There is more clarity about the new Integrated Reasoning (IR) section that is slated to debut in the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) in its new format scheduled to launch in June 2012. Unlike the Quant and Verbal sections which are adaptive, IR will be a fixed-form test. Which means that candidates will be served a fixed question paper from a collection of many such papers for the IR section, which will be post-equated. The difficulty level will not be adjusted depending on your performance in each question.
Your percentile score in the IR section will be updated each month by taking into account the fresh batch of test-takers for every new month. “So if you took the test in June 2012 and applied to a b-school in the same month, your IR percentile reported to the school will be equal to the percentage of candidates who scored lower than you in June only. However if you applied to a school in October 2012 using the same score, your new IR percentile will be the number of people who scored lower than you throughout June, July, August and September,” Vice President of the GMAT program Ashok Sarathy told PaGaLGuY today.
The scoring process and scale for the IR section is still being worked on and will be made public around March 2012, he added. After the new GMAT is launched, scores will continue to follow the old Quant-Verbal-Total-Essay score format. But in addition, there would be an additional IR score. The Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) score would be calculated on the basis of just one essay instead of the existing two.
The GMAT Quant, Verbal and Total percentiles will however continue to be updated using the same old scheme — once every year by taking into account test taker performance for the last three years.
The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) also released 19 new sample questions from the IR section on its website yesterday across the Graphics Interpretation, Two-part Analysis, Table Analysis and Multisource Reasoning question subtypes.
Prima facie, the IR section looks a lot like the Data Interpretation (DI) section of the Common Admission Test (CAT). However, there are a few major differences. For one, GMAT appears to be very clear that it is not interested in your calculation skills, because the IR section will have an on-screen calculator throughout the test. It does want to test your visual estimation skills, though.
For example in this question showing how the mass of a Tyrannosaurus Rex increases as it grows older, the idea is to look at the shape of the graph and deduce the average mass between ages 12 and 30 years in the first option. All GMAT wants to test here is how good you are at reasoning visually, and therefore the answer options are ranged fairly far apart.
Unlike the CAT DI section whose questions have been centered around data calculations that directly follow from the tables or charts, the IR section wants to evaluate whether you can make higher order deductions from the given data. For example in this set, the first question requires you to deduce the answer based on Brazil’s 21% production share and rank 1. Such type of questions have only lately started appearing in the CAT.
Using questions such as this, the IR section wants to test how good a candidate is at correlating information from two or more sources — such as the text of two emails — to reach a conclusion. According to Mr Sarathy, “It tests skills such as whether you can read two related memos, one from your boss and one from your colleague, and interpret the information correctly to reach a decision.”
However, each set will be considered as one question, regardless of many sub-questions it has. For example, this set will be considered as one question (and not two, despite the two problems given inside for solving) and the entire IR section will have 12 such.
The IR section will however eventually become adaptive. “We haven’t yet decided when it will go adaptive. This is a new section. We want to see what the data looks like, share it with schools and get their reactions. We can only then take a decision once we have better information. Even though we’ve done a fair number of pilot tests with the IR section, we want to see how students react to it in a live environment,” said Mr Sarathy.
Given that the new GMAT format is going to be launched at an awkward time next year, there is confusion among applicants eyeing the 2013 admissions as to whether they should take the GMAT before June 2012 or after. Candidates typically tend to register three months before their desired GMAT date, so any rush of applicants wanting to take the older GMAT before it changes formats will only become apparent after February 2012.
GMAC’s official line has been that appearing for the new GMAT will empower candidates with the additional IR score apart from the standard Quant-Verbal-Total score, which they can use to make a stronger case for themselves in front of admission committees. “Candidates taking the GMAT before June 2012 will have the Quant, Verbal, Total and AWA scores, whereas those taking the GMAT after June 2012 will have Quant, Verbal, Total, AWA and IR scores. Candidates with the new scores will have an additional data point to make their case with,” said Lawrence Rudner, Vice President of Research and Development at GMAC.
Asked if candidates who apply to b-schools next year without the IR score will be at a disadvantage, Mr Rudner said, “Disadvantage is way too strong a word, I wouldn’t go with it. History has shown that when you release a new score, schools are very slow to use it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they first want to look at it, get a certain experience with it, look at how the high scorers in the IR section are performing in the classroom before putting more and more weight on it.”
When PaGaLGuY asked whether he would recommend candidates to take the test before June 2012 or afterwards in order to have the best chances for a 2013 admission, he said, “I would recommend candidates to take the test when they are ready for it.”
Apart from the sample questions released on the website, GMAC will upgrade its ‘Official Guide for GMAT Review’ containing the IR section in April 2012. The GMATprep software too will be released in an upgraded format around that time. Apart from the Windows version, there will also be a version of GMATprep for Apple Macs, said Mr Sarathy.