It was just announced that the GMAT test will be made shorter. Currently, the exam takes 3 hours and 7 minutes to complete. The new version will take just 2 hours and 25 minutes to complete. The exam’s analytical writing assessment will be eliminated. Test-takers will be allowed to “bookmark” a number of questions and return to them later. Reports indicate that the Graduate Management Admission Council hopes to recover market share it has lost in recent years to ETS and its GRE test.
Note that the test was previously shortened (by 30 minutes) back in 2018. It seems like the standardized testing industry is strongly embracing the idea of shorter tests.
The report from Poets and Quants paints a pretty bleak picture of the GMAT’s popularity in their report on the changes. They note that 260,000 people took the GMAT in 2016, while only 156,000 took the test in 2021. Some people I’ve talked to have partially attributed this decline to an online testing experience they call subpar.
Anyway, social media sleuths have uncovered a few additional details through sneaky methods. They suggest:
- Sentence correction questions will be eliminated.
- More integrated reasoning questions.
- No geometry?
Consider these three changes totally unofficial.