Starting in February 2015, GMAC will be launching its new Enhanced Score Report as a way of helping test takers better understand their GMAT performance and potentially strategize and plan for a retest. With this new tool, test takers will be able to see how much time they spent on each question, identify their skill strengths and weaknesses, and benchmark their performance against test takers from the last three years. The customized summary report will help test takers prepare for future study and test taking.
The AWA score is not included in the ESR since the report only uses data generated from unofficial scores (and this does not include the AWA). There is also no sub-section feedback given on the IR section since that section is too small to provide an adequate sample.
Test takers may purchase their GMAT Enhanced Score Report here for $24.95 and then have access to their report for five years. You can purchase your ESR for GMAT exams taken as far back as October 2013. ESRs become available up to 48 hours after you’ve completed your GMAT exam. Applicants who purchase the ESR also receive two additional practice exams and nearly 100 additional practice questions.
Starting last year in June 2014, GMAC gave test takers the option of cancelling their scores within a few minutes of completing the exam. The ESR authentication code can be applied to those cancelled exams, but not towards a GMAT exam for which a score was revoked due to a policy violation.
My thoughts:
This information should be valuable to those who aren’t satisfied with their GMAT score and want to know where to focus their studies. For those people the data is worth the fee. And in the context of the cost of the MBA, it is pocket change.
At the same time, this new revenue source for GMAC represents another competitive advantage for the GRE, which is less expensive than the GMAT to begin with.
Furthermore ETS, the entity behind the GRE, already provides the GRE Diagnostic Service at no additional cost to its test takers, and that service is similar to GMAT’s Enhanced Score Report. According to the ETS website:
“The GRE® Diagnostic Service provides insight into your performance on the test questions in the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections of the GRE® revised General Test. This FREE service includes a description of the types of questions you answered right and wrong as well as the difficulty level and time spent on each question.”
Unlike the GMAC’s ESR, the Diagnostic Service does not provide practice exams or questions.
My sense is that the $25 fee will be resented by affluent test takers, but if they need the information they will (and should) pay for it. It will be yet one more hurdle for applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. And for those unsure of which of the two tests to take, the price of the ESR just adds a little weight to the side of the scale that says “GRE.”
By Linda Abraham, president and founder of Accepted.com and co-author of the definitive book on MBA admissions, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools.
Related Resources:
• That GMAT Score: Implications for Your MBA Application
• Should You Retake the GMAT Exam?
• GRE vs. GMAT: Trends
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This article originally appeared on the Accepted Admissions Consulting Blog, the official blog of Accepted.com.
