Rotman Announces MBA without GMAT Requirement for CFAs

As North American business schools continue towards the summer break, for standard full-time MBAs at least, many schools have taken the opportunity to announce overhauls of their MBA admissions requirements. This week, the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management has joined that trend - good news for level 3 chartered financial analysts (CFA) as they can now apply to the Rotman MBA without taking the GMAT.

 

“An increasing number of applicants want to earn both a CFA and an MBA," explains Niki da Silva, director of recruitment and admissions for the full-time MBA at Rotman. "We understand that taking the GMAT test can be a ‘barrier’ stopping some who have passed all three levels of the CFA program from applying to business school.

 

“As one of the leading b-schools for teaching and research in the area of finance, the pool of CFA candidates is a strong source of talent for Rotman. With this change, we hope to make it easier for this group of qualified candidates to apply to our program,” adds da Silva.

New applicants to the Rotman MBA with a CFA level 3 qualification will be able to submit their qualification in lieu of the GMAT when they are applying to the full-time and part-time MBA programs at the business school.

 

However, it should be made clear that the CFA level 3 qualification will have already tested potential MBA applicants on much of the GMAT's content, with the MBA admissions team being able to glean the rest from other parts of the application process - admissions essays, interviews, and the like. Applicants in search of an MBA with no GMAT requirements should remember that the top MBA programs will always have admissions tests in some form, whether they be the GMAT, the CAT, the school's own test, or a test in the form of another qualification.

 

The change to allow CFAs to apply to the Rotman MBA with no GMAT follows the school's announcement last year that it would allow applicants to the full-time MBA program to apply with a video essay, instead of a tradition written version.