GMAT Exam Will Include New Integrated Reasoning Section Beginning in June 2012

A new section designed to measure prospective business school applicants’ ability to evaluate information from multiple sources will be introduced as part of the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) beginning in June 2012, the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) announced yesterday.

The new integrated reasoning section will call on test takers to analyze information from a range of sources – including graphs, charts and spreadsheets – and draw conclusions based on the relationships between the different data points.

“The new integrated reasoning section of the GMAT will be a microcosm of today’s b-school classroom,” Dave Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC, said in a statement. “These questions will provide critical intelligence to schools about the ability of prospective students to make sound decisions by evaluating, assimilating or extrapolating data.”

The new section will replace one of two essays that now comprise the GMAT’s analytical writing section. GMAT research supports feedback from admissions officers suggesting that student performance on the two essays is closely aligned, making a single essay effective at predicting performance. The new integrated section, meanwhile, will help provide valuable insight to admissions officials as to how students will respond to the kind of complex challenges they are likely to encounter as managers in today’s information-rich workplace.

GMAC, which owns the GMAT exam, revealed its plans to add the new integrated reasoning section at its Annual Industry Conference yesterday. The enhancements come in response to surveys the Council has conducted over the past four years of business school faculty as part of its commitment to continuously improve the exam. Innovations in testing technology will support the introduction of the new questions, which require examinees to draw on information from multiple sources.

The overall length of the GMAT exam will not change from the current three and a half hours. The new section will be 30 minutes long, the same as the essay section it will replace. The verbal and quantitative sections of the exam will remain unchanged, and the exam will continue to be scored on the existing 200 to 800 scale, with examinees receiving separate distinct scores for each the essay section (as they do now) and the new integrated reasoning section.

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