GMAT Alternatives: The Executive Assessment & GRE Tests

A substantial advantage of applying to online MBA programs is that most applicants do not need to take admissions tests like the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). And that’s especially true for candidates with enough years of work experience to qualify for waivers, as we discuss in our guides on GMAT waivers and MBA programs without GMAT requirements. Notably, according to Poets & Quants, just 17 of 61 schools they ranked for 2026 (27.9 percent) now require a GMAT or GRE as a part of a candidate’s application.

But candidates applying to the minority of programs that still require admissions tests should know that some business schools now accept as many as three ypes of tests. What’s more, applicants who assume that they have no other options besides taking the GMAT may damage their chances of admission to some of the best schools.

Why? That’s because they might score relatively higher on one of the alternative tests: the Executive Assessment (EA) or the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Of course, higher scores can lead to admissions and scholarship offers from better schools.

GMAT Alternative #1: The Executive Assessment

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), the same organization that administers the GMAT, introduced the Executive Assessment in 2016. Originally designed for executive MBA programs, the EA is shorter and features similar quantitative and verbal question types as the GMAT.

These days, hundreds of MBA programs accept the EA, including top full-time programs. Wharton, Chicago Booth, Berkeley Haas, Carnegie Mellon Tepper, and UVA Darden all accept EA scores for their flagship MBAs.

Over 200 programs worldwide now accept the EA, including executive, part-time, online, and full-time MBAs. For example, UC Berkeley Haas accepts EA scores for its weekend MBA and executive MBA programs.

Also, in an interesting twist, Poets & Quants noted in 2019 that the EA provides an incentive for highly ranked business schools to accept candidates with lower scores:

U.S. News does not count and has no plans to include EA scores into its formula for ranking MBA programs, which means that schools can accept lower-scoring EA applicants and not worry about the impact on their ranking.

This policy is still true in 2026, as confirmed by U.S. News 2026 methodology.

What is the Executive Assessment (EA) Test?

The EA takes 90 minutes with 40 questions across three sections.

The integrated reasoning section (30 minutes, 12 questions) measures the ability to evaluate information from multiple sources. The verbal reasoning section (30 minutes, 14 questions) tests reading, understanding, and editing written material. The quantitative reasoning section (30 minutes, 14 questions) requires secondary-school level math.

Compared to GMAT Focus (135 minutes, 64 questions), the EA is shorter and has fewer questions. Both use section-adaptive testing and allow calculators, with no essay.

GMAT Alternative #2: The Graduate Record Examination (GRE)

The GRE, administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), is a general graduate admissions test now accepted by nearly all U.S. business schools. GRE submission rates have surged, with 37 percent of top 10 MBA applicants submitting GRE scores in the latest cycle—up from 31 percent two years ago.

Moreover, business schools now appear to have no preference for one test over the other. Top schools treat GRE and GMAT equally. Stanford GSB accepts both GMAT and GRE with no preference and allows students to choose what best reflects their strengths. Harvard states, “There is no minimum GRE or GMAT score needed to apply and we do not have a preference toward one test or the other.” Wharton notes, “There is no minimum GMAT or GRE score requirement to apply to the Wharton MBA program, and we don’t have a preference for one test over another.”

Why Choose the GRE Instead of the GMAT?

So why might an applicant do better on the GRE than the GMAT? US admissions experts recommend the GRE over the GMAT based on the candidate’s strengths.

• Candidates who are stronger in verbal skills and have strong vocabularies tend to perform better on the GRE. Verbal reasoning questions test vocabulary deeply. Therefore, it can be a great option for word lovers, but it can be especially challenging for international applicants who are non-native English speakers.
• By contrast, applicants who are better at math tend to score higher on the GMAT. Experts agree that its quantitative questions are more challenging than the GRE quant.
• The GRE allows more flexibility because test takers can skip difficult questions and return to them later in the section. That’s not the case with the GMAT, which allows test-takers to review or change up to three answers per section. For that reason, more anxious applicants tend to perform better on the GRE.

Moreover, candidates can submit GRE scores not only to MBA programs and specialized business master’s degrees, but also to a broad range of master’s and PhD programs in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Candidates who aren’t yet certain about their future plans can “keep their options open” without the need to invest months preparing for different admission tests.

