Exam Information

http://www.gmac.com/
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Exam Preparation

About the GMAT

The Graduate Management Admission Test® (GMAT®) was designed to help business schools assess the qualifications of applicants for advanced study in business and management. It measures basic verbal, quantitative, and writing skills that are developed over a long period of time and is available year-round at test centers throughout the world. Of the several thousand graduate management programs worldwide, 1,700 use the GMAT and more than 1,000 require it.

In the school selection process, applicants are asked to show evidence of their potential to succeed. The GMAT is only one such measure of potential academic performance in graduate management education. In addition to the GMAT, this evidence typically includes academic records, work experience, application essays, recommendations, and interviews.

The GMAT is specifically designed to measure the verbal, quantitative, and writing skills of applicants for graduate study in business. It does not, however, presuppose any specific knowledge of business or other specific content areas, nor does it measure achievement in any particular subject areas. In addition, the test does not measure subjective factors important to academic and career success-such as motivation, creativity, interpersonal skills, and study skills. Test takers should note that the GMAT is entirely in English and that all instructions are provided in English.

All of the information that you need to prepare yourself for taking GMAT including the genuine directions on the test, demo questions, and testing procedures are contained in subsequent sections of this website, and are repeated in the GMAT Information Bulletin.

Format and Content

The Graduate Management Admission Test® (GMAT®) is a standardized assessment. Each individual test that is administered contains the same format and areas of content. The test is comprised of three main sections-analytical writing, quantitative reasoning, and verbal reasoning. Each of these areas is measured using different types of questions that have specific instructions for each. Visit Overview for more specific information about each section.

It is important to recognize that the GMAT evaluates skills and abilities that develop over relatively long periods of time. Although the sections are basically verbal or mathematical, the complete test provides one method of measuring overall ability. The GMAT does not test specific knowledge obtained in college course work, and it does not seek to measure achievements in any specific areas of study.

The Graduate Management Admission Council® recognizes that questions arise concerning techniques for taking standardized examinations such as the GMAT, and it is hoped that the descriptions and demo questions provided on the website will supply you practical familiarity with both the concepts and techniques required by GMAT questions. Of course, specific questions vary from one GMAT to another. Test questions are continuously written to replace previously administered questions, but must meet content and statistical requirements for the GMAT. genuine test questions that have been used previously are published in the demo GMAT® Questions and GMAT Mini-Test areas and in The Official Guide for GMAT® Review and the GMAT: POWERPREP® 3.0 Software.

Part of the standardization of the GMAT relates to the procedures followed at the testing center on the test day. Please visit the Procedures & Regulations area of the website to review these procedures before you appear at the test center. This will help reduce your anxiety and avoid any unforeseen problems the day of your test.

Format

The Graduate Management Admission Test® (GMAT®) includes analytical writing, quantitative, and verbal questions using a computer-adaptive format-the test adjusts to your individual ability level. Questions are chosen from a very large pool of test questions categorized by content and difficulty. Only one question at a time is presented to you on the screen. The first question is always of middle difficulty. The selection of each question thereafter is determined by your responses to all previous questions. In other words, the adaptive test adjusts to your ability level—you will get few questions that are too easy or too difficult for you.

You must answer each question and may not return to or change your answer to any previous question. If you answer a question incorrectly by mistake-or correctly by lucky guess-you answer to subsequent questions will lead you back to questions that are at the appropriate level of difficulty for you.

Every test contains trial multiple-choice questions needed for pre-testing for future use. These questions, however, are not identified and appear in varying locations within the test. You should therefore do your best on all questions. Answers to trial questions are not counted in the scoring of your test.

Content

The GMAT consists of four separately timed sections (see Summary). Each of the first two sections contains a 30-minute writing task; the other two sections are 75 minutes each and contain multiple-choice questions;

1. Analytical Writing Assessment

   You begin the GMAT with the Analytical Writing Assessment, which is comprised of two essays syllabus selected by the computer. You are allowed 30 minutes to respond to each topic. One task is to analyze an issue; the other is to analyze an argument. Most syllabus are published on the website (see demo GMAT® Questions) and in the GMAT®: POWERPREP® 3.0 Software. The Analytical Writing Assessment measures the ability to think critically and communicate complex ideas through writing.

2. Quantitative Section

   After an optional five-minute break, you begin the GMAT Quantitative section. This section contains 37 multiple-choice questions (with five answer choices per question) of either two question types, Data Sufficiency or Problem Solving. You are allowed a maximum of 75 minutes to complete the section. The Quantitative section measures basic mathematical skills and understanding of elementary concepts, and the ability to reason quantitatively, solve quantitative problems, and interpret graphic data.

