GMATGraduate Management Admission Test

The GMAT, owned by the Graduate Management Admission Council, is the global standard for MBA admissions and plays a specific, senior-skewed role in India: it is the primary exam for ISB's PGP, for the one-year executive MBAs at IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta, for XLRI's General Management Programme, and for NRI/international-candidate quotas at many Indian schools. Unlike CAT's once-a-year sprint, the GMAT is delivered year-round at test centres and online, can be scheduled at will, and permits five attempts per rolling year (eight lifetime), with scores valid for five years.

The current exam (the streamlined format introduced as the 'Focus Edition' in 2023-24, now simply the GMAT) is 2 hours 15 minutes long with 64 questions in three equally weighted, individually adaptive sections — Quantitative Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, and Data Insights, the last blending data sufficiency, multi-source and graphical reasoning that mirrors modern analytical work. Scores run on a 205-805 scale. There is no essay and no dedicated grammar (sentence-correction) testing, and candidates may bookmark and edit a limited number of answers within a section — a departure from older adaptive-test rules.

For Indian candidates the CAT-vs-GMAT decision is largely a career-stage decision: fresh graduates targeting two-year IIM programmes need CAT, while professionals with 4+ years of experience aiming at ISB or IIM executive programmes need the GMAT. The GMAT's retake-ability and five-year validity also make it the lower-variance option for working professionals who cannot risk a single-day national exam.