Earlier than even making use of to your required graduate faculty, you’ll probably must take both the Graduate Administration Admission Check (GMAT) or the Graduate File Examination (GRE) to submit alongside along with your admissions packet. 

Schooling attainment information from the 2022 U.S. Census present a 50% improve (between 2011 and 2021) within the variety of folks aged 25 and over whose highest diploma is a grasp’s. That’s fairly a rise, and I commend you for difficult your self in the identical method.

Under, I’ll dive into the small print of every standardized examination possibility. We’ll take a look at the construction of the exams, the benefits and downsides of every, after which think about elements that may assist you to make the very best determination for your self. By the top of this text, you need to have a clearer understanding of the right way to proceed in your journey to graduate faculty.

The GMAT was created particularly for MBA packages, and greater than 2,400 tutorial establishments settle for GMAT scores for admission. Per the Graduate Administration Admission Council, “The GMAT examination is designed to check expertise which can be extremely vital to enterprise and administration packages. It assesses analytical writing and problem-solving skills, together with the information sufficiency, logic, and important reasoning expertise which can be important to real-world enterprise and administration success.” 

This is what you should know concerning the GMAT: 

• Accepted by most enterprise packages
• May be taken on-line or at a testing website
• Check is run on a pc
• Free rating supply for as much as 5 colleges
• Value is $250 on-line or $275 in-person
• Whole take a look at time is about 3.5 hours
• Restricted to 5 makes an attempt in a 12-month interval
• Scores are good for five years

Right here’s how the GMAT examination is structured (not together with two optionally available eight-minute breaks):

Whole GMAT scores vary from 200-800, and the Graduate Administration Admission Council places the present common at 582. Nonetheless, your goal faculty could have a mean rating that’s higher than this. You’ll wish to evaluate your faculty’s web site to establish the vary of scores they sometimes settle for. Typically talking, a rating of 600+ places your utility in an optimum place.

Subsequent to every of your examination scores might be your GMAT rating percentile, which is one other method of evaluating your outcomes to different test-takers. Percentiles are calculated yearly, utilizing GMAT scores from the earlier three years. So, should you see a percentile rating of 80 subsequent to your Quantitative Reasoning rating, it means you scored higher than 80% of those that took the GMAT within the final three years.

The GRE is one other standardized examination generally used for entrance to graduate faculty. It has been round a bit longer than the GMAT and is run by a unique firm, but it surely assessments comparable expertise: essential pondering, reasoning, and analytical writing. The GRE is, nonetheless, identified to be accepted by a greater variety of graduate packages, together with a number of enterprise and legislation colleges. 

This is what you should know concerning the GRE:

• Accepted by most graduate colleges, no matter program kind
• May be taken on-line or at a testing website
• Check is run on a pc
• Free rating supply for as much as 4 colleges
• Value is $205, both on-line or in-person
• Whole take a look at time is about 2 hours
• Restricted to 5 makes an attempt in a 12-month interval
• Scores are good for five years

Right here’s how the GRE examination is structured (not together with one optionally available 10-minute break):

*Word that modifications to the final take a look at construction took impact September 22, 2023. Beforehand, whole take a look at time was about 3 hours and 45 minutes.

GRE sections are scored independently of one another within the ranges listed above. For reference, the scaled rating for the highest 25% of all take a look at takers is 157 in Verbal Reasoning and 165 in Quantitative Reasoning.

Comparatively, the scaled rating for the highest 50% of all take a look at takers is 152 in Verbal Reasoning and 157 in Quantitative Reasoning.

Once more, when contemplating your whole rating, you’ll wish to know the minimal admission necessities at your required faculty to higher perceive your baseline. Realizing the imply rating of beforehand admitted candidates will assist you to decide what rating you should stay aggressive in the course of the course of.

Holding the large image in thoughts, the GMAT and the GRE tackle the identical aim: serving to your potential program consider your instructional expertise and aptitude compared to different candidates. There are, nonetheless, a couple of minor variations between the 2 that you simply’ll need to remember come time to decide on.

Essentially the most notable distinction is that the GMAT is most frequently used for admission to enterprise faculty, whereas the GRE is broadly used for all different graduate packages, from an MFA to a PhD in Economics.

There are refined variations in how the exams are structured, the kinds of questions requested, and whole take a look at time, however they take a look at virtually the very same content material. Those that have taken each exams do, nonetheless, point out that the GRE focuses extra on textbook math, like geometry, whereas the GMAT emphasizes quantitative logic. Equally, earlier test-takers level to the GMAT’s deal with grammar, whereas the GRE leans extra into vocabulary.

Each exams make the most of a system often known as laptop adaptive testing, which means the examination varies the order and issue degree of the questions you might be requested in real-time. Nonetheless, the GMAT is question-adaptive, whereas the GRE is section-adaptive. What does this imply for you? The GMAT requires that you simply reply every query so as, with out the power to return to it, the place the GRE lets you reply questions in a piece in no matter order works for you.

Total, one of the best ways to establish which examination is healthier fitted to you is to run via a follow take a look at for every (entry a free GMAT follow take a look at right here and a free GRE follow take a look at right here). 

How properly you do on both the GMAT or the GRE solely signifies the extent of match between your expertise and what was examined. There isn’t a query of which take a look at is simpler — the reply utterly relies upon by yourself data and skills. However should you think about the suggestions listed by your required program, you need to be simply wonderful.

Except your program particularly states that they solely settle for the GMAT or solely settle for the GRE, stick to the one which works for you, and also you’ll be properly in your strategy to graduate faculty very quickly. Good luck!