Nearly every day, GMAT test-takers – via GMAT Club, YouTube, or one-on-one tutoring sessions – ask us dozens of questions that are best answered by the test-makers themselves.
A few of our favorites:
- Why is my GMAT exam “under review”? Am I in trouble?
- What is this Executive Assessment thing? Is it just a “lite” version of the GMAT?
- I’ve met people who get extra testing time because of ADHD or some other condition. How does that work?
- When schools receive my official score report, is there a photo of me? Does it include scores from every exam I’ve taken?
- I’ve heard that online GMAT scores often get cancelled. Should I take the at-home GMAT instead?
- Are the official mba.com practice tests just like the real exam, or are there differences?
- How many RC passages and MSR sets are on the GMAT?
And here’s the question we hear the most:
- I don’t understand how GMAT scoring works! I missed only two questions on a section, and my score wasn’t great. How is that even fair?!?
If you’ve wondered about any of these things, we have good news: GMAC – the creators of the GMAT and Executive Assessment – have answered all of these questions on camera, in partnership with GMAT Club and GMAT Ninja.
If you're like most test-takers, you've probably felt like the GMAT was created by incredibly cruel bogeymen, who hide in their offices and laugh maniacally at your pain. We created this video series with the goal of demystifying the exam and the people who administer it -- and, ultimately, with the hope that we can reduce some of the agony that often accompanies test-taking.
Here's the initial release of ten videos, hosted on
GMAT Club’s YouTube channel:
- June 11: The Truth Behind Your GMAT Score, Part 1 – with Jaime Malatesta, GMAC Senior Psychometrician and Research Manager
- June 18: The GMAT Score Report Revealed – with Zach Fernebok, GMAC Senior Product Marketing Manager
- June 26: The Truth Behind Your GMAT Score, Part 2 – with Jaime Malatesta
- July 2: How Testing Accommodations REALLY Work, Part 1 – with Jason Northrup, GMAC Senior Manager for Testing Accommodations
- July 9: How to Avoid Getting Your GMAT Score Canceled -- stories of how GMAT exams can go wrong and advice for avoiding test-day trouble
- July 16: How Testing Accommodations REALLY Work, Part 2 – with Jason Northrup
- July 23: Learning From Your Mistakes: Inside GMAT’s Detailed Score Report -- with GMAC's Zach Fernebok, who took the GMAT and was rewarded with a painful, on-screen analysis of his actual score report
- July 30: How to Survive the Online GMAT -- spoiler alert: don't let anybody hide under your bed during the exam
- August 6: Inside the Executive Assessment -- with Eric Chambers, GMAC Director of Membership and Key Initiatives (also known as the de facto godfather of the Executive Assessment)
- August 13: Help, My GMAT Score is "Unfair" -- "weird" (or "horrible") GMAT scores and the real reasons why they happen
I say this with pride: it took us 15 months to produce just ten short videos, partly because testing agencies simply aren’t accustomed to this level of openness and transparency. There are good reasons why: a misstatement could compromise the integrity of the exam or inadvertently mislead test-takers. Everything you’ll see in our video series was the result of painstaking collaboration, with up to a dozen different voices shaping the content for each video.
If you’re a test-taker, I think you’ll love the result: an all-access look at everything related to the EA and GMAT, including an unprecedented level of transparency about the exams’ scoring system and overall design.
To access the videos, visit
GMAT Club’s YouTube channel, and we'll also add links to this thread as the videos are released. If you have more questions that you’d like to see answered by GMAC, just let us know in the video comments or in this thread, and we’ll do our best to address them in an upcoming video.
Enjoy, and have fun studying!