Matt@VeritasPrep wrote:It certainly matters, as the skills being tested in IR are more directly applicable to business than, say, the skills tested in sentence correction or much of the math section. (I'm great at SC myself and would be one of the worst businessmen - and for that matter, one of the worst project managers / accountants / whatever - in the world, so the merit of this section is dubious.)

That said, at the moment I think GMAC is trying to convince business schools that the IR correlates reliably with the rest of the test and that it measures the sort of skills those programs want measured, which is why they're bothering to score you on the section at all (you're a data point). Once GMAC has done that, the IR will be expanded and matter quite a bit. But at the moment, your IR score is more a contribution to the future of the test than a crucial factor in an admissions decision: I'd be surprised if an 8 in IR compensated for an otherwise bad GMAT score, or if a 4 in IR ruined an otherwise excellent one.

Matt@VeritasPrep wrote:Yup, agreed!

IR also seems to be getting easier -- the questions don't seem as exotic, time-consuming, or devious as the first 50 that were released a couple years ago -- so I'd use it as a cognitive warmup for the rest of the test more than anything else.