Has anyone not heard yet that the GMAT is changing on June 5th? If you’re sure you won’t need to take the new test, you don’t need to read this article. If you are planning to take the new test, though, or if you think you might have to, then read on.

Scoring

Over the past week, GMAC has released some additional information about the new Integrated Reasoning (IR) section – in particular, some very key details on how the scoring is going to work.

When GMATPrep 2.0® launched a few weeks ago, it became apparent that the scoring scale would be from a low of 1 to a high of 8, and GMAC has since confirmed that the scores will be given in integer increments – no 6.5 or 7.5 scores.

More importantly, we now know that the IR section scoring will be based on percentage correct, unlike the quant and verbal portions of the test, and there will be no penalty for incorrect answers. Integrated Reasoning is not an adaptive test, so the primary determinant of our score really is just how many we get right. (Note: although the test is not adaptive, we still can’t go back to questions we’ve already finished. Once you confirm an answer, that question is gone for good.) Further, the different question types will all be weighted the same – so it’s not the case that, say, Graphics Interpretation questions will be any more or less important than Table Analysis questions. Continue Reading…

Note: This is an updated version of an article posted last year.

As GMAC gears up to release the Next Generation GMAT in June of 2012, we’ve been taking a look at the four sample questions posted on the mba.com website.

Let’s look at the hardest one of these questions in more detail! I can’t reproduce the problem here for reasons that will be obvious once you actually start to tackle it yourself. I also can’t tell you how much time to give yourself because GMAC hasn’t given us any timing guidelines. Just take whatever time you need. (Note: all excerpts or quotes from the problem are copyright GMAC.)

Continue Reading…