GMAT is the test you take when you want to study business programs. If you want to get into a highly prestigious business school, a stellar GMAT score is pretty much a necessity. Due to how competitive business school admissions have become, more and more students want to attain as high a score as possible.
For starters, the GMAT is indeed a difficult test, but its difficulty is not because of its content.
In fact, the content that the GMAT tests is very basic school level math and english. Like any other standardized test, the biggest challenge is the time constraint, which makes it difficult to keep up with the ticking time while answering questions correctly.
To add further insult to injury is the fact that most people taking the test aren’t fresh out of school. Therefore, they do require some some time and effort to brush up o those old concepts.
Hence the GMAT is challenging because of the reasons above, however, intelligence is not one of them. Sure, you do need some intelligence for almost anything in life, but to suggest that the GMAT tests your IQ or is dependent on a high IQ for a good score is straight out false.
Is GMAT an IQ Test?
No, it is not. GMAT is a lot of things, but an IQ test is not one of them. You can scour all you want, and not one reputable academic would say otherwise.
Here is why.
At its core, the GMAT is a standardized exam that tests specific skills to gauge your readiness for business school. These skills include:
- Reasoning
- Analysis
- Time management
In addition, it is also a test of your perseverance and willpower in that how motivated are you to sit down for 3-4 hours every day for months to prepare, practice and perfect. The keyword here is “practice”, which is what gets you those high scores.
On the other hand, you cannot practice for an IQ test to get you a high score. An IQ test is supposed to be a measure of your raw intelligence. Even if you could study and practice for an IQ test, wouldn’t that be cheating? Not to mention IQ tests aren’t all alike, and they test different cognitive abilities, which leave out various factors from person to person.
Measuring intelligence is not a clear cut topic. The jury is still out on whether IQ tests are accurate predictors of intelligence, given how cultural bias can affect the scores. For example, a person who isn’t natively an English speaker will have a considerably harder time with the test compared to an English speaker, even if they had the same intelligence level.
So given how even an actual IQ test might not be all that great at predicting intelligence, GMAT then is not even up for discussion. Moreover, GMAC, who make the test, has said nothing about the test as a means to test intelligence. Nor did they have intelligence in mind when they were crafting the test. In fact, most of the people who design the GMAT questions are themselves just ordinary people like us. The GMAT test designers are not wizards or scientists or nobel laureates.
They simply want to predict an applicant’s success in business school, and that is all the GMAT is designed for.
Hence, every skill that the GMAT tests can be prepared for. You can solve hundreds of questions, time yourself and improve your pacing. You can memorize math formulas and grammar rules, you can learn test-taking strategies and much more. All these things are shown to improve scores. How can it be an IQ test then?
You will find a hundreds of GMAT test takers who improved their GMAT scores by at least 100 points through sheer hard work and disciplined preparation. Only if you are willing to put consistent effort of 20-30 hours per week for 3-4 months, you can achieve any score of your desire.
Can GMAT Score be converted to an IQ Score?
Again, no. We are talking apples and oranges here. One test is designed to test your aptitude for a very specific thing – a business school, whereas the other is designed to measure your relative intelligence, and we still don’t know how accurate it really is.
Sure, you might find someone on the internet who have come up with a “formula” to convert your GMAT score to IQ, but it will be nonsense at best. The two tests have no significant similarities that would allow for such a conversion.
Conclusion
No, the GMAT is not an IQ test in the same way a submarine is not an aeroplane. The two things in both cases are designed for entirely different purposes, and one cannot do what the other can. Moreover, a GMAT score and an IQ score have no means of cross-analysis and cannot be substituted for one another.