3. Verbal Section

   After a second optional five-minute break, you begin the GMAT Verbal section. This section contains 41 multiple-choice questions (with five answer choices per question) of any of three question types, reading Comprehension, Critical Reasoning, and Sentence Correction. You are allowed a maximum of 75 minutes to complete the section. The Verbal section measures the ability to understand and evaluate what is read and to recognize basic conventions of standard written English.

4. Completing the Testing Session

   Following the end of the official testing time, you are asked questions concerning your background and the schools to which you are sending your GMAT scores. You may print a copy of your GMAT Quantitative, Verbal, and Total scores at the center at the end of your testing session.

Summary of Format, Content, and Scoring

You'll receive four GMAT scores:

Analytical Writing Assessment
Score ranges from 0–6. This is a separate score that is less important than the 200–800 cumulative score.

• Analysis of an Issue (1 Topic, 30 Minutes)
• Analysis of an Argument (1 Topic, 30 Minutes)
• Optional Rest Break (5 Minutes)

GMAT Quantitative
Quantitative scaled sub-score, ranging from 0–60. (Effectively, 51 is the max score.)

• Problem Solving (37 Questions, 75 Minutes)
• Data Sufficiency
• Optional Rest Break (5 Minutes)

GMAT Verbal
Verbal scaled sub-score, ranging from 0–60. (Effectively, 48 is the max score.)

• Reading Comprehension (41 Questions, 75 Minutes)
• Critical Reasoning
• Sentence Correction

Overall
Scaled score, ranging from 200–800. This is an overall score that is the combination of your 0–60 Quantitative and Verbal scores. The 200–800 cumulative score is what business schools primarily use.

National Averages
50th Percentile: 540
75th Percentile: 620
90th Percentile: 690
95th Percentile: 720
99th Percentile: 760–800

Retaking GMAT Tests

You may take the test (computer-based and/or paper-based) only once per calendar month and no more than 5 times in any 12-month period. This applies even if you canceled your scores on a test taken previously.

A PhD in Quantitative Methods in Educational Psychology develops a strong and marketable base in quantitative research methods.

Why choose to study quantitative methods?

• There is a well-documented shortage of professionals with quantitative skills, making graduates with such competencies in high demand.
• Across content areas and degree types, having strong quantitative research and data analysis skills makes applicants more competitive and better suited for many types of academic of industry work.
• A accurate report revealed there are more than twice the number of job positions advertised for quantitative methodologists as there were graduates with such skills.
• Forbes listed the ability to analyze quantitative data as a “top skill” needed on any résumé.
• Job openings can be found in such places as federal and state governments, state and local educational agencies, private industry, consulting firms, non-profit organizations, and offices of institutional research in post-secondary institutions.

Learn more about the PhD in Quantitative Methods:

• PhD with Quantitative Methods

Highlights:

• Full tuition remission
• Graduate stipends for all interested students
• Opportunities to work with research faculty who specialize in quantitative methods such as simulation, applications of advanced methods, and data mining using secondary data sets
• A department that is #1 campus-wide in publications by students and #2 for doctoral student presentations at professional meetings

For more information:
Dr. Grant Morgan, Quantitative Methods Program Director
Grant_Morgan@baylor.edu

All marketers, including entrepreneurs engaged in startups, must understand their customers from a 360 degree perspective. The process typically begins by identifying the most productive customers for a product or service. It’s also critical to obtain intelligence on how a product or service could fit into customers’ lives. That’s a more complex task.

When weighing how to spend limited research resources, many marketers believe that qualitative research is “soft”; quantitative research—especially big data—reigns supreme. But consider Evert Gummesson’s characterization of conducting both qualitative and quantitative marketing research as “a merger of the best of both worlds… (that) will add substantial synergy to research in marketing.” In other words, to fully understand customer practices, attitudes, and sentiments, and gain inspiration for innovation and marketing, it pays to conduct qualitative and quantitative research.

Even with the current emphasis on quantitative research, businesses are becoming more receptive to qualitative approaches. Sociologist Tricia Wang argues that qualitative research adds “thick data” to big data and, despite skepticism about qualitative research, business is booming for business anthropology. Business schools, known for being quantitatively focused, teach qualitative methods such as ethnography. And, to Gummesson’s point, combining qualitative and quantitative research is not a new idea; it’s been around for decades. Despite all of this, the emphasis in business schools—and, we observe, among startups—is on quantitatively derived market intelligence. At Columbia Business School, we have developed an advanced marketing research course that emphasizes the complementarity of qualitative and quantitative market research methods, incorporating, in a sense, both art and science. Even startups with limited budgets can use most of the methods we cover in our course and should add them to their startup toolkit.

