The Educational Testing Service is going after a new market: business-school applicants. According to BusinessWeek, although almost all business schools require students to take the Graduate Management Admission Test, which is owned by the Graduate Management Admission Council, ETS has already made inroads in persuading some business schools to consider its test, the Graduate Record Examination, as an alternative.

Stanford University’s MBA program and MIT’s Sloan School of Management announced in 2006 that they would accept the GRE in lieu of the GMAT, BusinessWeek writes.

ETS officials have also placed advertisements claiming that “MBA” can mean “more business-school applicants.” Their selling point is that a larger number of students, including those who may be weighing graduate-school options, will apply to business school if they do not have to take a separate test.

To persuade more business schools to accept the GRE, ETS officials told BusinessWeek they planned to meet with focus groups of business-school deans and were also considering changes in the content of the test. —Elizabeth F. Farrell