The GMAT has three main divisions: Analytical Writing; Verbal Reasoning; Quantitative reasoning.

Analytical Writing

The analytical writing section has two essay writing tasks: the Issue and the Argument. The Issue task requires the students to write an essay presenting the writer's position on a topic. The candidate is required to support his or her point of view with examples and reasoning. The time allotted for this task is 30 minutes.

The Argument task presents a statement of a position. The candidate is required to analyze the logic of the given position and suggest how and where the reasoning may be faulty or require improvement. The student is given 30 minutes for this essay.

The scoring for the Analytical Writing section is on a scale of 0-6. Each essay is scored by a human reader and then by a computer program (which the official GMAT website, mba.com, refers to as an automated essay-scoring engine). If the human and computer scores differ, the score is sent to a second expert reader for final evaluation. The final score is the average of the score on the Issue task and the score on the Argument task.

Quantitative Section

The quantitative section has two types of multiple choice questions: data sufficiency and problem solving. Follow the links to explore these types of math question.

There are 37 questions to be solved in 75 minutes. The level of math knowledge should be within the grasp of an 11th Grade student. However, the level of reasoning required is quite high. No calculators are allowed.

Verbal Reasoning

The verbal reasoning section contains three types of question: critical reasoning; reading comprehension; sentence correction. All questions are multiple-choice. You can click on the links to try out questions of each type.

There are 41 questions to be completed in 75 minutes.

GMAT Scores

The maximum score for the test is 1600: verbal and quantitative sections are each worth 800 points.

The student can get the results at the test center immediately after the GMAT-CAT. This is not an official score as the results of the writing section come later. The writing mark (on 6) is reported along with the score, but is not included in the score for the other sections.

GMAT scores are valid for five years, although some business schools might insist on a recent score.

What is a good GMAT score?

• The average score for GMAT test takers over the last few years is somewhere in the high 500's
• A 'good' score would be over 600
• A 'very good' score is one which crosses the 700 mark

As a rough guide, a score of 600 indicates a percentile ranking of about 70; a score of 700 approximates to the 90 percentile. (The percentile rank indicates the percentage of people taking the test who performed worse than you.) The average (mean and/or median) scores for students admitted to the 50 top ranking MBA programs is apparently 660. These are ball-park figures: it is easy enough to find the average GMAT scores for the intake in a given year to individual business schools.

Note that as well as an overall score and a percentile, the test report includes the scores and percentiles for both the verbal and quantitative sections of the test. Sometimes a student's composite score looks very good, but shows a great disparity between the verbal and quant sections � this is unlikely to go down well with the admissions committees.

One thing is certain: the scores of those admitted to B-schools have been rising in recent years. Some people with lower scores than the average for any given school are admitted because they have other assets that add to the diversity of the school. In effect, this means that for a person with nothing outstanding to offer in terms of academic prowess or work experience, the score he or she needs to stand out from the crowd of applicants at a top ten B-school has to be 720 or more.