With effect from the MAT held in May 1997, MAT scores are being released to both the
Management Institutes (MIs) and the candidates. These guidelines have been prepared
to provide information about appropriate use of MAT-Score for those who interpret
scores and set criteria for admission. The guidelines are based on many policies and test
considerations. One of the test considerations, viz. normalization of raw scores before
scaling has been started from the MAT held in February 2021.
The purpose of MAT is to provide information on a candidate’s aptitude and skills to cope
up with a Post Graduate Programme. It, therefore, assists in making decision pertaining
to admissions to Institutes/Universities. MAT-Score is one of the sources of information
and should be used, whenever possible, in combination with other information.
With effect from the MAT held in May 1997, MAT scores are being released to both the Management Institutes (MIs) and the candidates. These guidelines have been prepared to provide information about appropriate use of MAT-Score® for those who interpret scores and set criteria for admission. The guidelines are based on many policies and test considerations. One of the test considerations, viz. normalization of raw scores before scaling has been started from the MAT held in February 2021.
The purpose of MAT is to provide information on a candidate’s aptitude and skills to cope up with a Post Graduate Programme. It, therefore, assists in making decision pertaining to admissions to Institutes/Universities. MAT-Score® is one of the sources of information and should be used, whenever possible, in combination with other information.
The primary asset of MAT-Score® is that it provides a common measure, administered under standard conditions, with known reliability and validity for evaluating the academic skills of many candidates.
MAT-Score® has two important characteristics.
First, it is a reliable measure of certain developed skills that have been found to be important in the study of management at the post graduate level. AIMA conducts studies to check the ability of MAT-Score® to predict academic success in the first year of study at the post graduate courses.
Second, unlike graduation level marks, which vary in their meaning according to the marking standards of each college or university, MAT-Score® is based on the same standard for all candidates.
All the administrations of MAT closely measure similar abilities. However, each individual test necessarily asks different questions. This may make one MAT test to be slightly more or less difficult than another. These slight differences are accounted for during the normalization and scaling process. As a result of these adjustments, equal scaled scores represent about the same level of ability, as measured by the test, regardless of the administration or when and in how many sessions, the test was conducted.
Each score-report contains six scores:
Language Comprehension
Mathematical Skills
Data Analysis & Sufficiency
Intelligence & Critical Reasoning
Economic & Business Environment
Composite Score
In the normalization process, distribution of scores for the overall session for a specific subject/Section is used as standard form against which the scores obtained in each of the sessions gets normalized.
In the formula used here, α% top scores are used depending on the number of candidates in different sessions.
Let Xᵢⱼ = scores of jth candidate in ith session
Mᵢ = mean raw score of ith session
Sᵢ = standard deviation of ith session
Mᵢα = mean score of top α% candidates
Gᵢ = Mᵢ + Sᵢ
M₀ and S₀ = mean & standard deviation of raw scores of overall sessions
Normalized score of the sessions may be shown as:
X̂ᵢⱼ₀ = (Xᵢⱼ − Gᵢ) * [ (M₀α − G₀) / (Mᵢα − Gᵢ) ] + G₀
Language Comprehension, Mathematical Skills, Data Analysis & Sufficiency, Intelligence & Critical Reasoning and Economic & Business Environment are reported on scales ranging from 0 to 100.
The Composite Score is reported on a scale ranging from 200 to 800.
The composite score is arrived at using all five sections of the test. Equal weightage is assigned to all these five sections.
For each of the six scores mentioned, a percentile below figure is also given. Each of these indicates the percentage of examinees who scored below the candidate based on the entire MAT testing population for the test. The percentile below figure may change marginally with each administration for the same scores.
MAT-Score® is not to be compared with scores on other tests. Differences, if any, among different administrations of MAT are compensated by the statistical process of score equating.
MAT is not intended to be parallel to any other tests offered by other testing agencies.
