About the Cranfield Admission Test (CAT) and how to book

Cranfield offers the Cranfield Admission Test (CAT) as an alternative to the GMAT. Normally the CAT is only available to students who are able to attend the campus in the UK but applicants will be able to sit the CAT in Melbourne & Sydney and subject to demand, in other states as well. Check the Key Dates for details.

We cannot be certain that we will offer the CAT in Australia every year so if you are thinking of applying for the Scholarship in a future year it may make sense for you to sit the CAT while you have the chance.

You can find PRACTICE TESTS for the Cranfield Admission test on the School of Management website here.

The Cranfield Admission Test has been designed to ensure that candidates who study at Cranfield will cope with an extremely demanding learning environment. However, because the Cranfield test is used by Cranfield alone, it does have some characteristics which differ from the GMAT test.


Cranfield Admission Test (CAT) v’s Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) 
More than 260,000 people take the GMAT each year, and the GMAT has been designed to ensure that the testing scores are graduated enough to create a “bell curve” of results.

In Australia, our educational system develops high levels of verbal and literacy skills and permits the use of calculators for maths. Thus our experience with Australian applicants sitting the GMAT is that they tend to obtain extremely high scores in the Verbal section and lesser scores in the Quantitative section, reflecting their somewhat rusty mental arithmetic skills. Until we changed our advice on the GMAT and encouraged applicants to drill themselves on mental calculations, we had excellent candidates who did not meet the minimum 600 GMAT score required by Cranfield and who then did not have time to re-sit the GMAT and thus missed out on that year’s cutoff.

There are some KEY differences between the CAT and the GMAT

  1. You can use a calculator! That leaves you with one less thing to stress over – your mental arithmetic skills – and will allow you to focus your preparation and practise on the types of questions to be answered.
  2. You can sit the test here in Australia and get the results within a few days.
  3. You can review all questions and then go backwards and forwards to answer them in the order you wish, as well as being able to return to a question should you wish to, because the CAT is paper based.
  4. There is no charge to sit the CAT.
  5. The CAT is shorter in time, with two thirty minute sections compared to the GMAT which has four sections and takes 3.5 hours.

The CAT is just as challenging as the GMAT; you will still need to practice and all the GMAT resources that we have referenced here on the website are relevant.

http://cranfieldalumni.org.au/how-to-apply/gmat-help/http://cranfieldalumni.org.au/frequently-asked-questions/gmat/

  1. If you have sat the GMAT and obtained your 600 score, you do not need to sit the Cranfield Admission Test.
  2. If you have sat the GMAT and not reached the 600 score cutoff – you can either re-sit the GMAT or sit the CAT and have your application assessed on the CAT results.
  3. If you have not yet sat the GMAT, you can take either test.

But you do need to have Registered Interest in the Scholarship and you do need to tell us that you want to sit the CAT by submitting the form below.

Remember to bring a calculator with you as you must surrender your phone during the test!


Book to sit Cranfield Admission Test

Please check the Key Dates which will be updated once the dates/locations each year are confirmed.

  • Please indicate any travel issues you may have that we need to take into account (e.g.: if you are travelling from interstate)