Assessing practical intelligence in business school admissions: A supplement to the graduate management admissions test

The Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) is the most widely used measure of managerial potential in MBA admissions. GMAT scores, although predictive of grades in business school, leave much of the variance in graduate school performance unexplained. The GMAT also produces disparities in test scores between groups, generating the potential for adverse impact in the admissions process. We sought to compensate for these limitations by adding measures of practical intelligence to the admissions process in an MBA program. We developed two approaches to measuring practical intelligence, one knowledge-based and the other skill-based. We administered the resulting measures to two samples of incoming MBA students (total N = 792). Across the two studies, we found that scores on both measures predicted success inside and outside the classroom and provided small, yet significant, increments beyond GMAT scores and undergraduate GPA in the prediction of variance in MBA performance. We further found that these measures exhibited less disparity across gender and racial/ethnic groups than did the GMAT. These findings, although preliminary, suggest the potential value of considering a broader range of abilities in admissions testing.