angeles, CA and the author of the DVD Advanced Tips for Data Sufficiency Success. Contact me for in-person GMAT tutoring in Los Angeles or online GMAT tutoring worldwide. I can be reached through www.thegmattutor.com.

The Importance of Timing on the GMAT

Timing is one of the biggest issues that GMAT test-takers encounter. It’s very common for students to reach question 33 on the Quantitative section with only 4 minutes remaining. If this happens, I recommend educated guessing for those last few problems, because it’s critical to finish to every question. However, it’s best to avoid this situation entirely. If you’re rushing through the last 5 problems, it means you didn’t budget your time properly throughout the whole section.

The first thing you must realize is that you’re not supposed to answer every question correctly on the GMAT. I just took a practice exam using GMATprep (the most accurate test prep simulator) and scored a 760 (Q48, V45, 99^th percentile). Yet, despite my Quant score of 48, I still missed 10 questions out of 37. So, it’s possible to score very high on Quant while still missing a few questions.

The reason for this is the adaptive nature of the exam. It’s designed to keep challenging you until you start missing questions. Naturally, students want to meet this challenge and spend time solving every question correctly. However, this will not lead you to achieving your highest possible score, and may actually hurt you if you run out of time!

The situation you absolutely want to avoid is encountering questions at the end of the section that you know how to solve, but don’t have enough time. You’ll have to guess on problems that you could easily solve if you had another 30 seconds or 1 minute.

This leads to a couple of key strategy tips for the exam:

1) As you get closer to your test day, do your practice problems at a measured pace of approximately two minutes per question. Work with a timer and make sure you get into this rhythm as you’re doing your test prep. Try to simulate exam conditions as much as possible.

2) On the actual exam, do not spend more than 3 minutes on any problem. Only exceed this amount if you’re absolutely certain you know how to solve the problem, or are very close to the answer.

3) If you are completely clueless on a question (i.e. have no idea how to approach it), simply make an educated guess and move on! At the one minute mark on a question, you should have a clear idea how to solve it, and should have your algebraic equations set up if necessary. If you’re still reading the question, forget it! You’re wasting valuable time. Even students who score 700+ wind up using this strategy. As I pointed out above, it’s possible to miss 10 questions on Quant and still score a 48. So, any single question is not that important.

Remember, the GMAT not only tests your ability to answer questions correctly, but also your ability to complete each section in 75 minutes. In order to achieve your best possible score, recognize that you may have to essentially “skip” some very difficult questions by guessing and moving on.

I'm a GMAT Tutor based in Los Angeles, CA and the author of the DVD Advanced Tips for Data Sufficiency Success. Contact me for in-person GMAT tutoring in Los Angeles or online GMAT tutoring worldwide. I can be reached through www.thegmattutor.com.