What Kind of Research Are We Talking About?

Jake Pryszlak recently offered succinct definitions of qualitative and quantitative marketing research. Last year, Ken Yanhs wrote a piece that discussed current trends in qualitative research. He mentioned that when qualitative and quantitative research are combined, “you can tell a complete story of consumer sentiment, helping to validate or inform your marketing strategy for maximum impact.”

Let’s look more closely at what quantitative and qualitative marketing research each entail.

Qualitative marketing research is usually conducted with small numbers of respondents via focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, either face-to-face or virtually. Qualitative methods are valuable for uncovering customer attitudes, emotions, needs and wants, category and brand perceptions and usage, the impact of culture on consumption, and, especially, for adding depth and context to marketers’ understanding of their customers. Through all of this, marketers can learn if and how a brand could be a part of people’s lives. Qualitative research can inform product concepts and designs, help define marketing problems and opportunities, and generate hypotheses and questions for quantitative research. Small scale qualitative research should not be used to definitively assess a product concept or advertisement or to project market results.

Quantitative marketing research uses data collected through surveys, experiments, or customer behavior to validate research hypotheses generated by qualitative research, to explore empirical patterns in the data, and to make predictions. Quantitative methods are valuable for segmenting customers based on their needs, understanding consumer perceptions of products and services, assessing the impact of marketing activities on customer behavior, and optimizing marketing resource allocation. These methods support various managerial decisions involving which market segment(s) to target, how to position a brand within each segment, what product line to offer at what price, and how to promote it and deliver it to customers.

Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Marketing Research in a Course

In our course, we teach students how to select and apply the right type of marketing research to obtain consumer intelligence, make sense of it, and apply it to marketing problems. We cover how consumer markets are defined, understood, segmented, and assessed, and how all of that can generate compelling marketing insights. Students learn through cases and practice how to conduct and interpret focus groups, in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, ways to map customer journeys, how to apply quantitative methods such as cluster analysis, factor analysis, conjoint analysis, and logistic and OLS regression. Students have the opportunity to work with real companies, many of them startups.

Entrepreneurs need to know how and what kinds of questions to ask to use their often-limited resources most effectively. In our course, some of the questions we ask are the following:

• How do I begin to understand the market for my product?
• How do I discover if consumers need or want it, and which consumers are my best prospects?
• How do I capture them for research?
• How do I develop/modify my product?
• What are the best ways for positioning it in the marketplace and against which competition?
• How do I generate insights for advertising and packaging and evaluate consumer reactions to my messages?
• How do I price my product?
• How do I use sales promotion?
• Where do I sell it?
• How many can I sell?

Here are some examples of how we integrate qualitative and quantitative research methods:

• Use deep probing interview techniques to gain customer insight and, equally important, to develop hypotheses and questions for quantitative surveys
• Practice in-class projective interviewing techniques that help students formulate customer segments that can be assessed and refined in state-of-the-art quantitative segmentation studies
• Apply qualitative and quantitative research sequentially to develop brand positioning and advertising strategies
• Combine ethnography, ideation and conjoint analysis for new product development
• Have a guest speaker from a company that uses artificial intelligence to deliver focus group research on a quantitative scale

To illustrate how our students combine research methods, we’ve included a few slides (Fig. 1, 2, 3) in this article from one of our student group final projects.

The Power of the 360 Degree Approach

There is substantial power in a 360 degree approach to customer discovery that incorporates both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Taking this on does not require a large staff or a substantial budget, especially if entrepreneurs apply their innate resourcefulness to cost-effective survey methods and imaginative ways to procure respondents. They will emerge with profound customer understanding and strategic inspiration and increase their chances for marketplace success.

Robert J. Morais is a business anthropologist with experience in advertising and marketing research and an adjunct professor in the Marketing Division at Columbia Business School. Kamel Jedidi is the John Howard Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. His research interests include pricing, product positioning, and market segmentation.  

