GRE v. GMAT: Battle of the B-School Gatekeepers

Posted on July 24, 2009 by GRE Tutor

With Harvard, Wharton, and other top schools planning to accept the GRE for admissions, cracks are beginning to show in the GMAT monopoly

By Alison Damast

The battle between two of the largest graduate school testing giants has been heating up recently as more business schools warm to the idea of providing students with an alternative to the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). Now another top-ranked business school is weighing in. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School(Wharton Full-Time MBA Profile) plans to allow MBA applicants to submit the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), for admission in the fall of 2010, says Admissions Director J.J. Cutler. It’s part of a move by the school to attract a broader applicant pool, including dual-degree students, younger applicants, and international applicants from far-flung countries without GMAT access.

“We are trying to open up a little bit the different types of people that we want to apply to business school and we don’t want to create additional hurdles for them to do so,” Cutler says.

More B-Schools Embrace the GRE

Wharton is following closely on the heels of Harvard Business School(Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile), which made waves this spring when it announced that it would allow applicants to submit the GRE for admissions. The institutions are joining the ranks of a small but rapidly growing number of business schools that are embracing the GRE, a standardized exam that students use to apply to a wide variety of graduate schools. The movement comes at a time when younger applicants