Prospective B-school students whose financial situations prevent them from paying the $250 fee for the GMAT exam will have a chance to take the test for free, the Graduate Management Admission Council has announced. This initiative builds on an existing program that helps people cover the cost of taking the GMAT.

The new fee waiver program will permit business schools to offer free access to the standardized entrance exam to a limited number of prospective students.  Each school must apply for the waivers, and the school itself determines which applicants are eligible.

If you would like to get a GMAT fee waiver, check your target school to find out if they already have a program to help economically disadvantaged applicants. With this program, GMAC takes a lot of the burden off both schools and the underrepresented applicants’ shoulders.  For more information, read the fee waiver .pdf here.

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More women than ever are considering pursuing an MBA, which has led to some unexpected pipeline trends revealed by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) in this month’s Graduate Management News.

GMAC has reported that the number of GMAT tests taken by women surpassed 100,000 for the first time ever last year. Exams taken by women in the testing year ending June 30, 2009 represented 39.5% of all exams taken, a figure that has changed only one percentage point in 10 years.

However, Lamia Walker, GMAC regional director for Europe, Middle East and Asia,  points out some major shifts by region, age, and career intent. “When we break down gender distribution by regional citizenship, we find a wide range – from 56.1 percent of exams in Eastern Europe to just 24.6 percent in Central Asia,” she says.

(source: Graduate Management Admission Council)

Key findings from the 2010 mba.com Registrants Survey Report indicate that:

Schools need to recruit women sooner. The average woman first considers business school less than two years after finishing her undergraduate degree, almost nine months earlier than the average man. Women also sit for the GMAT exam sooner than men and submit their first business school application more rapidly than male counterparts.

Women typically submit fewer applications. Female applicants considering full-time MBA programs submitted an average of 2.4 applications, compared with 3.0 for men. Women in Central Asia and in Asia Pacific submitted the greatest number of applications on average, 3.7 and 3.3 respectively.

Don’t write off the female quants. Female prospective students are more likely than men to consider MA/MS in Accounting programs, and the average number of submitted applications reported by women to any graduate management education program type is highest among those applying to MA/MS Finance programs (3.2 applications on average in 2009).

The survey report found numerous differences between men and women when it comes to preferred study location, financing plans, information sources, business school preferences and employment outcome, as well as significant differences by gender in the skills that prospective students hope to improve in business school.

Armed with this information, MBA programs should be able to more effectively outreach to talented female applicants.

The number of European citizens taking the GMAT is on the rise, and these individuals are sending their scores to management education programs in Europe–not America–according to an analysis of GMAT testing trends released Wednesday by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).

In fact, non-U.S. citizens accounted for more than half of all exams taken worldwide during testing year 2009–the first time this has happened since the GMAT’s creation more than 50 years ago.

“Earning a business school degree provides a critical edge in today’s complex and challenging economy, and more and more Europeans are recognizing that high-quality management education is available in their own back yard,” says Julia Tyler, executive vice president of member services and school marketing for GMAC.

Researchers attribute the surge in popularity to an increasing interest in such schools by Europeans themselves, who are sending a significantly smaller share of their GMAT scores to the United States and more score reports to programs in Europe.

So, to which programs are Europeans applying? The most popular MBA programs for testing year 2009 were at INSEAD, London Business School and IESE Business School.

This data reflects the fast-rising interest in MBA and other graduate management education programs around the world in recent years. More details about GMAT testing and score-sending trends among European citizens are in GMAC’s latest European Geographic Trend Report for GMAT Examinees, available online at www.gmac.com/geographictrends.

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The B-school application process is in the midst of a transformation of sorts, with earlier deadlines, a growing number of programs accepting the GRE,  and the introduction of audio and video components that help AdCom get a better feel for the person behind the paper.

Francesca Di Meglio’s reporting of this revamp Monday in BusinessWeek singled out University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the UCLA Anderson School of Management as the leaders in creating innovative MBA applications.

The PowerPoint presentation, used at Booth for the past few cycles, has enabled applicants to show another side of themselves and demonstrate how they navigate ambiguity through various frameworks and strategies. However, admissions may eliminate such presentations starting with applications for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Rose Martinelli, associate dean of student recruitment and admissions at Booth, told BusinessWeek the PowerPoint slides became rote and entirely too easy to predict. They didn’t showcase the applicant’s personality and help the admissions committee determine who is and isn’t a good fit, she explained.

Today, on her blog The Rose Report, Martinelli further clarified the issue. The admissions committee is in the process of thinking through each of the different application components, and this may be the end of the presentation requirement in its current form, she explains. No final decisions about next year’s application have been made, however.

“Again, our focus is not on creating a clever or ‘gimmicky’ application, but one that provides candidates the opportunity to convey the most relevant information that helps us to assess fit  in our selection process,” Martinelli writes.

Despite it all, she says the PowerPoint presentation has been an incredibly successful part of identifying students who are a great fit for Booth. Stay tuned to see how the program will use innovation to capture an applicant’s essence in next year’s application.

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If you are feeling stumped by your application essays and need some additional guidance, check out our NEW series of essay guides for MBA applications. Columbia, Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford and Wharton available now. They are seriously terrific and we are proud to say that almost every person who has ordered one has come back for more!

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