New GMAT Section: Jose Ferreira on Integrated Reasoning in 2012

Jose Ferreira, Knewton Founder & CEO, Shares His View on the GMAT's New Integrated Reasoning Format

GMAC (the Graduate Management Admissions Council) recently announced that, beginning in June 2012, there will be a new section of the GMAT: Integrated Reasoning.

According to GMAC, the new section is "designed to measure people's ability to evaluate information from sources." Basically, Integrated Reasoning is what the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) wishes the Critical Reasoning question type could have been, except the technology wasn't available back when CR was created. To put it even more simply, Integrated Reasoning is Critical Reasoning meets MBA math. What's MBA math? Stats, data analysis, and probability, all three of which MBA programs have long emphasized in the first semester curriculum. MBA programs have also long complained that many matriculating students lack basic competence in each. (The new Integrated Reasoning section came about in part from the results of 4 years of surveys given to business school faculty members.) In the past, schools have addressed these deficiencies by instituting mandatory math camps for incoming students, and/or offering first semester courses with names like "Decision-Making Under Uncertainty." (At least, that was its name when I was a student at HBS.) These crash courses cover--you guessed it--stats, data analysis, and probability.

A few years ago, the GMAT began testing simple probability and statistics. But it's hard to test these concepts out of context. Integrated Reasoning uses innovations in technology and testing to add the context, thereby testing probability and statistics in a more real-world setting.

I wonder how MBA programs and the GMAC will address the fact that many students who apply to business school have little or no experience with these kinds of tasks-and little to no knowledge of how to use spreadsheets. (Although finance and consulting types will find these questions quite easy.) Perhaps admissions boards will still primarily rely on the 200 - 800 score as their admissions criterion, and use the separate Integrated Reasoning score as a flagging mechanism for students who need extra help-kind of like a mini "AP Test" for MBA math, so students who do well can place out of math camp. Or perhaps it will be weighted along with the 200 - 800 in the decision-making process. If so, awkward questions of how much to weight each score are inevitable, and schools will inevitably vary in their approaches. (Just what the process needs - less transparency!)

As for how to prepare for Integrated Reasoning - well, let me just say that I'm looking forward to taking a crack at it! I've had my fair share of experience "cracking" test questions, and my experience is that the more highly structured a question type, the more amenable it is to strategic destruction. Any system with formulaic rules in it can be beaten using the weak spots and omissions in those rules. In the '90s, I forced ETS to abandon a new test section called Pattern ID due to my strategies. They admitted that I "broke the code, so we are removing the questions from the test." Pattern ID's undoing was the fact that it was highly structured and formula-driven. Because the new GMAT section is much the same--I eagerly anticipate the possibility of finding some pretty fun strategies to "break the code" on Integrated Reasoning as well.