Why Can Candidates Choose Among the EA, the GRE, and the GMAT?

The ability of candidates to select from three admission tests marks a dramatic evolution in graduate management education, breaking the GMAT’s long-standing monopoly.

When the Educational Testing Service proposed creating a graduate admission test to nine business school deans in 1953, they created a monopoly that lasted for the next 50 years with the test that they created: the GMAT.

But in 2003—during an embarrassing cheating scandal and the Educational Testing Service’s general reluctance to upgrade the exam’s next-generation technology, customer service, international markets, and security—the Graduate Management Admission Council fired ETS.

In their place, GMAC temporarily hired the American College Testing (ACT) organization to develop the test and Pearson VUE to administer it. Meanwhile, GMAC had decided to “backward integrate” these vendor relationships by bringing all these operations in-house. Without expensive subcontractors, the GMAT ended up with higher profit margins than Apple’s iPhone.

Eight years later, the ETS testing empire struck back. In 2011, while the GMAT controlled 98 percent of the graduate management admission testing market, ETS retaliated with an aggressive strategy to recapture market share and revenue lost to GMAC by promoting the GRE as a GMAT alternative. That effort continues to this day and is largely responsible for ETS’s positioning of the GRE as a viable alternative to the GMAT. Today, GRE comprises nearly 40 percent of test submissions at top programs.

GMAC responded to growing competition by developing its own alternative in 2016. The Executive Assessment (EA) was designed specifically for experienced professionals pursuing executive MBA programs or one-year MBAs, offering a shorter 90-minute format compared to the full-length GMAT. Available at Pearson VUE centers or online, the EA quickly gained traction among popular schools, establishing itself as a third viable option in the admissions testing landscape.

However, ETS’s competitive retaliation wasn’t the only factor that led to these multiple admission testing choices in graduate management education. A persistent crisis in business school admissions—characterized by declining application volumes, demographic shifts, and intensifying competition from alternative career paths — compelled programs to become more accommodating toward prospective students reluctant to invest months preparing solely for the GMAT or juggling preparation for multiple specialized exams. This applicant-centric flexibility reflects schools’ urgent need to maintain enrollment amid broader market pressures.

A second, and perhaps more substantial, force behind this expansion of testing options has been the mounting criticism of admission tests themselves in graduate management education. Over the past two decades, faculty members, career offices, and even some deans have questioned whether exams like the GMAT or GRE truly measure the skills that matter most for long‑term professional success, such as leadership, teamwork, and the ability to navigate ambiguous business problems. As doubts about the predictive value of these scores have grown, schools have felt increasing pressure to treat standardized tests as just one data point among many, rather than the definitive gatekeeper for admission.

One of the clearest examples of this skepticism emerged from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, which in 2015 released findings from a comprehensive multi-year study tracking over 1,000 MBA graduates’ career outcomes against their admission test scores. The results were striking: the GMAT proved “close to irrelevant” as a predictor of post-graduation employability, with interview performance, analytical writing scores, and prior work experience emerging as far stronger indicators of long-term career success. Kevin Frey, then managing director of Rotman’s full-time MBA program, told Poets & Quants:

The most shocking surprise for us was how close to irrelevant the GMAT was. The one proviso is that GMAC has never claimed the GMAT exam is predictive of employability. It’s predictive of your ability to perform in the program.

But schools that are just trying to measure how their applicants will perform in the classroom are measuring the wrong stuff. We have a moral obligation to these students. They are going to invest a quarter of a million dollars into this degree. When we accept them, we need to feel very confident they are going to get the career outcomes they want. But the GMAT cannot be used as a proxy for employability.

Frey didn’t stop there. He also took direct aim at the role of test scores in U.S. News and World Report business school rankings, which factor GMAT medians into their methodology with significant weight. Here’s what Frey had to say about these practices:

They buy all these high GMATs and we know it’s not predictive of employability. U.S. News has changed incentives so perversely that the market is blindly chasing GMATs without even knowing why it is doing so. It’s unfortunate. But if schools want to spend all their scholarships and effort recruiting a high GMAT class, we are going to cheer them on because based on our hard numbers, the GMAT does not predict the team that wins the employment game down the road.