An Argument to Keep GMAT in EMBA Admissions

I just returned from the annual meeting of the EMBA Council, this year in Vancouver, where my peers and I share information among some 300 EMBA programs all over the world. Our combined interest is to provide access and information that ultimately lead more people to an MBA education via executive format programs. Three of my peers from other schools asked me how I still use the GMAT as a diagnostic, saying that they’d like to but felt pressure to stop requiring it. Their concern? Schools in their market had dropped GMAT, so it was difficult to require it of candidates to their programs and still make their enrollment numbers. How, they asked, have I convinced prospective students to take it?

Why drop a tried and true predictor of academic performance because of pressure to beat competitors? How about using the GMAT to win customers? At Vanderbilt, our GMAT requirement in the EMBA Program helps with the following:
1. Assurance of a solid academic experience and speed of classroom since all classmates are of comparable academic acumen—like a sports team with players at the same level, despite their different backgrounds and strengths. Top prospective students love that. By insisting on the GMAT, we differentiate on a “quality of peers” basis. 100% of our students are vetted academically on CURRENT academic skills—students who might become YOUR study group members and impact YOUR grades if you choose to get an MBA here. Given the high percentage of group grading assignments, don’t you want to know your peers are your intellectual equals?
2. College GPA, for executive age students out of school 15-25 years, is not a current indicator of ability. And, it is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Is it fair to consider a nuclear engineering major from one university and a general studies major from a different school as the same, if their GPA is the same? Probably not. Either one may be the better prospective student academically. The GMAT will be a more accurate way to compare those two. In fact...
3. It is well documented that the R squared for GMAT is a stronger predictor than GPA and even more pronounced in EMBA students than for weekday MBA students. Ironically given the strongest R squared for GMAT as a predictor of core MBA performance in executive programs, the GMAT is now used more in the weekday MBA admissions at a number of schools that have dropped it over the past decade in EMBA admissions. This same time frame has seen the disturbing reference to “MBA Lite” in the press where some executive programs are not perceived as rigorous academically compared to their weekday MBA. No wonder.
4. GMAT preparation—relearning critical reasoning, algebra, etc—and spending 20 hours a week over 6 weeks to do it, is:
a. a way to be prepared for the MBA program, relearning skills long forgotten,
b. A way to determine if you need other pre-work on math and statistics to maximize your success in the MBA program,
c. a way to test your stamina for juggling the demands of work and school over a longer (two year) period of time.

To the argument that some people don’t have much standardized testing experience, I say two things:
a. The right prep is the equalizer. We advise students on how to do their personal best on the GMAT—100 hours of study the right way. Those students who take our advice on HOW to study and invest the 100 hours to do it will do their personal best on this test. And, it will be an amazingly valid predictor of their core MBA class performance.
b. We don’t expect everyone to have the same GMAT score, but we have a broad range of acceptable scores that have proven to lead to academic success in our program. MBA Program directors should know how to look at the MINIMUM score needed for success at their school, given their particular courses, difficulty levels, and the peer competition in their classroom that determines grading curves. That is, we have the history of past students and scores as a predictor of success in core courses in our MBA programs.

As I review at our stance on requiring the GMAT, I have found we have lost very few applicants, even though the competitors in my geography do not require it. Quite the opposite: students who want intellectual challenge are heartened by the fact that everyone here was vetted academically, and it appeals to a higher quality student.