GRE Catching Up With GMAT?

By Louis Lavelle Updated Oct 22, 2014

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Introduction
GMAT vs GRE: Are all admissions tests created equal?

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For many years, the GMAT has been the undisputed gatekeeper for business school, with virtually every top school requiring applicants to submit test scores and giving those scores a degree of importance that far exceeds any other part of the application. That’s starting to change. Sort of.

A new survey of more than 200 US business schools conducted by Kaplan Test Prep found that 85% of MBA programs now give students the option of submitting either the GMAT or the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), the standard admissions test for non-business graduate programs.

That’s a fairly astounding accomplishment for a test, published by the Educational Testing Service, which has been angling for a piece of GMAT’s turf for only about seven years. As recently as 2009, only 24% of business schools said they accepted the GRE.

“The trendline for business schools that accept the GRE as an admissions alternative to the GMAT has been unmistakable over the past five years,” said Brian Carlidge, Kaplan’s executive director of pre-business and pre-graduate programs. “What was once seen as an almost exotic admissions policy by business schools has become nearly ubiquitous.”

GMAT vs GRE: Are all admissions tests created equal?

But before the folks at ETS go breaking out the champagne, Kaplan has a bit of bad news: even though a lot of schools accept the GRE only a small a trickle of applicants actually use the GRE to apply to business school.

Over half the admissions officers surveyed said that 10% or fewer applicants submitted GRE scores during the most recent admissions cycle, a slight uptick from past surveys, but still a tiny fraction of those opting for the GMAT.

Kaplan says that 78% of MBA programs claim to treat the scores from the two tests equally, while 18% say that applicants who submit a GMAT have an advantage over those who submit a GRE.

Why is this? Well, one reason may be that the GMAT is an extremely challenging test – and for some schools a GRE might be a red flag that the applicant can’t handle the math. Some MBA admissions consultants advise applicants who are weak on math to submit GRE scores instead. Even if the school prefers the GMAT, the logic goes, better to have a stellar GRE score than an awful showing on the GMAT.