How Frequently May One Take the GMAT?

Students frequently wonder how many times they can take the GMAT, regardless of whether they were dissatisfied with their score on the first try or they just believe they can improve it.

The GMAT is a challenging exam, so students may be worried about achieving the highest possible score. Thankfully, the GMAT can be taken more than once, with exams spaced as little as 16 days apart. To make sure that your scores and multiple test tries don't impair your applications to your desired institutions, it's crucial to develop a plan of action for score improvement.

How Frequently May One Take the GMAT?

If you’re unhappy with your score, it’s important to consider how you plan to improve prior to testing again. Currently, the GMAT costs $250 USD, and allows for score reporting to five schools of your choice. This means that each time you take the test, there’s a hefty price tag attached.

The GMAT can be taken no more than five times in a year. In addition to this restriction, students can only take the GMAT a total of eight times in a lifetime. Although it may be tempting to retake the exam as soon as you get a score you’re unhappy with, it’s important to consider a course of measures to improve your score. It is suggested that for 50 hours of studying, a 50- point improvement can be achieved. Similarly, 100 hours of studying could relate to a 100-point improvement, and so on.

The GMAT can be taken once every 16 days, as long as it doesn’t exceed 5 times per year or 8 times in a lifetime. If you intend to take the GMAT again, plan to make every effort to significantly improve your score. Give yourself ample time to study before your next attempt. You might want to seek the help of a tutor or take advantage of a review course. At any rate, have a good strategy for studying so you are prepared and ready to improve your score.

Downsides To Taking the GMAT Multiple Times

It is important to consider your target school’s average GMAT score for acceptance. If you’ve scored higher than this, it is not necessary to retake the GMAT. If you’re in a situation where you’ve scored lower than your target school’s ideal score, it’s a good idea to retake the exam after allowing yourself adequate study time to ensure that a score improvement is warranted.

According to Economist.com other reasons that you might consider retaking the GMAT are that you received a low Quant score, and you didn’t do well in college quantitative classes. This might cause schools to worry that the curriculum may be too rigorous. Secondly, if your verbal score is low and you’re not a native English speaker, schools could potentially worry about classroom participation and recruiting. Finally, if you’re looking to apply to a top-15 MBA school, and you know you can improve your score by at least 20 points, retaking the exam would reflect positively on your application.

Realistically, business schools are looking for the highest scores. However, that doesn’t mean that seeing that a student that took the GMAT more than once is negative. Ensure that you’re planning on retaking the exam for a valid reason, due to the fact that schools might see retaking the exam three times and getting the same score as a negative factor. Another important aspect is that some schools will be looking at your highest scores for each section, so be sure to brush up on what your target school’s practices are before making a plan to retake the GMAT.

Overall, schools want to see a candidate that can take the assessment and achieve their target score. Whether this takes one try, or three, the majority of business programs will look only at the highest score, with testing history not holding much weight.

Overview Of The GMAT

The Graduate Management Admission Test, also known as the GMAT, is a piece of your business school application that is of utmost importance. The strenuous standardized, computer-adaptive exam is required on the majority of business school applications. The exam shows business schools how prepared students are to complete graduate level work. Overall, scoring high on this assessment can show MBA programs that you’re a serious and prepared candidate, and could boost your application to the next level.

The GMAT contains four sections that test an applicant’s critical thinking and analysis skills. These are the primary focus of the exam, because these are the skills that are most often used during MBA graduate-level coursework, and beyond. The four sections are Analytical Writing, Integrated Reasoning, Quantitative, and Verbal. Each section is designed to test different skills, but overall assess critical thinking and problem solving as a whole.

For the Analytical Writing Assessment, participants will be asked to analyze and critique an argument with organization and logic. On test day, you’ll be given just thirty minutes to complete the writing piece, therefore, practice for this section will be essential.

Integrated Reasoning offers twelve questions in just thirty minutes. Within this section, students will see multi-source reasoning, table analysis, graphics interpretation and two-part analysis questions. Each of these question types deal with conceptually interpreting and synthesizing information from different formats.

The Quant section of the GMAT boasts 39 questions, and provides 62 minutes. This section encompasses the mathematics problem solving skills, computation and data interpretation.

Lastly, the Verbal section asks participants to complete reading comprehension questions, critical reasoning examples and sentence correction problems. There are 65 minutes allowed and 36 questions total. The total time length of the assessment is 3 hours and 23 minutes. Although this time includes a small break, the time limits for each section are one of the most difficult obstacles of this exam.

The GMAT Is Adaptive

The GMAT is an interesting assessment because it is an adaptive test. This means that based on your responses to questions, future questions are generated from performance. Your GMAT score will fall somewhere between 200 to 800.

Unfortunately, questions can’t be skipped, and penalties are given for not answering all questions in a section. For the Integrated Reasoning section, a score is given on a scale of 1 to 8, whereas the Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) is scored on a scale of 1 to 6. While all sections of the test are scored by a computer, the AWA is also graded by a human reader.

Directly following your assessment, you’ll be able to see your score and decide whether you want to keep it, or cancel it. The average total score on the GMAT is 552. Although raw scores are generated for each section, the total score is what the majority of business schools will pay attention to.

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