Stanford MBA Admission Blog 2 August 2012 Why you shouldn't worry about GMAT Integrated Reasoning You’ve probably heard that as of June 2012, the GMAT includes a new section on Integrated Reasoning (IR). And you might be thinking that this is one more thing to keep you awake at night during the application season. But there is no need to worry.
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. What we DO know is that the test was designed to provide insight into how you pull together knowledge from different sources--something you probably do already at work, and will certainly do here at Stanford.
For this application year, we will see your IR score if you have taken the new GMAT, but will focus on the verbal, quantitative, AWA, and total scores. Once we have had the chance to review IR scores in this first year, we will determine how to evaluate them in our process for next year. And, as we never tire of reminding you, no one score or section of a test is decisive in our process. We require no minimum or maximum scores; there is no cut off. We look for indicators of your academic ability throughout your whole application, and a test score is only one data point in a much larger picture. And of course, some of you haven't taken the new GMAT, which is just fine. Test scores are valid for 5 years, and we accept both the GMAT and the GRE (and we don't play favorites). We do not have a preference about when you take your test. For more about test requirements, including a handy test validation calculator, visit our GMAT-GRE page.
