Setting the high score

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A recent McMaster graduate is one of the top five scorers in North America this past January on the Bloomberg Aptitude Test. The BAT evaluates prospective candidates on various skills that demonstrate competency for a career in business or finance.

The BAT is a standardized test that has been written globally in over 3,000 universities and by over 250,000 students since 2010. The BAT largely serves to facilitate talent searches for prospective employers in the field of finance by matching student profiles based on key competencies.

The Bloomberg Hall of Fame recognizes students around the world who achieve a top five score amongst other students each month.

Michael Milewski, a graduate from the MBA program at McMaster in 2014, scored a 700 on the 800-scale test, which comfortably places him in the 99th-percentile of test-takers. Milewski is the lone Canadian representative among the top students from January, which includes strong representation from well-recognized American schools such as Stanford University and UCLA.

“I was debating what I should do career-wise, and I kind of took it just on a whim, as a litmus test, to see if I should try to go for a career in finance,” said Milewski.

Milewski has gone through a slight change in his field of focus, as he received his undergraduate degree in Engineering from the University of Toronto before coming to McMaster. However, he commented that having both an engineering and business background helped him in his approach to the skills being tested, which include areas such as economics, statistics, and analytical reasoning.

Like many recent graduates, Milewski is unsure of his future career path, but is pleased that he had a chance to write the test.

“It’s a good way to judge where you are on a scale with other people,” he said. “It is fairly difficult in [that] it is a more comprehensive test than a straight-knowledge test.”

Ultimately, the test acts as an additional component for students entering the workforce to demonstrate qualities not indicated in a resume. With an increasingly competitive job market, it’s clear that companies are looking beyond a student’s portfolio for their targeted candidates.

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