GMAT duration to be shortened by 30 mins from April 16; details available on mba.com

NEW DELHI: The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) is shortening the duration of the GMAT exam by 30 minutes as part of its ongoing focus on creating the best possible testing experience and offering user-friendly features. The new, shorter exam - which will be of 3.5 hours instead of 4 hours - will be available for test-takers worldwide beginning April 16.

To learn more about these changes, please review our FAQs: http://www.mba.com/frequently-asked-questions/shorter-gmat-exam

In a statement released by GMAC, it said that the quality of the exam remains unchanged in terms of reliability, validity, security and integrity. GMAT scores before and after this change will be the same and comparable across time.

"We are always looking for ways to help build candidate confidence and streamline the test experience, all with one goal in mind - to help GMAT test-takers do their very best on exam day," said Vineet Chhabra, senior director of product management for GMAC. 

"We believe candidates will have less anxiety and feel better prepared, which can contribute to a better reflection of their true performance on the exam," he added.

The time savings are achieved by streamlining the two longer sections of the exam, the Quantitative and Verbal Reasoning sections, reducing the number of unscored, research questions in these sections. Several tutorial and instruction screens that test-takers see at the test center have also been simplified. There are no changes to the exam’s Analytical Writing or Integrated Reasoning sections. The way the GMAT exam is scored, the content of the exam, the question types and the average time per question are not changing.

Chhabra further said, "Through our ongoing market feedback and operational reviews, we were able to identify this opportunity to shorten the exam, without changing its reliability. 

"This change will not affect GMAT exam scoring as the number of scored questions will not change. The scoring algorithm will be the same; the Total Score and individual Quant and Verbal section scores will be comparable to the exams taken prior to this change. There is no action or change required on the part of business schools and universities. We are providing candidates with a better testing experience, while providing business schools with the same high quality, fair and reliable scores," he added.

A total of 250,884 GMAT exams were taken by prospective business school students around the world, and 32,514 GMAT exams taken by prospective business students in India in the testing year 2017, which ran from July 1, 2016, through June 30, 2017.

The GMAT exam is designed to showcase the skills that are most relevant to the world’s leading graduate business programs; 9 out of 10 new MBA enrollments globally are made using a GMAT score.