Record number of students take GMAT

The Graduate Management Admission Council or GMAC, owner of the GMAT exam, accepted by more than 5,400 graduate business and management programmes worldwide - has announced a total of 286,529 GMAT exams worldwide were taken.

831,337 score reports were sent to 5,281 graduate business and management programmes around the world: these are all historic highs. The 2012 GMAT exam volume was up 11 per cent from the 2011 testing year, and 8 per cent higher than the previous record of 265,613 in 2009.

The key trends reflected in the GMAC's numbers for 2012 are:

• The number of programmes receiving scores was up 7% from 2011 and 21% from 2008. 
• Roughly 560,000 GMAT score reports were sent to MBA and EMBA programs, and 240,000 scores went to other masters programmes (such as accounting, finance, and management).
• GMAT testing outside of the United States continues to grow quickly. Tests taken by non-U.S. citizens rose 19% in 2012 and represented 59% of global GMAT volume.
• Chinese test takers, the second-largest citizenship group after the U.S,. represented 20 % per cent of global testing. 
• In 2012, the number of exams taken by Chinese citizens increased 45% to 58,196 exams.
• Indian citizens, the third-largest citizenship group, took 30,213 GMAT exams, a figure that increased 19% in 2012.

The percentage of exams taken by women hit 42.9% in 2012—a record for the third straight year.

Source: GMAC http://www.mba.com/

50 years of women at HBS

Harvard Business School (HBS) have started a yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the School’s first class of female M.B.A.s. 

Women have gone from claiming just eight spots in that initial cohort to being 40 percent of the M.B.A. program.

But speakers say the world is still unfair for women; for example, at home, women still face a set of expectations as demanding as in the 1950s and ’60s. 

Source: Harvard Gazette

UCLA Anderson Essay Topics 2012-2013

Following up on their earlier announcement of the 2012-2013 application deadlines, UCLA Anderson has announced its essay questions for the 2012-2013 admissions season.

Essay 1: What is your proudest achievement outside the workplace, and how has it impacted you? (700 words maximum)

Essay 2: What are your short-term and long-term career goals, and how will an MBA from UCLA Anderson specifically help you achieve these goals? (700 words maximum)

Re-applicant Essay: Please describe your career progress since you last applied and ways in which you have enhanced your candidacy. Include updates on short-term and long-term career goals, as well as your continued interest in UCLA Anderson. (700 words maximum)

Optional Essay: Are there any extenuating circumstances in your profile about which the Admissions Committee should be aware? (250 words maximum)

Source: UCLA Anderson 

MBA IQ Service for Pre-MBA Study.

Poets&Quants has a very interesting article about pre-MBA courses for people anxious about entering an MBA program

The MBA IQ service is an interactive online curriculum designed to give students baseline knowledge in 12 core areas of business before they start their graduate degrees.

For a fee of $195 per person, enrollees receive 60 days' use of MBAIQ.com. There, they can take quizzes to determine their own MBA IQ scores-- quantitative figures demonstrating an overall knowledge of business as well as individual scores for each of the dozen areas, or "modules."

Students can identify their weaknesses and study them, for example learning such things as the difference between static budgets and continuous budgets, the finer points of penetration testing, and how to calculate weighted-average cost of capital.

Students also have access to other self-assessment quizzes, 134 reading assignments, 1,000 E-flashcards, short daily lessons (example: "What is a Type I error?") and a 353-page workbook. 

Many of the best business schools hold pre-MBA summer boot camps for students who need a little extra help but they are often cursory reviews of the most common accounting or finance concepts.

The service already has several hundred customers and some are business schools, which get a bulk rate and offer the online program to their students either for free or at a discount as well as companies that pay a licensing fee and incorporate the program into their corporate universities. 

Ten corporations have subscribed, some of them using MBA IQ as their own "business acumen" programs. And MBA IQ is currently working out an agreement with book-publisher Wiley to sell the program directly to business schools and share the profits.

The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business recently began offering the MBA IQ to newly admitted and returning students for $175 per person. 

Source: CNN Money