Preparing for the New GMAT Exam: The Integrated Reasoning Section

“Nobody likes change,” points out Ashok Sarathy, vice president of the GMAT Program, in a recent blog post.

“Some of you are wondering why these changes to the GMAT exam have, seemingly, being thrust upon you,” Sarathy continues. “After all, isn’t the GMAT exam just a standardized test that allows you to be compared objectively with all of your peers in front of an admissions committee?

“Sure the GMAT exam does that, but it is more than just a standardized test — it is an exam built to purpose. For nearly 60 years the GMAT exam has been built to measure the skills necessary to succeed in a graduate management program.”

As global business has evolved in recent years, so too have the MBA programs that teach individuals to excel in the field. That of course means that the measures needed to test the suitability of applicants to MBA programs also needs to change – in the GMAT’s case this means adding the new Integrated Reasoning section.

Before deciding how best to prepare for the new GMAT’s Integrated Reasoning section, applicants need to know what the section is designed to test for.

Sarathay explains that the Graduate Management Admissions Council, organizers of the GMAT, received feedback from business schools that a number of key skills had emerged in modern business that they needed to prepare their MBA students for.

“We named these skills Integrated Reasoning, and they are at the heart of the new section,” he says.

“Examples from the business world validate the relevance of these skills, as data mining and analysis are critical in identifying purchase behaviors, cost factors, and opportunities to improve efficiencies. Even in graduate management programs, the case study approach (a typical methodology to teach various management concepts) requires students to integrate many different sources of information (graphical, tabular, text-based) to answer questions or provide a solutions to business problems.”

These integrated reasoning skills that the new GMAT is designed to test for shouldn’t be new skills to worthy MBA applicants though – they are skills needed in almost all levels of business, and should be ingrained on anyone with enough work experience to enrol on an MBA program in the first place.

Thirty minutes in length, the new Integrated Reasoning section consists of 12 questions, each of which falls under four different question types:

Graphics interpretation: questions that test MBA applicants on their ability to interpret graphs and/or graphical information. Graphics interpretation questions will consist of a graph or graphical image with one or more statements, of which candidates need to select the correct multiple-choice option to make each statement correct.
Two part analysis: here, candidates are presented with one or more statements, and a table with multiple-choice selections. Candidates should select one answer from each column in order to solve a problem with a two-part solution.
Table analysis: as the name suggests, candidates are required to prove their understanding of information displayed in a table. Questions are presented with an introductory explanation, a table of information which can sometimes be sorted, and a series of opposing statements (yes/no, true/false, etc…).
Multi-source reasoning: In the multi-source reasoning questions, candidates are given a series of sources accompanied by statements for which they must select the one(s) that are proven correct by one or more of the sources.

GMAT section

Previous GMATNew GMAT

Verbal

75 mins75 mins

Quantitative

75 mins75 mins

AWA

60 mins30 mins

Integrated Reasoning

N/A30 mins

Total

3.5 hrs3.5 hrs