Biometric fingerprinting and digital camera surveillance could from next year be another source of stress for students taking the Graduate Management Admission Test, the compulsory precursor to most MBA programmes.
The GMAT was created in 1953 by nine leading US business schools. They set up the Graduate Management Admissions Council to develop a standardised test for students entering the then expanding MBA market. Today the GMAT is a significant operation, with about 68,000 tests taken worldwide in the first five months of this year.
But changes are afoot. From January, GMAC will end its long-standing link with Educational Testing Service and GMAT will be administered by Pearson VUE, the computer-based testing arm of Pearson Education (whose parent company is Pearson, owner of the Financial Times).
According to David Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC, the switch to Pearson VUE will bring with it more international centres, all with greater security.
“Test security is a huge issue for us,” says Mr Wilson. The principal fear is that the person showing up at business school with an impressive score may not be the same person who took the GMAT.
“The whole focus of admissions is on saying ‘is the person we are admitting the person we think we are admitting?’” says Derrick Bolton, associate dean and director of MBA admissions at Stanford Graduate School of Business in the US.
Earlier this year, two impersonators were convicted for fraudulently completing business school entry tests – including the GMAT.
In some south-east Asian countries it is not unknown for teachers to take the test themselves and memorise questions. Students can then be coached before the exam.
According to Mr Wilson, Pearson VUE plans to address these issues by using digital video cameras at test centres. Crucially, digitally recorded images can be magnified, allowing identification of individual students. Mr Wilson adds that “we will use biometric fingerprinting in every country that allows us to do that”.
But perhaps just as important as security are rising scores. Research by the Economist Intelligence Unit shows that between 1994 and 2004 the average GMAT score at schools with the top 10 highest scores rose from 648 to 708 (the maximum score is 800).
There are several explanations for this, including greater preparation and taking the test multiple times. Prof Bolton believes that “if scores keep rising then GMAC may have to recalibrate the test”.
Rightly or wrongly, students use average GMAT scores as a sort of proxy for the quality of an MBA programme. Jikyeong Kang, director of the MBA programme at Manchester Business School in the UK, says: “If one school has a 600 average and another has 650, then they will think the 650 is a better programme.”
Mr Wilson argues that in surveys students consistently say the most important thing in an MBA programme is the quality of their classmates and that, in effect, GMAT scores are a good indicator of this. “Who is sitting next to you in class is important,” he says.
