报道原文：

　　Sixty years ago on Feb. 6, 1954, slightly more than 1,000 people sat down in 100 different places around the world to take a test for the very first time. It was the precursor to the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the de facto entry exam to the best business schools in the world.

　　Back then, the 1,291 prospective students paid just $10 each to take the paper-and-pencil exam. It was offered only three times a year in five countries, and candidates had to wait three to four weeks to get their results. Only 54 business schools accepted GMAT scores at the time.

　　Today, the computer-adaptive GMAT costs $250 a pop and if a test taker wants the results sent to more than five schools, there's an additional $28 charge for each score report. The test is offered year round at more than 600 sites in 113 countries. Anxiety-ridden test takers receive their scores within five to seven days, and more than 2,100 schools all over the globe now require the GMAT for admission.

　　The growth of the test itself mirrors the spectacular rise in popularity of the MBA degree, arguably the most successful educational product of the post-war period. The credential's prosperity has made the GMAT a hot "product."

　　For the organization that oversees the test, the Graduate Management Admission Council, profit margins on the exam are even better than the margins Apple (AAPL) makes on the iPad and the iPhone. GMAC says it collected $87.7 million in fees in 2012, yet it cost the organization only $45.7 million to administer the test, according to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service. The effective gross profit on the actual exam is roughly 47.9%, nearly 11 points higher than Apple's current gross profit margins.

　　All told, GMAC reported that its "program service revenue" came to $92.7 million in 2012, up from $88.5 million a year earlier. The organization's "investment income" alone amounted to another $30.7 million. When you kick in other revenue, GMAC recorded total revenue in 2012 of $125.1 million, up from $92.7 million a year earlier. Though it is a non-profit and does not have to pay taxes, the organization reported a tidy $22.4 million in cash after paying all its expenses for the year.

　　GMAC says the expenses to administer its test do not include such things as test design, score reporting, test taker accommodations, and the cost of running its website, where test takers register for the exam. "These are all activities that are intrinsic to the delivery of the test and are not covered in those operating expenses," says Rich D'Amato, vice president of corporate communications at GMAC. "In addition, there's [a] smaller expense group around fulfilling our responsibility -- part of our being a nonprofit -- to invest in [the] promotion of graduate management education as a field of study."

　　The reported expenses on the test do not include another very big line item in the organization's budget: its salaries and benefits to GMAC staffers. In 2012, GMAC's total compensation amounted to $25.9 million for a staff that numbered only 141 people.

　　At the very top of the non-profit are some very generously paid people. David Wilson, who until Dec. 31 of last year was president of the GMAC, was paid $1,914,845 in salary, benefits, and deferred compensation in 2012, more than three times the $662,000 that Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria made in 2011. Indeed, Wilson made substantially more than Educational Testing Service President Kurt Landgraf, who was paid $1.3 million in the same year for leading an organization with total revenues that are eight times greater.

　　What's more, at least 15 other officials at GMAC make at least a quarter of a million dollars a year in pay. Margaret Jobst, an executive vice president, made $539,058, according to GMAC's government filing. Julia Tyler, an executive vice president for global market development, pulled down $562,378. Robert Rosecrans, chief information officer, made $465,327. In all, six-figure bonuses were paid to nine GMAC officers, including a $448,000 bonus for Wilson, whose 2012 annual compensation was especially inflated due to $745,485 in deferred pay.

　　GMAC defends those salaries, saying that they are not out of line with what peer organizations pay their top leaders. "We are a global revenue generating enterprise with a not-for-profit mission," says D'Amato. "We were recruiting to 'build' a company, not just staff an existing organization in a very competitive recruitment market."

　　The majority of GMAC's staff, including its most senior officers, work on two quiet floors of a modern office park in Reston Town Center, Va., where Google (GOOG), Rolls-Royce, and the College Board also lease space. The brightly lit facility features what its architects call a "monumental" open staircase with a two-story waterfall structure, a cafe, and a testing center.

　　Such generous compensation and treatment at a non-profit comes largely because of GMAC's near-monopoly on the entrance test for graduate business programs. "It has been a very healthy business because of the growth in the underlying industry," explains Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. "People have to take the test to apply to the best business schools. But several thousand schools don't require the test. The question is: Do schools see a value in it, especially schools that will grow in India, China and Latin America?"

　　In fact, many of the newer business schools in developing economies do not require the GMAT, in part because of the test's cost. Devanath Tirupati, dean of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, estimates that as much as two-thirds of the global market for business programs doesn't require the exam. "The GMAT is too expensive and not accessible," says Tirupati, who notes that the cost of the more widely popular Common Admission Test (CAT) in India is about 1,500 rupees, or less than $25, compared to about 15,000 rupees for the GMAT. Nearly 175,000 students took the CAT last year in India. And 195,000 people took the CAT exam in 2012, while only 22,803 Indian residents took the GMAT that year.

　　Some business deans also express concern that the GMAT fails to measure attributes of candidates that are as important as the quant and verbal skills the test assesses. "I think we need different instruments to identify different skills today," says Santiago Iniguez de Onzono, dean of IE Business School in Spain. "If we want to attract entrepreneurs, then the GMAT is useless. It mostly measures analytical skills, but if you think about the importance of leadership, innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship, the GMAT doesn't measure that."

　　Much of the success of the organization behind the test can be attributed to David Wilson, a tall, lean Canadian accountant who was recruited to become president and CEO of GMAC in 1995. Wilson, who in his early career had been a B-school professor at the University of Texas and Harvard Business School, had just taken an early retirement from Ernst & Young. He had left his job as national director of professional development and was thinking of returning to teaching when he got a call from a Korn/Ferry headhunter during the Thanksgiving Day holiday in 1995.

　　Though GMAC was little known outside the business school world, its early roots could be traced to a meeting between nine business school deans and the Educational Testing Service in 1953. The pow-wow was arranged to discuss the possibility of an exam that would assess applicants on their potential for success in business and management courses. But it wasn't until 1970 that the deans of 30 graduate business schools launched the organization as independent from ETS. GMAC, however, didn't even have an office until 1982, when the council hired its first president, Bill Broesamle, then an associate dean at UCLA's business school. He worked out of a small office in Santa Monica, Calif. with five employees who largely oversaw one very large external contractor, the Educational Testing Service. "Many people didn't know what GMAC was," says Broesamle.