You are not alone
Each year around this time, GMAC releases its annual report on GMAT test-takers. The report this year counted a record 265,613 GMAT test-takers in 2009, up 7.55% from last year’s record 246,957. So your imagination is not running wild – it is indeed a year during which many people are taking the GMAT and trying to gear up for business school.
Other facts from the report:
The fastest-rising age group of GMAT test-takers is under 24, rising 23.6 percent annualized over the last five years. It seems young people are keeping their options open in this economy.
For the first time, non-U.S. citizens (135,105) outnumbered U.S. test-takers (130,508). This is likely because of the increasing adoption of the GMAT by international business schools, which are themselves increasing in number. If historical trends continue, this may continue to skew the GMAT’s math curve up (a subset of international applicants tends to be very good at math) and the verbal curve down (a subset of international applicants tends to be poor at verbal).
After rising by 15 points over the preceding 3 years, the mean GMAT score dropped by 1 point, to 539. This is a bit of a surprise, as we’d imagined scores to continue rising, though perhaps increasing the number of test-takers would logically result in stable average scores (so we should have thought differently).
39.5% of test-takers were women, the same proportion as last year.
If there are more interesting insights from GMAC’s report, we’ll look to post them here.