In a recent post to her blog, Harvard Business School (HBS) Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Dee Leopold announced that HBS will begin accepting either GMAT or GRE results as an application requirement. “We think that both tests will provide adequate metrics of what a standardized test can tell us about a candidate,” she wrote.
The move is part of a growing trend among business schools that, among other things, allows the schools to woo candidates who might not otherwise have considered applying for an MBA program. “Once they realize that they don’t have to take another test to apply to business school, they are going to hedge their bets and explore both opportunities,” David Payne, who heads the GRE program for Educational Testing Service (ETS), told BusinessWeek in an interview last year.
HBS joins other schools, including Stanford Graduate School of Business and MIT’s Sloan School of Management, which have quietly begun accepting GRE scores in addition to GMAT scores over the past few years. Stanford began loosening its admissions testing policy in the fall of 2007, and that year roughly 3 percent of applicants chose to submit GRE scores instead of GMAT scores.
“We were talking with faculty about whether we were attracting the most intellectually curious students, about whether MBA programs were attracting students with a genuine intellectual curiosity with the subject matter,” Stanford Admissions Director Derrick Bolton told the Chronicle of Higher Education about the decision in early 2008. GRE test takers, he said, are more likely to be women and younger applicants – undergrads or students just a year or two out of college. “If we are able to fish in both of those pools, how can that hurt us?” he asked.
In addition to appealing to a wider pool of applicants, the GRE exam is also cheaper — $140 compared to the GMAT’s $250 fee – and ETS has a wider network of testing centers both nationally and globally.
According to HBS’s Leopold, the change will take effect for the class of 2012, but it may take the school a while to update every reference to accepted tests on its website. “In the meantime, please accept this as official notification of this change,” she wrote.
For more on the GMAT vs. GRE debate, click here.
