GMAT Testing Policies

Well, well, well.  It is upon us!  The age of online, at-home testing has dawned.  Yesterday I posted an article about online testing for the GRE and made some predictions about the how soon GMAC would roll out online testing for the GMAT and, sure enough, the announcement came less than 24 hours later!  This may seem like a very minor thing in the panicked milieu of the moment and with the coronavirus outbreak in full swing, but for the thousands of people who have poured their time and money into preparing for the GMAT with no hope in sight of being able to actually take the test and move on in their lives, this is a VERY big deal.

I don’t want to rehash what I wrote in the aforementioned post, but I just continue to be amazed that this is a reality and that both GMAC and ETS have been able to roll out online testing so quickly during this crisis.  

One question that remains is whether this will be an “interim” offer (this is how it is worded on GMAC’s website) or whether it will be here to stay.  Obviously the word interim suggests that it is temporary, and maybe it will be, but I just don’t see how you go back, once you have made this a reality.  It would be like telling people to continue to only send physical letters once they have been exposed to email.   I might be wrong about this, but I don’t know how you reverse the flow of progress!

The one interesting thing I will note that relates to this is that a couple of the people I am currently tutoring who I told about the prospect of online testing for the GMAT responded by suggesting that they might not want to take the GMAT at home and would prefer to be in a test center where the environment feels more authentic, etc.  But I have to believe that there will easily be enough demand to make online testing for the GMAT and GRE a permanent reality, assuming that GMAC and ETS are willing to allow it to remain so.  Only time will tell!

ETS just announced that the GRE can now be taken at home!!!  The question is, when will GMAC follow suit and allow test takers to take the GMAT at home as well?  The short answer:  probably soon, if the GMAT has the pieces in place!

First, let me start by saying that I was amazed to see this last night.  In fact, I woke up this morning and wondered if I dreamt it.  Seriously.  I had to look on the Internet and read it again to believe that it was not a figment of my imagination.  I just recently wrote another blog post about how Covid-19 was likely to change the landscape of standardized testing and how tests would soon be administered at home.  I also knew (and mentioned this in the aforementioned post) that ETS and GMAC had done research into at-home testing, but the fact the ETS was ready and able to roll this out right in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak is just astounding.  

There are a lot of hoops that one must jump through to be able to take the test at home, so before you get too excited, it’s worth reading the specifications for at-home testing on the GRE website (you need to have a windows-based computer, a webcam that can accommodate 360 degree views of the room, a marker and whiteboard, among other things).  But I am nevertheless in a state of shock with this new development and am now obviously waiting for the GMAT to follow suit.

For the uninitiated (and I just had to explain this to someone I am tutoring who, to my surprise, did not realize this), the GRE and GMAT compete with each other.  ETS has lead a somewhat successful campaign to draw test-takers, and therefore business, away from the GMAT and to the GRE (and it has done the same with the LSAT more recently as well).  And the move to at-home testing is such a game changer that it is only a matter of time before GMAC starts to offer in-home testing for the GMAT.   

So many of the people I am currently tutoring are now dealing with the uncertainty of when they will be able to take the GMAT that it is really wreaking havoc on their GMAT prep plans.   For the people who are not looking to test in the next few months it’s not a big deal, but I have several students who were hoping to take it in the next month, and not knowing whether it will be possible to take the GMAT in 1 month or 2 or 3 just makes it very hard to know how to prepare and how to pace the study process.   In fact, just today I already had 2 conversations with students about the possibility of taking the GRE (either switching to it entirely or taking it as a sort of “add on” where they still prepare for the GMAT but do a little GRE prep on the side and just take it to see what happens…at the very worst it’s good practice taking a standardized test under stressful conditions).

Regarding the possibility of at-home testing for the GMAT, the only question is whether GMAC has all the pieces in place to be able to roll this out soon.  Again, I know the company was looking into this, but if it is not far enough along in the process I could imagine that it might take some time to make at-home testing a reality.   But it’s a virtual certainty that it will happen at some point, and it’s helpful to remember that GMAC is a business and that, like other businesses, it needs to survive and needs people to be taking the GMAT to do so!  So even if GMAC doesn’t have all of its ducks in a row, I’d imagine it will get them lined up ASAP, in order to be back in business!

One final aside I thought of…even with all the contraction that is happening in the economy, clearly there will be new and unforeseen opportunities created for businesses and, in turn, for people looking for employment.  Well guess what?  One just came online.  How about being a proctor for people taking at-home versions on the GRE and GMAT?!!!   I don’t know exactly how the proctoring will work, but even if a single person can proctor several people at a time, you are still going to need a whole cohort of proctors for all the people who will now be taking the test at home!  So for some of the people who are losing jobs in other places, this presents a new opportunity for employment…and as an added bonus you get to work from home!!!

Since GMAC just announced that as of July 11th, 2017 you will be able to choose the order in which you take each section of the GMAT, I thought I would shoot off a quick blog post with some thoughts. Ready? Here goes…

First of all, they probably should have done this a long time ago. Let’s face it, it sucks having to spend the first hour of the test on sections that don’t really matter to business schools. I used to try to make the case to my students that you could view the AWA and IR as a bit of a warm-up, sort of like stretching and running in place before going for a long run. But I doubt that anyone is going to continue to do those sections first. I mean, a 10-minute warm-up would be nice but 1 hour is a little much.

