GMAT scores in CAT country

A number of B-schools in India have been moving towards the GMAT in the past two years, writes Samrat.

Through September, the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, has been announcing its list of selected candidates for a new one-year MBA course it will launch in December. Admission to the course is not through the Common Admission Test or 'CAT'. It is through a test more commonly associated with the US — the Graduate Management Admission Test, GMAT.

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A number of B-schools in India have been moving towards the GMAT in the past two years, as more and more Indians who go abroad for work or study want to return home. This is reflected in a trend report by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT.

The GMAC analysed test data from 2001 to 2005 and found that, “the percentage of score reports sent by Indian citizens to US schools declined by 14.37 per cent whereas the percentage of score reports sent to Indian schools more than tripled”.

Shaista Vadra is one of those who contributed to that statistic. Shaista got her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for a year in New York before taking her GMAT. “I applied only to the Indian School of Business,” she says. “I was looking to do an MBA in an Indian context.”