Graduate Management Admission Council offers more testing centers

Graduate Management Admission Council offers more testing centers

Representatives from the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) have announced that the demand for the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), which it administers, has grown exponentially in recent years.

Currently, there are more than 500 testing centers worldwide that offer the exam, which shows a 25 percent increase over the past four years.

Company officials say that this increase occurred due to a growing interest in campus-based and online MBA programs, particularly in the international markets. In fact, more than half of students who took the exam in 2009 were non-U.S. citizens, marking the first year that foreign test takers outnumbered Americans. Chinese and Indian students were the most dominant members of this group.

Last year also attracted record numbers of GMAT examinees, as nearly 267,000 prospective business school students sat for the exam.

Peg Jobst, executive vice president of GMAC, said that "increasing access to the GMAT will provide schools with a bigger pool of candidates to choose from," which could fuel "the growth of quality management education programs around the world."

By Stefanie Hughes