The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is the latest among top business schools that plan to allow prospective applicants to submit scores from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in lieu of the long-favored Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), according to a recent BusinessWeek article.
The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business made a similar announcement earlier this year, bringing the number of MBA programs accepting GRE scores to more than 250, BusinessWeek reports.
“We are trying to open up a little bit the different types of people that we want to apply to business school and we don’t want to create additional hurdles for them to do so,” Wharton Dean J.J. Cutler told BusinessWeek. By accepting GRE scores, schools are hoping to attract more dual-degree students, younger applicants and international applicants from countries without GMAT access.
Stanford Graduate School of Business and MIT’s Sloan School of Management began accepting the GRE several years ago. And earlier this spring, Harvard Business School announced that it, too, would allow applicants to submit GRE scores for admission to its regular MBA program as well as its 2+2 Program, which accepts students straight out of college who agree to complete two years of approved work experience before beginning their MBA.
“Now that Harvard has accepted it, I anticipate over the summer and into the fall we’re going to see a rapid increase of other business schools accepting it,” David Payne, head of the GRE program for Educational Testing Service (ETS), told BusinessWeek.
Behind the trend toward accepting GRE scores is a change in the relationship between ETS and the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), which owns and administers the GMAT. On Jan. 1, 2006, GMAC ended its contract with ETS, which had been its partner in developing and delivering the GMAT exam for decades. GMAC moved instead to a new testing administrator, Pearson VUE, which freed ETS from non-complete clauses with GMAC that had previously prohibited it from promoting the GRE to business schools as an alternative exam.
And since then, promoting the GRE is just what ETS has done . “Once they ended the contract with us, we were able to move into this market,” ETS’s Payne, told BusinessWeek.
As business schools move toward accepting the GRE, they are able to appeal to a broader audience of applicants who might otherwise have been dissuaded from applying by the prospect of having to study for and take more than one exam. ETS, which has been aggressively marketing the GRE to business school admissions officers in recent months, has also been promoting its $150 exam as a more affordable option for applicants than the $250 GMAT.
