The recent GMAC Test Prep Summit provided key insights into the GMAT Focus, test policies, and future developments in business school admissions. Among the major takeaways: the GMAT Focus isn’t more challenging than the old GMAT, but students need to adjust to the new scoring scale. GMAC experts reaffirmed the validity of the official score conversion table, dismissed concerns about a fixed 700+ benchmark, and highlighted the stability of the new score scale.
Additionally, the lifetime attempt limit has been removed, reinforcing GMAC’s confidence in its question pool and test security. Other key discussions included the value of retakes, the importance of time management, and the benefits of the review-and-edit feature. Read on for a deep dive into the latest updates and what they mean for test-takers.
By Anthony Ritz, SBC’s Director of Test Prep
The GMAT Focus is not harder than the old GMAT
Students just need to get used to the new numbers. Yes, the score scale has changed, and the new scale’s composite score numbers are lower. However, a lower GMAT Focus score than the old GMAT doesn’t mean a “worse score” than the old GMAT. Schools are fully informed and will adjust their expectations per the new scale.
In particular, I spoke to two high-level GMAC psychometricians, who flatly disagreed with and pushed back on the idea that 700+ could or would remain the standard for top schools on the new scale. Both also rejected the idea of distrusting the GMAT conversion table. Have you ever seen the face someone made while vigorously shaking their head after eating something sour and foul-tasting? Yeah, they both made that face.
Of course, schools’ reported GMAT score averages are almost all still on the old scale since a whole cohort has yet to be admitted using the new scores. So be sure to use the conversion table.
The new GMAT Focus score scale is stable
The GMAT score scale is revised every year. This year, percentiles dropped slightly (around two points) in the middle of the curve. But this is well within the realm of normal variation, as the test-taker population shifts, and it doesn’t affect the conversions. A score of 645 on the new scale is still comparable to a score of 700 on the old scale, and so forth.
This is true worldwide, but also specifically in the US. GMAC reports that North American scores are centered and comparable to scores worldwide, so you have a fair shot on the test no matter where you’re from.
The lifetime attempt limit is gone
That’s right, GMAC has removed the eight-attempt lifetime limit. Ultimately, students rarely hit or even approached the limit, which came into play less than half a percent of the time. However, the fear of running out of attempts sometimes prevented candidates from taking the GMAT as much as they should have to achieve their best scores.
GMAC made this change because its question pool is now large enough to support people taking the test five times per year without ever running out of questions. Furthermore, test security has improved enough that GMAC is less worried than it used to be about people using repeated retakes to try to steal questions.
Note, however, that the five-attempt-per-year limit remains.
Partner with SBC’s best-in-class GMAT and GRE experts and increase your score significantly. Our test prep team will help you recognize your individual learning style, discover flaws in your foundation knowledge and set manageable yet ambitious goals.
A retake can improve your score slightly, especially if you didn’t take the first attempt seriously
American students take the GMAT on average only about 1.5 times. Chinese and Indian students take it on average about 2.5 times. The latter group’s attempt count is higher primarily because in Asia, the first official attempt is often viewed as essentially just for practice and so isn’t taken as seriously.
But perhaps more attempts would be worthwhile. High scorers gain, on average, 20 to 30 points on their first retake (and less on subsequent retakes, of course). Of course, the number is higher in Asia, given the “just for practice” view of the first official attempt, and it’s a bit lower in the US. However, many students would benefit from taking the GMAT with at least two (or perhaps three) serious attempts.
It’s critical to finish each section
GMAC’s chief psychometrician emphasized how crucial it is to manage your time and answer every question. For one thing, if you have almost no time for a run of several questions at the end, and you have to just guess, the adaptive can drop quite a bit. That means you could potentially end up missing a bunch of easy questions. This is a killer because your floor is more important than your ceiling, as discussed below.
But not getting to questions at all is even worse. Per the chief psychometrician, “It is important to complete the exam to avoid harsh penalties” – penalties that are even harsher than the wrong answer penalty for most students.
