Executive Assessment (EA) is a new exam that is administered by GMAC for experience and seasoned professionals who are pursuing an Executive MBA. The EA is a new type of exam which has been devised by GMAC after getting feedback from top MBA programs and is tailored to test the candidates on the most relevant skills needed to be successful in an Executive MBA program.
So is EA the same as a GMAT. At the surface, both GMAT and EA have the verbal and quant section. The EA in addition also has an integrated reasoning (IR) section (GMAT does not count IR for scoring). So is EA a mini GMAT, well the answer is it is not. The EA first of all is 90 mins long with three 30 mins sections in order: IR, Verbal, Quant. The types of questions and the base material will be quite similar as GMAT but the flow and adaptive nature is different and so we must follow different study and testing strategies.
The EA has the following flow: IR section has two sub sections of 6 questions each, followed by Verbal which has two subsections of 7 questions each and finally followed by Quant which has two sub sections of 7 questions each. Within a given section a test taker can go back and forth within a sub section, once a subsection is submitted the answers cannot be revised further. This is the major difference between GMAT and EA. Second major difference is the importance of the IR section. The EA takes the scoring of the IR section to determine the starting difficulty level in the first subsection of the Verbal as well as first sub section of the Quant. Note: If you do really well in the IR and score high then you will start off with high difficulty in both Verbal and Quant (higher difficulty means you are scoring higher). So its really important to do well in the IR section because it sets the tone for the remaining sections and thus your overall EA. GMAT does not use IR to calculate the final score, so most GMAT oriented test materials will primarily skim past the IR.
So now we know roughly what is EA and how it mainly differs from GMAT. There are many useful things from the GMAT that we can use to prepare for the EA. The verbal section features questions from reading comprehension, critical reasoning, and sentence correction. GMAT material for preparing for verbal is totally applicable for EA. Quant section features data sufficiency and problem solving questions, the EA and GMAT share almost all the covered topics with the exception of Geometry which is not tested in the EA. Thus we can use all the material from GMAT quant, skipping geometry, to prepare for the EA quant portion of the test.
The most challenging aspects of the prep is how to prepare for the IR section. The key point in the IR section is that the 12 questions, are shown in 12 screens. Each screen will present some data in table, graph format or wordings and we need to typically answer 2 -4 questions. We get credit only if we answer all questions correctly on the screen, and remember I said there are 12 of them ! hence practice is key for IR and timed practice is essential.
In this blog post i will just list the set of resources i found useful for my EA prep. One thing I will mention is that most top schools do require the EA, so its a good idea to email and ask them what kind of scores do they want to see in applications. At the time of writing this blog, most schools want to see a score of 150. The Executive MBA is not dependent on academic credentials alone unlike the full time MBA. The exec MBA student is expected to be a mid career successful professional with high quality leadership and management experience with minimum of 8 years of relevant experience (typical range tends to be 12-14 years). Hence the EA test is mainly to ensure that the candidate is still academically sharp but its unlikely that high EA score is going to offset lower quality of work experience. Think of EA as a minimum filter that gets the conversation started with the admission committee.
So without further ado here are some resources that I found useful for prep. In my other blog post I will discuss my specific strategy and study plan should you desire to read on.
1) GMAT book : Use this to get reacquainted with a lot of the topics and materials and get warmed up by solving 100-150 questions in Verbal and Quant. Will help identify areas that need further attention.
2) Magoosh : This is an online GMAT prep site with lots of good free resources. I downloaded the magoosh verbal and quant app and followed the free lessons. The website has an Verbal idiom e-book that I found very useful.
3) Chicago Booth: The booth school offers free live webinar on verbal and quant. These courses are offered by a faculty member and is very useful as part of the prep.
4) GMAC EA practice : this has 100 questions in the test format. Once done with GMAT and magoosh switch to the EA practice. Costs about $150 for practice and tests. Probably the only way to practice IR is by the EA practice set.
5) GMAC EA practice tests 1-4; The real deal, a simulation of the EA test for practice. Use this once you have covered most of material and finished the practice set.
No comments:
Post a Comment