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egmat
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Till I read this announcement, I was of the same opinion as Sachin and Carcass. However, the findings of this report surprised me (were some sort of an eye opener too). Traditionally, GMAT has served two purposes:

1. It has been taken as a predictor of the student's performance in B-school.
2. It is a symbol of prestige. Schools flaunt their mean and median GMAT scores as a proxy for prestige/selectivity.

Having completed an MBA, I can vouch that the skills tested on the GMAT IR are at least as relevant for B-School (and post B-school) success as the skills tested in the quant and verbal section. The IR skills are probably more important in schools such as Stern, Duke etc. (finance focused schools). The trend with big data will make these skills important again in fields such as Marketing.

Why are GMAC's findings interesting?




Lets understand GMAC's findings. The stats have proven that regardless of your GMAT score, the IR score has a distribution. This probably means that even those who score 750, a good percentage of them (half of them if you go by the stats) do not score well on the IR. Considering that the skills tested on IR are important to academic and professional success, I believe that it is possible that schools will start considering them seriously.

Lets fast forward a few months and go to September'2014 - the year when the first batch that was tested on IR completes their first year. I bet that schools will start taking IR more seriously if GMAC can prove that there is a much higher likelihood that a student with a GMAT score of 650 and with an IR score of 7 or higher is likely to perform better than one with a GMAT score of 700 and an IR score of 6 or lower (Remember IR has low correlation with Quant and Verbal Scores).

So yes, IR may not be as important right now, but it could be very important in a year from now.

-Rajat
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Really interesting stuff. Thank you for posting, Rajat!

I definitely believed that schools wouldn't care about the IR section for at least another three or four years, but maybe the validity studies will prove IR's value far earlier than I thought. I actually agree that the IR section seems to test more important skills than the rest of the GMAT (data interpretation is far more valuable than number properties or modifier placement, right?), but I figured that b-schools already have plenty of data points on applicants, and the IR data point is unlikely to say anything terribly new about any given candidate.

And it looks like I'll be very wrong about that. Rajat, you're completely correct: if the next batch of studies proves that somebody with a 700 composite and a 5 on the IR performs worse in b-school than a student with a 700 composite and a 7 or 8 on IR, the game will change really quickly.

For whatever it's worth, I'm a little bit skeptical of this first batch of data. Despite GMAC's best marketing efforts, many test-takers aren't taking IR seriously yet, and some well-prepared test-takers (including many of our friends in this forum) are likely to conserve energy on IR, and therefore get a lower IR score relative to their quant and verbal scores. Maybe it's not a large effect, but I wouldn't be surprised if the correlation figures are skewed by the fact that many test-takers refuse to take the IR seriously yet. My bet is that the correlation between IR and quant/verbal scores will slowly inch upward, but not nearly enough to invalidate the IR section.

It will be really interesting to see what happens when GMAC has more complete data over the next year or two. Despite my mild skepticism about this first batch of data, it looks like GMAC is well on its way to proving that the IR section matters, and soon it will just be a question of how long it will take for adcoms to fully embrace the data.
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Dear Charles,

Your hypothesis is quite likely. It was difficult for me to fathom that a large # of folks who did well on the Quant and Verbal sections did not do as well on IR. I do believe that the correlation between quant and verbal scores and IR score will increase as well.

On the other hand, one could argue that GMAC may make IR questions more challenging to ensure that a high enough correlation is maintained. Moreover, as schools start considering IR scores, more and more people will take it seriously. Whatever be the case, the next 12 months will be interesting.

-Rajat
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Hi fameatop / Egmat ,

Could you please explain this equation below ( how did you derive it ) ?


This means that the combined score of 2 new students must be equal to ->
= [Current Mean score (excluding 2 new students) X No of new students] + [Required Increase in Mean score x No of current students]
= [Min 10 x 2] + [ Min 2 x 13]
= Min 20 + Min 26
= Min 46
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1991sehwag
Hi fameatop / Egmat ,

Could you please explain this equation below ( how did you derive it ) ?


This means that the combined score of 2 new students must be equal to ->
= [Current Mean score (excluding 2 new students) X No of new students] + [Required Increase in Mean score x No of current students]
= [Min 10 x 2] + [ Min 2 x 13]
= Min 20 + Min 26
= Min 46

Hi 1991sehwag,

We know that Sum of all the numbers in the set = Mean of the set * No. of numbers in the set
So before the addition of two new students in the class, we had

Total combined score = 14.23 * 13 = 185.

Once two new students are added the mean score increases by at least 2 points and the number of students also increases by 2. Hence we can write

Total minimum new combined score = (14.23 + 2 ) * 15 = 243

The increase in the combined score is because of the addition of the scores of the two new students. Hence their combined score should be minimum of 243 - 185 = 58. Since the statement tells us that their combined scores was ( 19 +5 ) = 24, the statement is not true.

Hope this helps :)

Regards
Harsh
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