How is the Executive Assessment Scored?
The highest overall Executive Assessment (EA) score is 174, and the lowest is 126. The scale supposedly runs from 100 to 200, but we still haven’t seen scores outside of the 126-174 range.
Each of the three sections -- Integrated Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, and Quantitative Reasoning -- count toward your overall EA score. When you complete the test, you’ll receive a score for each of these sections from 0 to 20, as well as an overall score from 126 to 174.
How the Executive Assessment is scored
The EA is an adaptive test, which means that when you answer questions correctly, your test will be “adapted up” to include harder questions. Similarly, when you answer questions incorrectly, the test will adapt to give you easier questions.
The test adapts up or down in the middle of each EA section. You’ll start with a six question mini-test in the Integrated Reasoning (IR) section, with medium-level questions on average. Then, after you submit those six questions, you’ll be presented with a new mini-test of six more IR questions.
The difficulty of this second mini-test depends on how well you did on the first mini-test. If you aced the first six questions, the test will “adapt up” and show you harder questions. If you bombed the first six questions, the test will “adapt down” and you’ll see easier questions.
The same process is repeated on the verbal and quant sections, except that each mini-test will consist of 7 questions.
Overall, this means that your score is partially determined by the difficulty level of the questions you missed, not solely by the number of questions that you missed. Imagine you did really well on the first mini-test of the quant section, and the test adapts up to show you a bunch of tough questions. It wouldn’t be fair to penalize you harshly for missing those tough questions, so the scoring algorithm takes the difficulty level into account.
After you complete the test, you will see your individual IR, quant, and verbal scores (out of 20), as well as your overall EA score (on a scale from 100 to 200).
What is a good Executive Assessment score?
At the end of the day, a “good” test score is one that will get you into your target program.
However, defining a good EA score is particularly challenging, since schools don’t publish average EA scores of admitted students. In reality, we don’t know exactly what MBA admissions committees define as a “good” EA score.
One hint is that GMAC has recently started to publish limited information about EA score percentiles. Here’s what GMAC has released so far:
Yeah: this isn’t very much data. We do know this, however: at the request of MBA programs, GMAC has deliberately released only limited information about EA scores. Why? Well, the purpose of the EA is to provide EMBA programs with useful data about older students’ ability to thrive in graduate-level business coursework – and both GMAC and its member institutions prefer to avoid the “arms races” that have occurred over the years with GMAT test scores.
In other words: if your EA score is within a reasonable range for your target programs, you’re in good shape. And beyond that, you don’t need to spend much time worrying about a general definition of what a “good” EA score is.
What is a good EA score for top EMBA programs?
A handful of top part-time and executive MBA programs have begun to publish data on average EA scores, and we see a consistent pattern in those limited data releases: even at the best EMBA programs, average EA scores are consistently in the low-to-mid 150s.
For example, the average EA scores at the Darden and Booth EMBA programs were 153 and 154, respectively, in their most recent incoming classes. The average EA score for Wharton’s incoming EMBA class was 156 – which is, unsurprisingly, the highest we could find for any part-time or executive MBA program.
So if you’re applying to ultra-elite EMBA programs, a “good” EA score will, as always, depend on the rest of your profile. But as a very general rule of thumb, an EA score in the low-to-mid 150s will put you in the right ballpark for top EMBA programs, and if you’re applying to less-competitive EMBA programs, you might be in great shape with an EA score closer to 150.