Covering both quantitative and qualitative methods, this book examines the breadth of modern market research methods for upper level students across business schools and social science faculties. Modern and trending syllabus including social networks, machine learning, big data, and artificial intelligence are addressed and real world examples and case studies illustrate the application of the methods. This text examines potential problems, such as researcher bias, and discusses effective solutions in the preparation of research reports and papers, and oral presentations. Assuming no prior knowledge of statistics or econometrics, discrete chapters offer a clear introduction to both, opening up the quantitative methods to all students. Each chapter contains rigorous academic theory, including a synthesis of the accurate literature as well as key historical references, applied contextualization and accurate research results, making it an excellent resource for practitioners. Online resources include extensive chapter bibliographies, lecture slides, an instructor guide and extra extension material and questions.

'Mercedes and Jose have written a comprehensive and modern book on marketing research methods that covers classical approaches as well as new methods such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Using real-life examples and case studies, the book illustrates complex methods with great clarity. It is a highly valuable resource for all teachers, students, and practitioners of market research.' Sunil Gupta, Harvard Business School, University of Harvard

Editorial Note: We earn a commission from partner links on Forbes Advisor. Commissions do not affect our editors' opinions or evaluations.

Mon, 08/21/2023 - 09:12am | By: Whitney Branch

The University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) Master of Business Administration (MBA) program has received impressive recognition in the field of online education by Fortune Education in their prestigious rankings for Online MBA Programs.

USM’s Online MBA program has earned several accolades, solidifying its position as a leader in delivering quality, flexible, and innovative business education.

Fortune’s Best Online MBA Program rankings were based on quantitative and qualitative methodologies via survey data, Fortune research findings, and brand surveys. Through these rigorous evaluation and analysis techniques, the Southern Miss Online MBA program has been placed at the forefront of academic excellence.

“We are thrilled that the Southern Miss Online MBA program has achieved remarkable recognition in Fortune Education's Best MBA Program rankings. These prestigious accolades are a testament to our unwavering commitment to delivering excellence in online business education,” said Dr. Bret Becton, Dean of the College of Business and Economic Development.

Dean Becton added, “The recognition highlights the dedication of our faculty, the exceptional quality of our curriculum, and the outstanding achievements of our graduates. As we celebrate this achievement, we remain steadfast in our mission to provide a world-class educational experience that empowers future business leaders to thrive in a dynamic and competitive global landscape.”

Dr. Steven Stelk, MBA Program Director, is delighted with the accurate ranking releases and optimistically looks to the future of the MBA program at Southern Miss.

“Fortune’s recognition of our MBA program is deeply gratifying. The College of Business and Economic Development faculty and staff have continued to invest in and refine the online MBA program since it was established in 2014. The accurate rankings are based on the previous academic year, which gives us an opportunity to celebrate the results of our investments while providing fresh motivation for continuing to refine the program. We are implementing some exciting curriculum changes this Fall while we welcome the second-largest MBA class in the program’s history.”

Dr. Stelk adds, “We are continuing to develop and test new ideas to increase the value of our MBA for students, and I am excited to see what the future holds.”  

USM’s MBA program has indefinitely waived the GRE and GMAT requirements, removing some student barriers. The University will still consider test scores with applications with other required materials – three letters of recommendation, statement of purpose, resume, and cover letter. International students must submit TOEFL scores.

Prospective students interested in joining the esteemed ranks of The University of Southern Mississippi’s Online MBA Program can learn more online. Inquiries and discussions on the program, or other Southern Miss Business graduate programs, can be facilitated by calling (601) 266-4659 or emailing.

This pathway is for social scientists who wish to learn advanced quantitative methods for secondary-data analysis, and apply these methods appropriately to answer particular substantive questions from their disciplines. This includes social scientists who are interested in interdisciplinary research that requires the application of quantitative methods from one discipline to problems in another.

This pathway is also for statistically trained researchers whose interests are more methodological. Projects may involve applying statistical methods used in other disciplines to social science problems, or developing novel statistical methods for analysing social science data. We welcome applications from students with backgrounds in statistics or related disciplines.

You will normally be registered in the school of your first supervisor. This may not be the school that processes your application.

The primary goals of the PhD program in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Quantitative Methods are to

• Develop researchers with multidisciplinary perspectives
• Improve the quality of instruction and research in higher education
• Develop researchers who encourage inquiry and creative production
• Develop researchers who are scholars.

The quantitative methods specialization can be up to 24 hours of advanced coursework in quantitative methods, such as item response theory and latent variable models.

The Quantitative Methods Specialization of the PhD program is for those who aspire to such professional goals as:

• Joining a faculty at an institution of higher education in departments of educational psychology, psychology, and related disciplines
• Coordinating professional development, continuing education, and research centers
• Leading research and development centers.