GMAT - Graduate Management Admission Test
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What is GMAT?
GMAT is short for Graduate Management Admission Test and it is a test often required by schools when applying for a MBA course. The reasoning behind the exam is that since applicants to MBA courses are often not coming from just one background but instead have done various undergraduate courses, various job experience, motivation, leadership and other skills, a test is needed to put all applicants on the "same start line" so to speak. The GMAT is seen as a more subjective way of comparing applicants.
Do I need to get a perfect score to get into a school?
No you don't. A perfect score would be 800 but this is something only apparently 0.025% of all applicants achieve according to The Graduate Management Admission Council. Thus don't stress too much. On the other hand though aim to do as well as possible since schools do give points towards your MBA school application based on your GMAT score. Some top schools do have minimum required point levels that their applicants need to achieve before applying. The GMAT result is one thing the schools look at but they also look at your undergraduate grades, letters of recommendation and your admission essays.
The GMAT test format
The test itself consists of 3 parts. These measure your verbal, mathematical and analytical/writing skills that you have developed so far in life. The score you get is valid for 5 years and you can resit the test.
The multiple choice section starts always with a medium level difficulty question. If you answer this correctly you will get a question that is slightly more difficult thus leading to a higher score in the end. If you get it wrong you will get a slightly easier question until you answer the question right. The process then continues and after you have gone through all the questions the computer will have an accurate assessment of your level of ability in that area.
You can not return to a previous question, skip questions or change previous responses in the GMAT test.
It is important that you pace yourself and keep track of time since you should aim to finish the exam i.e. all questions before the time runs out. The penalty for not completing is fairly severe and not worth it.
In total there are 41 verbal questions and 37 mathematical ones.
On top of these 2 sections there is also the analytical writing assessment section. This section is meant to try and measure your ability to communicate ideas you have and how you think critically. You will face two 30-minute essays and the first one is an analysis of an issue and the second is an analysis of an argument.
The test questions you will face in the actual test are not far off from all the tests we have on our pages. We cover most kinds of numerical tests, verbal tests, logical reasoning and graphical/diagrammatical reasoning tests on this site so practising here will help you hugely.
We do of course also recommend that you get the official GMAT Review book which has 800 GMAT questions and answers in it and which is created by The Graduate Management Admission Council.