Worried About the GMAT’s New IR Section? Don’t, Says Stanford GSB
In a recent update to its MBA admissions blog, Stanford Graduate School of Business attempts to ease the concerns of some applicants wondering how the school will view their scores in the GMAT’s brand-new Integrated Reasoning section.
“Rest assured that IR is is new to us, too, and it’s going to take us (and our peer schools) some time before we know how to interpret it as it relates to the Stanford MBA Program,” writes Allison Davis.
According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the GMAT, the new IR section measures test taker’s problem-solving skills when presented with data in different formats and from multiple sources.
The section is scored on a scale of 1 to 8 in single-digit increments. Like the Analytical Writing Assessment score, IR will be reported as an independent score that does not affect the computation of the GMAT Total Score.
While schools will see your IR score if you’ve taken the new GMAT, Stanford GSB says that for this application year, at least, MBA admissions will focus on the verbal, quantitative, AWA and total scores.
Applicants have plenty of things to juggle and worry about throughout their journey to business school, so don’t lose a wink of sleep over the new Integrated Reasoning section. We’ll have a better idea next year of how the scores play in the evaluation process.
