How Long Does It Take To Prepare For The Executive Assessment

The Executive Assessment is a requirement for admission to a growing number of business schools worldwide. If you are a candidate looking to pursue an EMBA or any other postgraduate business degree, an Executive Assessment score could be the difference between being accepted for a top program or not. Therefore it is important that you do well in it. 

The Executive Assessment is very much like the GMAT in terms of the content and skills tested. It is tailored to be less lengthy or involving than the GMAT but still has high predictive validity. It was specially created for the busy executives who are targeted for EMBA programs but may not have the time to prepare for and take the GMAT. 

Going into an EMBA program, the schools expect you to be bringing along extensive work experience and leadership qualities, the EA is meant simply to demonstrate that you have enough verbal and quantitative abilities to succeed in business school. Therefore, for most business schools an above-average score is all that is needed, so unless otherwise stated it may not be necessary for you to spend a hundred hours or more trying to get a perfect score in your Executive Assessment test. But of course, the higher your score the better. 

Preparation Time 

As already stated, the Executive Assessment is not the kind of exam that you will need to spend hundreds of hours preparing for, as a matter of fact, the GMAC’s official recommendation is 20-30 hours. However, this may not be enough for most test takers especially if it has been a while since you encountered the kind of math tested in the Executive Assessment. 30-50 hours is often more fitting, enough time to learn all the necessary content and to do enough practice without it dominating your life for an extended period of time.

Most students preparing for the Executive Assessment have families, full-time jobs, and many other interests and responsibilities. It is important that you create a plan that works for you and your busy lifestyle. You will need to make sacrifices during your Executive Assessment journey but it should not be so much that you need to put your life on hold.

A good study schedule may be, say, one hour a day every weekday, first thing in the morning or late in the evening depending on what works for you. Two to three hours on Saturdays and Sundays during which time you could schedule full practice tests or study for longer blocks of time. This will give you a total of 8-10 hours of study per week, in four weeks, that will be 32 to 40 hours of study. 

Here is a hypothetical study schedule assuming you start studying four or five weeks leading to your test appointment date. 

• Monday – One hour of Executive Assessment prep. Morning (5.00am – 6.00am)
• Tuesday – One hour of Executive Assessment prep. Morning (5.00am – 6.00am) 
• Wednesday – One hour of Executive Assessment prep. Evening (10.00 pm – 11.00 pm)
• Thursday – One hour of Executive Assessment prep. Evening (8.00 pm – 9.00 pm)
• Friday – Day off
• Saturday – 3 hours of Executive Assessment prep. Full practice test/ review (10.30 am – 1.30 pm)
• Sunday – Two hours of Executive Assessment prep. Morning (6.00am – 7.00am)

Is the Executive Assessment Easier than the GMAT? 

After everything that has been said above, it sounds like the Executive Assessment is so much easier than the  GMAT. Isn’t it just an easier GMAT? Well, it’s not. The Executive Assessment does not have geometry and you will not need to write an essay, but everything else is the same as far as content is concerned. In some ways, it can be harder and more frustrating to prepare for the Executive Assessment. You will have to prepare for the same amount of content but you will end up seeing fewer questions in the exam. So you prepare for all these math topics for instance, but quite a number of those topics do not appear in your exam because the Executive Assessment has less than half the number of questions in the GMAT.  

So the answer is no. The Executive Assessment is not necessarily going to be easier for you. You still have to prepare adequately. Do not go for the Executive Assessment thinking that it is going to be easier, rather take it with the mindset of approaching it with the same vigor that you would for GMAT, the only difference being that it should take you much less time to prepare. 

Study Tips to Prepare for the Executive Assessment 

There are three key things you need to take care of as you prepare for the Executive Assessment:

1. Know “what”

You must know what content you need to learn to be able to answer the questions you will meet in your exam. For example, what content do I need to learn to be able to solve these simultaneous equations? What content must I learn to pass the Integrated Reasoning section? You must first know what you need to know. Things such as grammar rules, math formulas, among other things. This is the “what” that you need to know. 

2. Practice 

Do a lot of practice problems and take a number of full-length practice tests before the actual exam. Practice makes perfect. This may be the most crucial part of your preparation. You could just take a course, watch some YouTube videos, or even study an approved manual, but without practice, you are very much unlikely to be ready to pass the Executive Assessment. So practice, practice, practice. 

3. Have a strategy

A strategy here refers to getting the correct answer more efficiently and effectively. Strategy is what separates students who do well and those who do really well. How do you navigate a section for instance? Will you answer all the questions in the order in which they appear or skip the harder, time-consuming questions and only come back to them when there is enough time to get them done? Can you quickly eliminate incorrect answers or substitute choices back into math problems to save time? A strategy sometimes involves getting to the correct answer in non-traditional ways, but having a strategy that works is the key to scoring highly in your Executive Assessment.