My second observation is that the GRE will now have to counter this and I predict that they will eventually. GMAC experimented with test takers choosing the section order before implementing this new policy, so presumably ETS will have to do that first as well, but I’d imagine that ETS will feel the need to counter this new “user-friendly” feature of the GMAT and we’ll eventually see the same feature on the GRE.

A third observation that I just feel compelled to share is the very bizarre way in which GMAC put this new information out there. I got an email from GMAC with the subject line “Congrats on Taking Your GMAT Exam!” I was like, wtf, did I just take the exam and forget or did someone hack into my account and take the exam under my name? I was completely perplexed. I mean it did get my attention and motivated me to immediately open up the email, but after reading what the message was actually about I just thought that it was a pretty slimy and underhanded way to convey this new information. Maybe I have a higher opinion of GMAC than most, but it felt very spammy and not what I expected of the good folks at GMAC.

The last thing to mention is that obviously people will now need to strategize which section to do first, and I think that is an interesting conundrum. Again, I can’t imagine anyone doing the AWA and IR anything but last, but which section to do first, Quant or Verbal? I guess I’ll have to see how this plays out with the people I tutor, but I must say that I would personally do Quant first. I could imagine that if you are the type of person who loses focus easily and therefore has trouble with the Reading Comp passages or even the Critical Reasoning stimuli it might be better to do the Verbal first. But something about the Quant section almost feels like it serves as a bit of a warm up for the Verbal section and not the other way around, so I would opt for Quant first.

Now that I think about it, I guess there is a Verbal element to Quantitative questions, but there is not a Quantitative element to Verbal questions. And I guess if you couple that with the fact that schools care a little more about the Quant score than the Verbal one it will probably make sense for most people to do Quant before Verbal. If I had to predict I would say 80% of people will choose to do that. But again I think that for some people, especially those for whom fatigue and focus become an issue on Verbal, it may be good to tackle the Verbal section first.

In any event, this certainly gives test takers an advantage and I can already report that for the few students I have who were thinking of taking the test in the next couple of weeks, all immediately declared (upon hearing the new section order policy) that they will wait until after July 11th to take the test. And they were all very, very excited!!!

GMAC recently announced new policies regarding both the cancellation of scores and how often one can take the GMAT. These new changes taken together are pretty significant, offer some big advantages to test-takers, and really affect how one can approach the test.

As of July 19th, 2015 there is 16 day waiting period between tests. This is a significant improvement upon the 31 day waiting period that test takers had to deal with for many years. GMAC is no doubt motivated by the GRE, the makers of which have gone out of their way to compete with and even one-up the GMAT. As of this writing, the waiting period between GRE tests is 21 days, though I would not be surprised if they eventually change that to something shorter (like 14 days) just to outdo the GMAT!

When the waiting period was 31 days, the following scenario would often play out with my students. A person would take the GMAT and would really have been ready, having scored at or above their target score on previous official GMAC practice tests. But on the actual test they would sometimes come in underneath their target and then be in the unfortunate position of having to wait a full month before taking the test again. If a person needs significant reprep, then waiting 31 days is not a big deal. But when you are genuinely ready and just underscore because of a bad test day performance, sometimes what you need is just to jump right back on the horse and take the test again. That 31 day was excruciating for people in that situation since they literally had to sit on their hands and just wait for 31 days to pass.

So 16 days is much more reasonable – people will be much less likely to slide backwards even if they do very little practice in that period. And so this is really a significant improvement over the previous policies and will be sure to make test-takers happy.

The other major change just announced is that test takers can now cancel their scores (right after they are shown them at the end of the test) and not worry about having a “C” on their score report. C’s will no longer be printed on score reports as of July 19th so even if you took the test before the 19th and cancelled it, if you send a score report to schools after the 19th then the C will no longer appear.

This may not seem like a big deal, but coupled with the news about the 16 day waiting period, it really does constitute a significant change for test-takers. You can now be much more aggressive about taking the test because if it does not go well you can essentially erase the score completely AND you can jump right back on the horse and take the test a little over 2 weeks later. In the past I would not have my students be so aggressive in part because if they did not do as well as hoped they would then be barred from taking it again for 31 days. But 16 days is such a short amount of time that even if you were pretty much ready when you took the exam you could just continue in stride, push for 2 more weeks, and then just get right back in there and do it again.

Essentially these policies almost translate into allowing people to go in and take the GMAT as a sort-of dress rehearsal for the real thing. It can be like taking an official practice test in real test conditions at the actual testing center. The only difference is that it costs $250 and that you can’t see which questions you got wrong! The only thing that I would caution people against is in being too cavalier in the use these GMAT tries. You still have only 5 attempts in any 12 month period. Now most people don’t end up taking the test more than 3 times, so most test-takers would be just fine burning one test a little prematurely. But I have known and tutored many people who end up taking the test 4 or more times, including a handful of people who have taken the GMAT over 5 times.

At the end of the day these new policies, if used appropriately, are really a boon for test-takers since they allow them to worry a little less about any single test day performance. If a particular test does not go well, a test-taker can erase the score completely and then retake the test very soon thereafter.