While we are on the topic of American testing non-profits and their finances, it is worth taking a moment to glance at the latest 990 form from the GMAC.  It covers the year ending December 2024 (I think it was published earlier this month).  They lost 6.8 million USD on the year.

Program service revenues for the year (which come from the GMAT,  NMAT and “other services” for schools and test takers) were 56.4 million USD for the year.   Compare that to 89.9 million USD for the final pre-pandemic year.

We see it again and again:  people are just not taking the tests sold by these organizations like they used to.

Meanwhile, GMAC has net assets of 164.2 million USD.  That’s down from 174.8 before the pandemic. The good news for GMAC is that those assets are mostly in cash and publicly traded securities. These can easily be used to cover losses, so they can go on losing money for decades without having to worry about future unknowns.

GMAC has published statistics for the 2025 testing year.  They note that the GMAT was taken 93,196 times in the year.  That’s down from 115,286 in 2024.  In the last pre-pandemic year, the test was taken 225,621 times. According to the numbers I have in front of me, the all-time high was 286,529 tests in 2012.

It seems that the “GMAT Focus” changes have not done much to slow the decline of this product.  There is a lesson here, perhaps, about how legacy test makers need to do more than shorten their tests and mess about with the item types if they want to win back the hearts and minds of test takers.  The kids might say that it comes down to vibes.  But there are more tangible things to keep in mind. They include cost, supplementary fees, the prep journey, customer-no-service, marketing… and more.