GMAT Strategy

267,000 students take GMAT in 2009

TheGMATPill | GMAT Prep Tips (About the GMAT).

Yup, that's how many people you are competing with when you take the GMAT exam. At least that's the figure that the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) announced for 2009. 267,000 is just a few thousand more than 2008's number of 264,700. So roughly the same as last year.

Interesting to see what will happen next year as ETS tries to market themselves and promote their GRE exam as an alternative to the GMAT.

Some points:

1) A lot of the testing boom has been driven by students outside of the U.S. It was the first time in the exam's history that there were actually more international test takers than U.S. test takers. In terms of numbers, about 51% of test takers were non-U.S. citizens.

2) There's a trend of higher quality business schools around the world outside the US. It used to be that all the international students were sending their test scores to U.S. business schools. About 75% of them did this. But now, that number is down a little bit to 65%--indicating that more of them are sending scores to business schools around the world. There is less of a U.S.-centric mentality when it comes to applying to business school from a global perspective.

3) Also, there are relatively more women taking the exam now--about 105,000 out of the 265,000 or so taking the exam.

Anyway, just some interesting trends in test taking that I thought you might find interesting.

Thanks for sharing that. Do you know how many scored 700+?

My guess is around 20K coz 700 represents around 92%ile, so about 8% of the population must
have scored above 700.

But then why do you need to know?

quote="poonammarwah"]Thanks for sharing that. Do you know how many scored 700+?[/quote]

Do we know the percentage of those who took the exam that were in the US? Not that it particularly matters... just wondering though