Tuesday’s Tip: “To GRE or not to GRE…”

Since the GRE was given an overhaul some 18 months ago, business schools the nation over–with Harvard Business School leading the charge–have stated that, in lieu of the GMAT, they will now accept GRE scores. This is huge news that has been met with barely a thud from the prospective applicant community. Why the underwhelming response?

For starters, most GMAT-ers have been so engrossed in conquering this beast of an exam, and with good reason, that they haven’t even considered their relative strengths and weakness and how those qualities would play out on a different exam, perhaps one more suitable to their skill set.

By all qualified accounts, the GRE quantitative portion is considerably easier than that of the GMAT. The concepts tested are simpler and the question structure is more straightforward (no data sufficiency!). In addition, in place of the dreaded Integrated Reasoning section is a second AWA essay–a slow-pitch softball if there ever was one in the standardized test world. In the verbal section, grammar is not tested but vocabulary is. The GRE contains sentence completion questions that test your familiarity with uncommon words used in context. The GRE reading comprehension section is comparable in length and difficulty to the GMAT, though most consider it slightly easier. Missing, however, from the GRE verbal section, are the GMAT critical reasoning questions–those dreaded labyrinthine argument questions; this is also good news.

As you can tell, the GRE, on the whole, seems to be an exam, if not easier, then at least requiring less new skills to be learned–argument deconstruction, data sufficiency, graphical interpretation–than the GMAT. Both exams are roughly four hours long. So, if you are struggling with the GMAT, take a free practice test at www.gre.org and see if your natural scholastic skill set is better suited for the GRE. A recent client of ours had taken the GMAT her fourth time before throwing her hands up in surrender and asked what we recommended. After having her take a GRE practice test and spending  a few weeks showing her some of the strategic shortcuts and patterns built into the exam, she walked away with a GRE score that would have equated to a 610 on the GMAT (she was stuck in the 400’s all four times she took the exam).

Speaking of scoring, there is one last difference between the two tests. To understand the difference, remember that GMAT test-takers are competing with other GMAT test takers, namely prospective B-School applicants. Who does this demographic typically include? Weeell, finance guys for starters…management consultants, former accountants, and lot’s and lot’s of Chinese and Indian math hot-shots looking to get into a Top Ten U.S. MBA program. What are we getting at? Math (quantitative reasoning) is this demographic’s bread and butter, skewing upward the average scores to where now anything less than a 720 and you stand little shot at a Top Ten School.

Conversely, take a moment to consider the typical GRE test taker. They generally tend to be liberal arts types, right? Art history, literature, history and psychology majors–people whose quantitative (and standardized test-taking skills in general) are not as strong as the math-heads taking the GMAT. Translation? Less competition for you!

So, for all you sleep-tortured GMAT sufferers, know that there is another, perhaps less painful option out there. And regarding misinformation out there that Business Schools favor high GMAT scores to high GRE scores, this is not only patently untrue, but also completely illogical. Why would a Business School encourage their applicants to take a test whose results they don’t trust? It would be like Apple paying big money to host a recruiting event for new computer programmers and sending the invitations to art school grads. Or something like that…

Good luck and we hope those data sufficiency nightmares stop soon. If you have any questions about this, or previous articles, please contact us and we will get back to you.