Note that your answer to a question isn’t final until you press “next.” So ensure you don’t linger too long on the last question as the final seconds tick by. If you want to think about it a bit more, you can always submit it and then go back to it using the review-and-edit feature.
The review-and-edit feature is both popular and well worth using
GMAC created the review-and-edit feature of the GMAT Focus to reduce pressure and anxiety during the exam. This widely popular feature works as intended, at least for students who use it.
In GMAC’s surveys before the change, roughly 87% of test-takers wanted a review-and-edit feature. Perhaps this is unsurprising since 84% thought they would score better on those same surveys with access to such a feature, though a plurality expected to see only “minor improvement.”
Spoiler alert: Students were largely right. Between a quarter and one-half of students finished a section with at least two minutes remaining – enough time, in GMAC’s eyes, to make review-and-edit worthwhile. Specifically, 25% of students finished Data Insights with time to review, 38% finished Verbal with time to review, and 46% finished Quantitative with time to review.
Between 75% and 80% of those students did, in fact, revisit questions. Students mostly revisited two to three items—especially items near the beginning or, to a lesser extent, the end of the section—with usually just one revisit for each item.
Fewer than five percent of students made a maximum of three edits in a section. Overall, students only changed between 14% and 18% of the answers they reviewed, and those changes were most often from wrong to right.
On verbal, roughly 52% of edits went wrong-to-right, and only around 20% went right-to-wrong. (The rest went wrong-to-wrong.) On math, the trend towards improvement was even stronger, with most edits going wrong-to-right and under 15% going right-to-wrong.
On Data Insights, wrong-to-right was between 40% and 50%, depending on the question type, and right-to-wrong was between 5% and 20%.
Unsurprisingly, a correlation exists for every section among students who had time (2+ minutes) to review: using review-and-edit and scoring higher. The upshot is simple—time permitting, use this tool.
For the GMAT Focus, your floor is more important than your ceiling
Getting questions right is good, and answering hard questions correctly is even better. Getting questions wrong is bad, and flubbing easy questions is even worse.
None of this is surprising. But what is perhaps surprising is this: For high scorers, if you’re going to get one right answer and one wrong answer, going “easy right, hard wrong” will be significantly better than going “easy wrong, hard right.” (The trend reverses for low scorers.) So, at least for those students aiming for above-average GMAT scores, your floor is unquestionably more important than your ceiling.
Suppose you get an extremely low section score despite missing very few questions. In that case, the likeliest explanation is that you missed a couple of extremely easy questions while getting significantly harder ones right. When you do, the weird answer mix creates high uncertainty for the scoring algorithm, and the algorithm responds by pushing your score back toward the middle of the scale (not at all what you want if you’re a high scorer).
In an extreme case, getting even just two answers wrong might lead to a below-average section score. Of course, such an extreme result is very unusual and rare, occurring in less than 1% of cases. The minimum possible score with 19/21 correct on math is a 76 (40th percentile); the tenth-percentile outcome of 19/21 correct is an 82 (76th percentile). If it does happen, you would have a very good chance of benefiting from a retake.
SBC’s test prep is fully customized to meet you where you are. Whether you’re starting fresh or retaking the test, we diagnose your needs and create a personalized plan. We teach, encourage, and coach you every step of the way.
Small mistakes can have big consequences
Now, before you start on how amazing you are, but you make a lot of “careless errors,” be aware that GMAT’s chief psychometrician says “careless errors” are rarely just careless errors. There’s usually a deeper understanding or approach issue underneath.
As a tutor, I agree entirely. If you keep making silly mistakes on basic questions, getting underneath the errors is critical. Figure out why they keep happening, and fix the problem(s). If you don’t, the scoring algorithm may punish them severely.
Finally, clever students may consider what would happen if they missed easy questions early but fixed them during review-and-edit. This won’t fool the algorithm. For precisely this reason, GMAC has adjusted the system to be less sensitive to the first few questions than it used to be. So don’t bother trying to game the system.
