Educational Testing Service (ETS), which owns the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), reported this week that test volume grew to 700,000 worldwide in 2010, an all-time high and a 5 percent increase over 2009.
“The growth we are seeing this year is further enhanced by the many business and graduate school programs worldwide that are now choosing to accept the GRE General Test for admissions,” David G. Payne, VP and COO of the higher education division at ETS, said in a statement.
ETS has made a significant effort to position the GRE as competitive with the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), which is owned by the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) and has historically been the preferred entrance exam for top business schools. An in hopes of attracting prospective applicants who may be considering other graduate programs as well as business school, some MBA programs have in recent years begun to accept GRE scores as well as GMAT scores. To make further inroads into the business school applicant pool, ETS is revising the GRE to be more directly comparable to the GMAT. The revised version of the exam will debut in August 2011.
“We expect continued growth in 2011 as students and institutions look to the GRE program to provide an even more diverse applicant pool, and unmatched value,” ETS’s Payne said.
GRE test volume increased 13 percent internationally, with significant growth in China and India and solid growth in other regions of the world, ETS reports. Additionally, students from the United States are sending more GRE score reports to international institutions.
ETS went on to report that more than 450 leading MBA programs around the world now accept GRE scores for admission, including seven of the top 10 global programs as ranked by the Financial Times.
One such program, the MIT Sloan School of Management, acknowledges that accepting GRE scores helps it attract promising prospective students who may not have considered a graduate degree in business. “By accepting the GRE test, the MIT Sloan School of Management can help students understand how a degree in business can help them to succeed and add value to a variety of careers and industries, including education and nonprofit organizations,” Julie Strong, senior associate director of MBA admissions at MIT Sloan, said in a statement.
But according to data from Kaplan Test Prep, which helps applicants prepare for both entrance exams, the vast majority of MBA programs that do accept the GRE report that fewer than 10 percent of applicants choose to submit scores from the more general entrance exam. Thirty-two percent of schools also told Kaplan that students who submit GMAT scores still have an advantage over applicants who submit GRE scores. This data comes from Kaplan’s 2010 survey of business school admissions officers.
Read the full article: ETS Reports Record GRE Test Volumes for Second Consecutive Year