Top 50 With Biggest Five-Year Increases In GMAT Scores

Top 50 With Biggest Five-Year Increases In GMAT Scores

School	Five-Year Change	Average 2015 GMAT	Average 2011 GMAT
Michigan State (Broad)	+26	664	638
Pennsylvania (Wharton)	+14	732	718
Southern Methodist (Cox)	+14	656	641
Northwestern (Kellogg)	+12	724	712
North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)	+12	701	689
UCLA (Anderson)	+9	713	704
Washington (Foster)	+8	688	675

Among the Top 50 U.S. MBA programs, only half show increases in their average GMAT scores for their entering classes in the past five years. 

 - 17 of the top 25 ranked schools have been able to improve their average GMATs, largely by taking a higher percentage of those students from lesser-ranked institutions.

The Top 50 school with the single biggest increase in GMAT scores was Michigan State University’s Broad School where the average soared by 26 points to 664 from 638.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, saw a 14-point rise to an average GMAT score for last fall’s entering class of 732, up from 718 in 2011. 

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management GMAT rose 12 points to 724 last year from 712 five years earlier

The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business school saw its average class GMAT also rise 12 points to 701.

Wharton closed a 21-point gap with Stanford. 

A 700 GMAT score puts a test taker in the 89th percentile of those who have taken the exam. That means only 11% of those who sit for the GMAT have a score of 700 or above. 

The average is about 547. Stanford’s leading average GMAT of 733 comfortably puts the incoming class among the top four percent of all test takers, though the latest entering MBA students have GMATs that range from a low of 570 to a perfect score of 800. Last fall, Harvard accepted a 510 GMAT scorer, while Wharton’s lowest score last fall was 110 points higher at 620.

Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business which has long boasted the highest average GMAT scores of any elite MBA program. Stanford’s average has fallen six points to 733, just a point above Wharton’s record 732 last fall. 

Just five years ago, Stanford was ahead of Wharton with a 21-point gap, with Stanford then at 739 and Wharton at 718. Harvard Business School, by contrast, reported a class average of 725 for the Class of 2017, up just a single digit from five years ago and down two points from 2013.

Source: Poets & Quants