Business Schools Look to GRE® to Boost Diversity
Princeton, N.J. (March
25, 2008) —At a time when business schools are looking to
diversify their applicant pools and to meet expectations from employers for
more creative business leaders, growing numbers of institutions across the
globe are accepting GRE General Test scores for admission to graduate
business school and MBA studies.
The Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE) General Test has been the
gold-standard admissions test for graduate study for nearly 60 years.
Recently, growing numbers of colleges and universities have begun using the
test for admission to MBA and graduate management programs. The reason? It
increases and diversifies the business program applicant pool, according to
David Bach, Associate Dean of MBA Programs, Instituto de Empresa (IE)
Business School, in Madrid, Spain.
“We are extremely proud of the diversity of participants in our programs
in terms of their international backgrounds, gender, undergraduate majors,
career trajectories and aspirations,” says Bach. “Accepting the GRE supports
our efforts to attract high-quality participants from very diverse
backgrounds, including students who may not have previously contemplated an
MBA."
In February, IE announced that it would begin accepting GRE test scores
for admissions to all its management degree programs, including the MBA. IE
is ranked as one of the top ten business schools world-wide by the
Financial Times. In recent months, other highly regarded European
business schools have also decided to accept GRE scores for their graduate
business programs. These include Helsinki School of Economics, Barcelona
School of Economics, ESADE Business School in Barcelona and the European
School of Economics in London and other cities.
Articles about the trend toward using the GRE test, in addition to the
GMAT® test, for business school acceptance have appeared in Business
Week, the Times of London and Inside Higher Education.
Most recently, the GRE business school phenomenon was reported in the
Beijing Times.
In a Jan. 8 Inside Higher Education article, Derrick Bolton,
Director of MBA Admissions, Stanford Graduate School of Business, suggested
that accepting the GRE test in addition to GMAT may help boost the pool of
women candidates.
“The GRE test takers are more likely to be women, and more likely to be
undergraduates or just a year out, while the GMAT is more popular with those
who have been out a few years. … If we are able to fish in both of those
pools, how can that hurt us? [There are] definitely some people who would
not have applied to the MBA program had we put an additional barrier of
requiring the GMAT.”
In June 2006, Stanford began accepting GRE scores to boost diversity in
its business school applicant pool. In recent months, the GRE Program has
approved applications to receive GRE test scores from Georgetown University
McDonough School of Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, University of
Michigan Ross School of Business and Johns Hopkins University Carey Business
School.
“Accepting GRE scores makes good business sense,” says ETS Associate Vice
President David Payne. “Accepting both GRE and GMAT tests will improve the
size, diversity and quality of the applicant pool and student body. Clearly,
these are the kinds of tangible benefits that business schools value and
what the global business community increasingly demands to meet the
challenges of the 21st Century.”
“Some people are surprised to learn that the GRE test measures the same
basic cognitive skills as the GMAT test,” Payne adds. “In fact, ETS actually
developed the GMAT test some years ago, so we are keenly aware that it does
not measure business skills. Like the GRE test, it measures knowledge and
skills that admissions officials must evaluate when considering applicants
for graduate programs.”
Because both tests are taken by individuals from diverse academic
backgrounds, neither the GRE nor the GMAT tests presume advanced content
knowledge in any specific area, including business. However, the GRE General
Test includes many questions presented in a business context, including more
than 70 percent of the data interpretation questions in the GRE Quantitative
Reasoning section. Furthermore, the level of math content knowledge is the
same in both GRE and GMAT tests.
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