Kaplan Test Prep Survey: Jury Still Out On What Admissions Officers Will Do With Integrated Reasoning

What’s the significance of the new GMAT section, Integrated Reasoning? It’s a question that both aspiring MBA students and MBA programs themselves are still working through.

A new crop of business school applicants has submitted the first set of applications with GMAT scores that include the newly launched GMAT Integrated Reasoning section. Meanwhile, results from Kaplan Test Prep’s 2012 survey of business school admissions officers* suggest that the opinion of business schools of the new section may have slipped since we surveyed them about this topic last year. It’s too early to pass final judgment on the new section, but here are this year’s major findings:

• 41% of admissions officers said IR would make the GMAT more reflective of the business school experience, a big drop from the 59% who answered that way in Kaplan’s 2011 survey. Those who weren’t sure if IR would make the exam more reflective rose from 37% in 2011 to 49% in 2012.   Admissions officers who said IR would not make the exam more reflective increased from 5% in 2011 to 10% in 2012.
• Somewhat similarly, 54% of admissions officers “do not know” if Integrated Reasoning makes the GMAT more reflective of work in business and management after business school; 36% say it does; and 10% say it doesn’t.
• There is still dominant uncertainty, however.  More than half of MBA programs are unsure of how important Integrated Reasoning (IR) scores will be in the evaluation process, with 54% responding “Undecided” to the question, “How important will a student’s Integrated Reasoning score be in your evaluation of their overall performance on the GMAT?” 22% say IR scores will be important, while 24% say IR scores will not be important.

Our key takeaway: Schools generally prefer to gather performance data on a new test or test section before fully incorporating it into their evaluation process.  Since GMAT scores are good for five years, not all applicants will submit GMAT scores with an IR component. We can expect that, as more data is available, schools will determine clear policies, in which IR may play a key role. In the meantime, we are telling GMAT test takers to not take IR any less seriously than the Quantitative or Verbal sections.

Students cannot afford to ignore IR, however. Because test takers receive a separate score for the IR section, poor performance can’t be masked by stronger performance on other sections of the test. And students who take the test now may end up applying later, when IR may play a more pivotal role.

The four question types found in GMAT Integrated Reasoning – table analysis, graphics interpretation, multi-source reasoning and two-party analysis – feature scatter plots, sortable tables, and multi-tabbed data.  Such question types, introduced in the new section in June 2012, are novel compared to the formats traditionally seen on graduate school-level admissions exams such as the GRE, LSAT and MCAT.
Stay tuned for more information about what MBA programs are saying – we’ll be tracking this issue in the months and years to come and will report back to you and the students you help.

* For the 2012 survey, 265 business school admissions officers – including 17 from the nation’s top 25 MBA programs, as designated by U.S. News & World Report – were polled by telephone between August and September 2012.