Score reporting is generally fast and simple
Fully 90% of candidates get their official GMAT Focus scores within 16 hours of taking the test. Even on the longer end, the timeline is only three to five calendar days. Furthermore, GMAC says that scores “almost never” change between the unofficial and official results. However, they may get canceled in a few cases if there are significant irregularities around test security.
Score reporting is also simple: Each score sent to schools is a separate individual transaction; bulk sending of every score on your transcript isn’t an option.
SBC curates the best test prep strategies to match your strengths and learning style. Our approach builds deep content understanding first, then smart, gimmick-free test strategies.
Don’t worry about random score audits, but if your score is canceled and you don’t think it’s justified, appeal
Routine audits are a thing; it’s usually nothing, so don’t freak out if your score gets flagged. That said, don’t be afraid to appeal if your score gets canceled and you disagree. GMAC stressed that a human investigates every customer care inquiry. So, submit an inquiry if there’s any issue – a bad proctor, a score cancellation you feel is unjustified, whatever. But human reviews can take time, so if you submit an inquiry, be patient.
As it turns out, one of my students recently had a score canceled for, we think, a minor non-cheating infraction. He appealed, and GMAC reinstated his score.
Want more high-level questions and improved study tools? They’re coming!
A new version of the GMAT Advanced Questions guide is on the horizon. GMAC also showed interest in providing more granular search tools and other improvements in its Official Question Bank. In the future, GMAC will look at refining how well its practice test scores line up with real test scores. So, if you’re working towards the GMAT on a longer timeline, keep your eyes peeled for even more helpful tools.
The Business Writing Assessment is here, but it’s nothing to worry about
The Business Writing Assessment, the reborn version of GMAT’s old AWA essay, is in its first year as a standalone assessment tool. Schools wanted a proctored writing sample, and some students wanted an opportunity to show off this skill set. It’s not meant to be a barrier to entry for student applications. In fact, schools currently don’t request it until after issuing an interview invite.
The BWA verifies that you can actually write (i.e., without Chat GPT). So don’t use AI to write your application essays because schools have the BWA as one of their tools for finding out.
The BWA is scored by a computer using a 0-to-6 scale with integer increments. Columbia, Harvard Business School, and MIT are currently testing it.
The Executive Assessment is a readiness tool, not a selection tool
GMAC emphasized that the Executive Assessment is a limited-prep tool for measuring classroom readiness, not for selection, screening, and/or filtering. If schools want a selection tool, the GMAT Focus is for that.
What’s the difference between readiness and selection? Readiness is for people that schools may already know they want to admit based on their experience, but the admissions committee needs to confirm that the candidate can do the work. It’s more of a binary case of “above or below the cut”; “can hack it” versus “can’t hack it.”
Selection, on the other hand, isn’t just about whether you can do the work. It’s more about discerning between candidates: “Does the school want you more than it wants someone else who can also hack it.”
Given the changes to the GMAT, GMAC is reevaluating the Executive Assessment over the next year. The content may change, especially since topics such as sentence correction are no longer on the GMAT. The future of sentence correction on the EA is unknown. Still, GMAC does see a place for the EA.
For EMBA candidates, the Executive Assessment is far more predictive of business school success than the undergraduate GPA is. Students continue to take it as much as they did in the past, so it’s likely not going away.
Also, in case you were wondering, the EA score range is 126 – 174, with an average score of 150.68.
Business school continues to be a worthwhile path for students who want it
92% of North American business school grads consider their degree to have good, excellent, or outstanding value. And almost no matter who you ask, roughly 80% are happy at graduation to have gone to business school. So, if you’re on the fence about business school, know that you probably won’t regret going for it!
The post GMAT Focus: Top Takeaways for Test Takers appeared first on Stacy Blackman Consulting - MBA Admissions Consulting.