Over the last ten years, the percentage of Asia-Pacific students taking the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) – the business school entrance exam – has doubled. Today, 44 percent of GMAT-takers come from countries such as India, Korea, and China (only 36 percent are from America). And, as this Wall Street Journal article indicates, those students are crushing their American competition. They’re far outpacing Americans, particularly on the quantitative section of the test. Many B-school admissions officers say that a score on the quantitative section is the best predictor of success in an MBA program.
One result of these disparities is that Americans’ percentile rankings have dropped, even though their raw scores have remained constant in recent years. With Asia-Pacific students applying to and attending American business schools in large numbers, some schools complained to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT. As the WSJ put it, schools “don’t want to become factories for high-scoring test-takers from abroad.”
The schools were unsatisfied with the global rankings, which made it harder to determine American applicants’ relative scores. Their thinking: a test-taker from Georgia may be in the 74th percentile globally, but how does he or she compare to other Southerners? To other Americans? Other males/females? And so, in September, GMAC announced new “benchmarking tools” that will allow B-school admissions officers to compare applicants without relying solely on global percentile rankings.
From the B-schools’ perspective, boosting enrollment from abroad is a goal to be balanced with another interest: enhancing ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic “diversity.” In this instance, however, I’m in agreement with one B-school admissions officer (who chose to remain anonymous) interviewed by the WSJ. The officer argued that the focus should be on improving math instruction at the K-12 level, not creating a “different [admission] standard for U.S. students.”