Exclusive Interview: GMAC President Sangeet Chowfla On The MBA’s Future

Chowfla with Dr. Rajan Saxena at the NMAT signing in New Delhi

As the person overseeing the GMAT, any advice you would give to potential test takers – either strategies or helpful tricks – to help them increase their score?

The first thing I always tell potential candidates is, “You need to prepare.” And don’t view this as preparation for the GMAT. View it as preparation for business school. Business schools, as we know, are challenging environments. They stretch a candidate’s capabilities. It’s important going into that being ready. Preparing for and taking the GMAT is an important way of preparing for business school. So I say, don’t look at the GMAT as an end by itself, but think of it as a part of the preparation process for business school. I’m going to come back to a point I made earlier: Business school is one of the biggest investments you’ll make in your career. It’s important that you get it right.

Second, use the GMAT to give you information about yourself. The GMAT is very reliable in terms of telling you the kinds of schools where you will be successful at and the ones where you may struggle in. It is important to have a positive experience and be successful in the school that you go to. Use those

GMAT results as a way to understand your capabilities. There’s no right or wrong answer – we don’t see the scores as good scores or bad scores. Scores just reflect a candidate’s capabilities. There is a good business school for every candidate. Career success is not limited to the graduates of a particular subset of business schools. Overall, we find that everything from career development, salary bumps, and enrichment in your work life is available to people from a wide variety of business schools. Use your scores to make the right choices and then commit to your education.

What question(s) didn’t I ask that you’d like to answer? 

I want to stress a couple of areas. [First], graduate management education matters. It matters from the point of view of survival and development. As we look at the world today and the problems we see on CNN whether it is conflict, politics, or other issues, we think we have a role to play. It’s not just about creating consultants for the big three consulting firms or financial services analysts, etc. It’s really talking about creating the leaders of tomorrow that will help us, as a society, deal with some of the problems that we’re facing.

Closer to home, I cannot stress [enough] the importance that we as an educational industry invest in addressing the complexity, and imperative of   attracting and enrolling populations that are today underrepresented. These are the growth areas. We cannotignore demographics. From the United States’ perspective, these are the largest population segments for the future. And we have to find ways to address the score gaps in the GMAT, and [the gaps] in their presence in the classrooms of our leading business schools and (as a result of that) their presence in business, industry, and society. Otherwise, we will be cannibalizing our future.

The third is the world has become much more global and fragmented. As a result of that, we need an industry-wide effort to connect students from around the world to schools from around the world. That process is, as I mentioned before, too complex and we would all benefit from streamlining and bringing more people into our industry. As a result of that, we will be able to complete our mission better and educate more people for society.

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