Worried About Returning to School? How the Executive Assessment Test Can Help

An Executive Masters of Business Administration (EMBA) is specifically designed for people who have professional experience.

When you attend an EMBA program, you’ll be doing so alongside others who have spent many years outside of an academic environment and who are driven to grow their careers just like you. In fact, approximately 63 percent of EMBA applicants have 10 years of experience or more. Given that 89 percent of EMBA graduates say the skills they learned in their program advanced their careers, it’s clear that an EMBA offers an excellent return on investment for experienced professionals. 

That being said, returning to business school if you’ve been working for some time may be a bit intimidating. Fortunately, taking the Executive Assessment (EA) is a great way to ensure you feel ready for the demands of academic life. Here’s how:

The Executive Assessment test can help you tackle test anxiety

Test anxiety is something that affects many students. Particularly if it has been some time since you have been in an academic environment, you may feel overwhelmed about the prospect of sitting down for tests and exams.

Fortunately, because it takes only 90 minutes to finish, the Executive Assessment is an excellent option. Given the short duration of the exam, you’re more likely to go into it with greater confidence, which can help you feel more prepared for business school overall.

As Jenn, who took the Executive Assessment, says, “I suffer from test anxiety, and so the longer that a test-taking time is, the more anxiety I feel. So it was really helpful as well to have something that was short. You get in there, you take the test, and you get out.”

Schools can use the Executive Assessment to work with you to ensure you’re ready

A graduate business school evaluation may sound like it is a barrier to a graduate education, but in fact the opposite is true for the Executive Assessment. Instead of using it to filter out candidates, many business schools use the Executive Assessment to determine how ready an applicant is for returning to school and what steps they may need to take beforehand. The Executive Assessment is divided into three sections: integrated reasoning, verbal reasoning, and quantitative reasoning. If you excel in one section but not in another, then the Executive Assessment can help you see where you may need to improve before starting classes.

That was the case for Skip, who enrolled in the Darden Executive Program. As he says, “…I think the EA does a great job of kind of assessing your knowledge as it is, and then I think it also, for me, gave me a couple areas where I needed to focus on.” He adds that “…I think being able to focus on those areas prior to business school also helped. So I kind of identified places where I can improve prior to the business school environment, which is what I did, so it was kind of feedback for me individually as well.”

If you’re interested in finding out more about what business school is like, check out What to Expect in an MBA Program.

The short preparation time can make it easier to return to school faster

One thing that makes the Executive Assessment unique is that it requires only modest preparation. This means that you can prepare for and take the Executive Assessment in a relatively short amount of time, which can help you apply to your EMBA faster. In fact, according to our own data, close to 80 percent of test takers said the Executive Assessment allowed them to apply for business school sooner.

The ability to speed up the application process is important since it can relieve a lot of the pressure that otherwise surrounds returning to school. Spending a lot of time preparing for an admissions assessment can make the prospect of returning to school feel daunting. By using the Executive Assessment test, which requires only modest preparation, you’re more likely to feel more self-assured heading back to business school.

In the words of EMBA student Eliza, “[The Executive Assessment] requires less studying, less time, but it also prepares you, at the same time, to be able to step into the MBA program and get you back on the right path of studying if you've maybe been out of school for a couple of years.”

Do you want to return to return to school and advance your career?

Learn more about completing a business career advancement evaluation.