GMAT - general information

    image

    Today we are starting a series of publications about the GMAT exam . Within a month, we will publish a series of informative and useful articles, reading which you can familiarize yourself with the structure of the exam, the assessment system, secrets and materials for preparation.

    In today's introductory article, we will talk about what GMAT is, what its features and structure are. This publication opens our cycle, so in it we want to give you a general idea about the exam.

    Let's start!

    The GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) test is designed to assess the degree of readiness of a candidate to enter a master's or business school program in finance, business, economics and management.

    GMAT History

    In the middle of the last century, the nine best educational institutions in the business sector decided to form an association that would create a standard test that could give the most objective assessment of candidates' knowledge and identify the most promising students from among them.

    It was such a structure that became the basis for the organization, which today is known as the Graduate Management Admission Council or in short - the GMAC . The test itself has a similar name - GMAT (last word Test). In the first years of its existence, this type of assessment was used quite rarely: during the first two years, only 4,000 candidates passed it for training in MBA programs, and only 54 schools throughout the United States used the test results to assess the quality of future students.

    GMAT demand

    However, today the situation has changed, and every year more than a quarter of a million candidates pass the GMAT test, and the exam results are taken at 1,500 universities and business schools, they are needed for 5,400 various educational programs conducted around the world.

    The demand and popularity of the exam is not surprising. It is annually rented out by people from many countries working in various fields. Thus, the selection committee can easily compare the level of knowledge of seemingly completely different applicants.

    Changes in GMAT

    For more than half a century of existence, the exam managed to change several times, moreover, the transformations affected both the format and the grading system, and even the structure of the test itself. Now the exam has 4 main sections and is built on an adaptive principle.

    Throughout the 20th century, applicants passed the GMAT on paper, and only in 1997 the test became computer and adaptive, and the Analytical Writing section was added.

    Thanks to the new CAT format, tasks in each section are adapted to the level of preparation of the examiner. The complexity of each subsequent question depends entirely on how correctly the answer to the previous task was given. Thus, in these sections the set of tasks will be completely individual for each of the dealers, however, the more correct answers are given, the more difficult the following tasks become.

    In 2012, the latest significant change occurred - the Integrated Reasoning section was added, which replaced 1 essay from Analytical Writing. This section has become innovative and distinctive for a test that has further distanced itself from the GRE test (we will talk about this exam in our next articles).

    image

    The structure of the GMAT

    Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) consists of four main sections, namely (in the order they are passed):

    • GMAT AWA (Analytical Writing Assessment);
    • GMAT IR (Integrated Reasoning);
    • GMAT Math (Quantitative);
    • GMAT Verbal section.

    About 4 hours are allotted for the test. Each of the sections of the assessment will be examined in detail below.

    GMAT Verbal section

    In this section you will need to answer 41 questions. You do not have much time for answers - only 75 minutes, so you should not think about each question for a long time. In this part of the test, all tasks can be divided into three main types:

    • correction of sentences (Sentence Correction);
    • understanding of the read material (Reading Comprehension);
    • Critical Reasoning

    In this section, you should show your skills in quickly reading a text, highlighting its main idea, as well as knowledge of elementary stylistic norms and grammar. In order to prepare for the section, it will be useful to familiarize yourself with examples of tasks in this section or pass the GMAT trial test .

    GMAT Math (Quantitative)

    This section includes 37 small tasks that take 75 minutes to solve. There are two types of tasks in the mathematical section :

    • problem solving;
    • analysis of the sufficiency of data to solve the problem.

    This section is designed to assess the level of your knowledge in algebra, geometry and arithmetic.

    GMAT AWA (Analytical Writing Assessment)

    In the third section, you will need to write an essay analyzing the argument. An essay is written in half an hour. A statement can refer to the most diverse areas of human life: from business to science. The work should show the examiners the level of your analytical thinking skills, as well as the ability to correctly express thoughts and ideas on paper. In this section you will not need any additional knowledge on the subject. Nevertheless, it is recommended to take a training course, study the topics of the essay, and also fill your hand in writing a 10-20 essay. Be sure to submit the essay for examination to an expert teacher who will point out the main mistakes in the presentation logic, the shortcomings of lexical diversity, and grammar.

    GMAT IR (Integrated Reasoning)

    The last section of the test that appears is a fairly new phenomenon in GMAT. In this section you will have to solve 12 tasks in 30 minutes, which can be divided into 4 main types:

    • table analysis;
    • two-part analysis;
    • chart analysis;
    • analysis of information based on several sources.

    image

    GMAT points

    After receiving an official certificate, most candidates pay attention only to the overall result, not particularly interested in the number of points for each section separately. Unfortunately, this is not always correct, because points for a separate part help to understand the admissions committee, in which particular areas you are strong, and where else you can improve your knowledge.

    In addition, each section has its own special rating system, which is why the score indicated in each section is indicated in the certificate. In order not to get confused, we advise you to pay attention to how each section of the exam is evaluated and checked:

    • In the Analytical Writing Assessment part, you can get from 0 to 6 points. Each essay is checked by both a computer and a person. After that, the “points” that were set during each test are summed up, as a result, the total score is displayed. The assessment step is half a point.
    • For the Integrated Reasoning section, you can score from 1 to 8 points. Your result, first of all, depends on how many questions you answered correctly. Some of them imply several correct answers that you need to find everything so that the task is fully counted. This part is evaluated with an interval of 1 point.
    • In the Quantitative (Maths) and Verbal sections, several aspects are important: how many tasks are completed, the number of correct answers, and the level of difficulty of the questions.


    You need to answer the maximum number of questions of the highest possible difficulty level. You can score from 0 to 60 points, while the interval is one point. As a rule, candidates rarely score less than 7 points and more than 50 for Quantitative (Maths); for the Verbal section, the average result usually ranges from 9 to 44 points.

    The total score for the GMAT test is from 200 to 800. After calculating and summing up the points scored for all sections, the total score is displayed, which is set in increments of 10 units.

    If you want to impress and show that already now, before the start of training, you are thinking about what you really have to face during its passage, you can speculate a bit on topics related to future studies .

    The next publication will focus on preparations for the GMAT.

    The author of the article is Vyacheslav Davidenko, founder of MBA Consult

    Also popular now: