After months of planning, we’re pleased to announce Bell Curves will be offering classes in two of our favorite places next month: Atlanta and Los Angeles.

We invite you to come join us as we continue providing the most comprehensive GMAT Preparation experience for people looking to boost their score. For all those who have inquired over the years about when we’d be coming West and South, that time is September 2010.

Our Classic GMAT course provides all the tools needed to get the GMAT score you want. Based on our proprietary Walkthrough Instruction Method, and underpinned by excellent support service and world-class instructors, our courses place an emphasis on gaining the Knowledge you need, honing your ability to Recognize which concepts are tested,  and learning to fluidly apply your Execution in our highly effective K-R-E approach. Forget tricks or gimmicks! Learn what you need and how to use it with Bell Curves.

Here’s a bit more information on upcoming events in the Atlanta and Los Angeles areas:

Atlanta

September 2010 - Atlanta - Wednesdays

Starts: 9/8/10

Ends: 12/1/10

Time: 6:30pm to 9:30 pm EST

Location: Atlanta University Center - Atlanta

Cost: $1199 - Sign up by August 21st for the Early Bird Discount - 20% off total course price - and get a free set of our Quant and Verbal Flashcards! Just use this promocode: BCEARLYAUG20

Sep 2010 - Sample Class: GMAT Introduction - Atlanta

When: Wednesday, 9/1/10 - 7pm to 9pm EST

Where: Clark Atlanta University - Atlanta

Cost: Free! Sign up for one of our free events now through August 21st and receive a Free Set of Verbal and Quant Flashcards!

Los Angeles

September 2010 - Los Angeles - Saturdays

Starts: 9/11/10

Ends: 12/11/10

Time: 1 pm to 4 pm PST

Location: California State University - Los Angeles

Cost: $1199 - Sign up by August 21st for the Early Bird Discount - 20% off total course price - and get a free set of our Quant and Verbal Flashcards! Just use this promocode: BCEARLYAUG20

Aug 2010 - Sample Class: Number Properties - Los Angeles

When: Saturday, 8/28/10 - 2pm to 4pm PST

Where: California State University - Los Angeles

Cost: Free! Sign up for one of our free events now through August 21st and receive a Free Set of Verbal and Quant Flashcards!

For more information on courses or free events in Atlanta, Los Angeles, NYC, or the virtual world, feel free to visit us at www.gmat.bellcurves.com/enroll

- The Bell Curves Team

GMAC’s recently launched Ideas to Innovation Challenge (I2I) presents an intriguing host of possibilities. Let’s take a look at what the I2I program is:

Created in 2008 with a US$10 million commitment, the Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund formalizes and enhances the Graduate Management Admission Council’s long-standing commitment to investing in strategic philanthropic initiatives that benefit business and management education globally.

Ideas to Innovation Challenge

The MET Fund Ideas to Innovation Challenge seeks to find the world’s best ideas for improving graduate management education and then to fund the top proposals, turning the best ideas into active innovation. Open to individuals worldwide, the challenge asks simply: What one idea would improve graduate management education?

This program intrigues me with the simplicity of the idea and the opportunity it presents. It seems very much in the spirit of Ted Talks in that it’s so much more than a mere contest. This challenge is exactly that … a challenge. A challenge to innovate, a challenge to inspire, a challenge to rethink, a challenge to redesign. If the I2I program works as I hope it will, we’ll see ideas that don’t win also inspire significant change within Graduate Management Education and perhaps even business.

Specifically, I hope to see a wealth of ideas offered to address the broad social and economic gaps in the world, and more specifically in this country as it relates to lower-income people and minorities. I hope to see another MLT or PhD project come out of this challenge. I’d hope to see an even more profound idea presented which might integrate the mentorship and support of SEO for high school students with the networking and scholarships of the Consortium. I hope to see ideas that lead to innovation. I hope to see recognition of the intrinsic connection between diversity and innovation. I look forward to seeing ideas that help graduate management programs improve their diversity, and ideas that help diverse candidates understand and pursue careers in business.

I plan to submit my idea. What’s yours?

Submit an entry here or learn more by visiting gmacmetfund.org

Until next time….

Akil

Many GMAT test-takers are often confused by how scores are generated for the test. Lots of this confusion stems from the seemingly straight-forward, but not easily explained, notion of a Computer Adaptive Test (CAT).

The confusion is pervasive enough, it seems, that GMAC often makes a point to clarify what a CAT is and does at various conferences, on their website, and on their official GMAT Blog. In a recent blog post, Dr. Eileen Talento-Miller provided some information about how CATs are designed and how they function in a way that even us lay-people can understand. Dr. Talento-Miller is a Ph.D.-certified psychometrician, and in many respects she does a sound job laying out the CAT basics in an easy-to-digest fashion.

While the basic function and characteristics of the test are clearly outlined, a couple aspects of the test could stand a bit more inspection to better clarify them for test-takers.

Number of Questions Answered Correctly

One chief question is what role the number questions answered plays in determining your score. In Dr. Talento-Miller’s blog post she states that “how many questions you completed” is a determining factor in generating scores. While this is true, some research of our own indicates a wide range of possible scores for a similar number of questions answered correctly. We studied a number of test results from the GMATPrep software that GMAC provides test-takers (and touts as using “The same technology used by the official GMAT exam”). And well…we noticed some interesting (and disconcerting) trends. Here’s what we found on the correlation between scores and number of questions answered correctly when we analyzed results for the Quantitative portion of the test:

The right column contains the ranges of questions answered correctly for the score ranges in the left column. When we first saw this we thought, “What? Really? So someone can get the same number of questions correct and end up with either a 22 or a 38? Really? Someone with 23 questions correct can get a 36 or a 50? Really?”

Apparently it’s true. We looked at more GMAT Prep results and the ranges more or less played out the same way. Which kind of defies expectation. We accept that the estimated ability component does play a role, but that the impact would be so great that the number of questions you get correct is almost irrelevant seems to defy logic.

Importance of Individual Questions

In her blog post, Dr. Talento-Miller says that “all the questions are important.” This may be true to some extent, but how true exactly is anyone’s guess. In reviewing hundreds of GMATPrep results, question by question, what we found is that there is no precise way to ascertain how the scores are generated from one question to the next. To some degree or another we believe the following factors may impact your score:

• Location - test-takers who score well at the beginning of the test tend to score better overall on each section than test-takers who don’t if other more quantifiable measures are constant (total number of questions correct, for example). This would indicate that questions near the beginning of the section impact score more than those later on, but we’ve also seen a number of instances where this isn’t the case.
• Consecutive sets of Right/Wrong - research also indicates that sets of consecutive right or wrong answers impact scoring beyond what would be expected of the aggregate increase in score over that stretch. The degree to which this circumstance impacts score is, again, indeterminate, and may depend on whether questions in that run are discriminating questions.
• Discriminating questions - in looking at so many test results, we found that a difference in score between two otherwise similar test results often comes down to different results for a couple specific questions in a section. How and to what degree these distinctions impact score is unclear, but it leads us to believe that at some point test-takers are given discriminating questions that have a greater impact on the score than others.
• Discriminating results - it also appears that responses to different difficulty level questions impact scores in different ways. Getting a hard question wrong is less detrimental to your score than getting an easy question wrong, as getting the former wrong is more likely to be the “unexpected” result for a given question.

What these circumstances establish is that the GMAT is a highly sophisticated test, one for which the algorithms and mechanisms used to generate scores cannot be easily replicated. Consequently, the GMAT is a very difficult test to “game” from a holistic strategy standpoint. Other standardized tests present the opportunity - whether large or small - to improve one’s score not through learning material but from an effective strategy for managing the test. The GMAT thwarts such strategies. Given this, there are a few things you want to take into account as you’re preparing to take the GMAT:

1. Yes, all questions on the GMAT are “important,” which is to say they all matter or count in some way towards your score. What’s left out here is that they’re not all equally important. How important is each question? We don’t know, but what we do know is that they’re not all equal.

2. Because all the questions aren’t all equal, it’s at a minimum ambiguous to tell test-takers to “just answer every question to the best of your ability within the time allotted.” Don’t let this statement confuse you. You DO NOT need to WORK every question, but you DO need to supply an answer for every question (even if you don’t spend any time working it). For most test-takers it is tough to actually solve every question in the allotted time without a significant drop in accuracy, so while working on every question is the goal you need to develop a solid alternative if you cannot do that.

3. The number of questions you answer correctly appears to have much less impact on your score (assuming you answer a minimum number correct) than would be expected given that this test evaluates and compares candidates. The bottom line is this: you should have a pacing approach developed and honed through practice that allows you the best chance to answer correctly as many questions as you can. There is no set way to go about this (see this post: Aesop’s Fables about GMAT timing), but the numbers show that you shouldn’t be compelled to necessarily rush through the test to get through all the questions.

4. Because the correlation between number of questions answered correctly and score is so loose, many test-takers would benefit from slowing down. While everyone has this notion of the “two-minute average” as the optimal timing for the GMAT, results would indicate otherwise. If question difficulty has a greater impact on scores than does number of questions answered. Slowing down enough to allow you to achieve greater accuracy while answering enough questions may be better than trying to reach the “two-minute average” mark to answer all questions in a section.

5. Be leery of anyone touting a specific test-taking strategy designed to get your score up. The bottom line is this: to do better on the GMAT you need to improve your knowledge base and your ability to answer questions (and harder questions) correctly more often. Your test-taking strategy will need to be determined on the basis of your testing practice and history, and honed as you take more practice tests to better understand yourself as a GMAT test-taker.

Until Next Time…

A few weeks ago, co-founder Akil Bello presented the above topic at GMAC’s Annual Industry Conference. The session was well attended and garnered positive responses from many of the industry professionals in attendance.

With over 20 years of test-preparation experience, as well as a focus in the last 10 on helping underrepresented minorities excel at standardized tests, Akil was well-positioned to provide the insights interested parties where there to hear. After significant research, and analysis of a wealth of survey data provided by GMAC, Akil brought his observations and conclusions to sunny San Diego.

In assembling information for the presentation, Akil found some interesting trends that both minority test-takers and admissions officers should be aware of:

• On average, URMs score lower than their white and Asian counterparts, as much as 130 points lower.
• URM test-takers and business school applicants also tend to be older.
• URM test-takers also tend to be predominately female, and are more likely to have families than are their non-URM counterparts.

This information begins to paint a clearer picture of who URM test-takers are, and more importantly, begins to clarify why there may be a gap in scores between URMs and non-URMs.

Because URMS are often older, they are more likely to be further removed from the fundamental concepts tested on the GMAT, as well as formal academic settings that, in part, breed testing success.

Even more interesting is what Akil found about how URMs perceive and/or find out information about business school-related topics:

• Both Hispanics and African-Americans perceive the GMAT as a barrier to business school admission, while whites have no such perception.
• URMs, particularly African-Americans, are more likely to get information about business school from objective sources such as school websites, and less likely to get subjective insights from friends and family as whites and Asians do.

With regard to the GMAT specifically, Akil indicated that URMs retake the GMAT more frequently, retake tests later, and, and report more hours invested in preparation than do their non-URM counterparts. All of these findings seem paradoxical in light of the fact that URMs generally score lower on the test. However, upon closer examination this data indicates that a likely setback to URMs is ineffective planning and preparation for the GMAT, as well as a potential lack of exposure or knowledge about the test and its role in the business school application process.

As many business schools are seeking to increase the number of qualified URM candidates in their programs, Akil offered a number of steps they might take to help this become a reality:

• Address Your Audience - if URMs often come from a different demographic, with characteristics distinct from those generally considered qualified candidates, efforts must be made to bridge the gap between the two. If URMs get information about business school and the GMAT from sources you are not yet fully utlizing, upgrading information disseminated from those sources might help better inform and encourage.
• Be Clear on the GMAT - because URMs often get their information about the GMAT from the internet (which is often full of inaccurate and subjective descriptions), business schools would do well to clarify online how they use the GMAT and how people can/should approach preparation for it.
• Go Where They Are - to reach a wider pool of potential candidates, business schools might need to seek out URMs in places not traditionally tapped. Among these are professional and Greek organizations, and diversity events.
• Get to Them Early - While generally spending more time preparing for the GMAT, URMs garner lower scores on average. To help combat this - and thereby help people become better candidates - the earlier schools can reach potential candidates and inform them of how the GMAT is used and how to prepare for it, the better chance URMs have of approaching the whole process in a more effective manner.
• Address the GRE - many people with difficulties on the GMAT often look to the GRE as a potential alternative. With more programs accepting the GRE in lieu of the GMAT, this is becoming even more likely. The problem is that it’s often even less clear to potential candidates how the GRE is viewed in business school admissions offices.

Clearly there are still significant distinctions between URMs and non-URMs in terms of how they acquire information about business school, how they perceive aspects of the application process, and how they view, prepare for, and take the GMAT. But with better, more effective dissemination of information, these distinctions can be mitigated, and help better prepare more URMs to become more viable business school candidates. It would seem that both admissions offices and applicants have this vested interest in common, which is as good a starting point as any.

On June 25th a short press release from GMAC provided the first details on the previously announced changes to the GMAT that were announced late last summer. The press release coincided with the company’s Annual Industry Conference (AIC) in sunny San Diego, California. As is often the case, the AIC was a gathering place for the GMAC member schools and business school industry members. Our very own Akil Bello not only presented a workshop at the conference, but was also able to learn more about the upcoming Next Generation GMAT.

Here’s what we know so far about the new GMAT:

Testing Changes - Integrated Reasoning

• The big one is that one of the essays for the AWA is going to be scrapped in favor of a new 30-minute section called Integrated Reasoning. Integrated Reasoning will include questions that ask test-takers to assimilate, interpret, or convert information from graphs and/or charts.
• Instead of being presented 2 AWA essays candidates will be presented with either an analysis of an issue or an analysis of an argument once the new test launches.
• Other questions in the Integrated Reasoning section will also ask test-takers to evaluate outcomes.
• The format of questions on Integrated Reasoning will also change. Some questions will now allow for multiple correct answer choices, have multiple tabs with different information on each tab, and have “drag-n-drop” answer completion.
• GMAC is also currently testing a listening component for the Integrated Reasoning section. Current tests are focusing mainly on how such a component would affect non-native speakers of English.
• The Integrated Reasoning section will NOT be adaptive.
• The score for Integrated Reasoning will NOT be figured into the 200-800 scaled score we’re all so familiar with. It will be given its own score component as part of your score report.

Other Change - Score Reports

Schools may have to wait longer to receive test scores, thus some GMAT deadlines might change.

What’s NOT Changing?

Pretty much everything else:

• The Quant and Verbal sections of the test will remain unchanged. Sub-scores for these sections will be used to generate the 200-800 scaled score as in the current incarnation of the GMAT.
• Total testing time will remain largely the same, with the 30-minute Integrated Reasoning section replacing one of the AWA essays of the same length, but is currently expected to come after the Verbal section.

So When is This Happening?

The press release indicates the launch date for the new GMAT is June 2012. We were able to find out a bit more info about the time line for significant development points in the process that may be relevant to test-takers:

• Pilot 1 (already occurred - April 2010) - several test items (what laymen refer to as questions) were tested on a group of business students. You can see a video of some of the reactions here.
• Pilot 2 (November 2010) - For one testing week in November, anyone who registers and sits for a GMAT test will be given an experimental Integrated Reasoning Section. The section will NOT be optional, but will also not be computed in scores. To eliminate any impact of an experimental section on performance, it will be the last section of the test, after the regular Quant and Verbal sections have been administered. After this round of testing question types will be finalized.
• Pre-testing (July-August 2011) - A broader implementation of the Next Generation GMAT will be administered.
• Standardizing Scores (by September 2011) - After pre-testing, score scales will be set and put in place for the new section.
• Field Testing (January 2012) - Full testing of Next Generation GMAT will take place.
• Launch (June 2012) - The old GMAT is no more. Hello Integrated Reasoning!

Why is GMAC Doing This?

Their position is that the time was right to further improve the validity of the GMAT as a predictor for business school potential. Their decisions to make the changes arose chiefly out of a four year study, which included feedback from a large number of business school faculty. Other reasons for the change and the timing of it include:

• Changes in the student/test-taking population
• Changes in school curriculum
• Advances in technology
• Advances in measurement/assessment capabilities.

It’s also possible that the revisions to the GMAT are designed to keep it as a more effective measurement tool for business school in the face of developments with other standardized tests (notably the GRE).

Hear from GMAC CEO Dave Wilson on the changes to the GMAT by clicking here.

What Do You Need to Do?

For now, you don’t really need to do anything, particularly if you’re looking to take the GMAT in the next 12 to 18 months. Even if you should sign up for the test in the window for which Next Generation GMAT testing will be occurring, there shouldn’t be any reason for concern or worry about the new section impacting performance.

GMAC has indicated they will be publishing sample material to the general public in the near future.

Stay tuned and we’ll provide more information and insight as the whole process unfolds.

-The Bell Curves Team