The GMAT test measures general verbal, quantitative, and analytical writing skills that are developed over a long period of time and are associated with academic success in the core courses of graduate management programs. GMAT now has a new section called Integrated Reasoning in place of 'Analysis of an issue' Essay topic. The GMAT examination does not presuppose any specific knowledge of business or of other specific content areas, nor does it measure achievement in any particular subject area.

The Next Generation GMAT test

The Analytical Writing Assessment section of the test measures your ability to think critically and communicate complex ideas through writing.

The Analysis of an Argument task tests your ability to formulate an appropriate and constructive critique of a specific conclusion based on a specific line of thinking.

Integrated Reasoning section will assess the data analysis skill of a candidate. It will consist of four types of questions:

• Graph analysis
• Table analysis
• Two way analysis
• Multi source analysis

The Quantitative section of the GMAT exam measures your ability to reason mathematically, solve quantitative problems, and interpret graphic data. This section contains the following types of questions:

• Problem Solving
• Data Sufficiency

The Verbal section of the test measures your ability to understand and evaluate what you read and to recognize basic conventions of standard written English. The section contains the following types of questions:

• Reading Comprehension (Reading and comprehending the given text, and answering the questions based on the same)
• Critical Reasoning (Reasoning and evaluating arguments)
• Sentence Correction (Correcting the data by following the standard conventions of writing)

In a computer-adaptive test, questions are chosen from a very large pool of test questions categorized by content and difficulty and presented one at a time.

The test is constantly targeting your individual ability level. In each section, your answer for each question will determine the level of your next question.

Consequently, you must enter an answer for each question and you may not go back to make changes. If you answer a question incorrectly by mistake or correctly by lucky guess, your answers to subsequent questions will lead you back to questions that are at the appropriate level of difficulty for you.

• Essays are scored on a scale of 0 - 6 in 0.5 increments.
• Integrated Reasoning section is scored on a scale of 1 - 8 in 1 point increment.
• Quantitative section is scored on a scale of 0 - 60 in 1 point increment.
• Verbal section is scored on a scale of 0 - 60 in 1 point increment.
• Scaled scores of Quantitative and Verbal sections are added to create a score on the scale of 200 - 800 in 10 points increment. 650+ score is considered good score.