Highest & Lowest GMAT Scores At Top Schools

According to GMAC, the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers hundreds of thousands of GMAT tests every year, over the last three years the mean score on the test was 556.04. In 767,833 tests taken between 2015 and 2017, no one scored lower than 220.

-  According to a Poets&Quants analysis, 12 of the top 25 schools admitted someone with a GMAT score in the 500s, including four of the top 10 schools. 

-  At four schools in the top 25, the lowest GMAT score that earned admission was lower than GMAC’s three-year average of 556.

-  Of 21 schools GMAT scores for enrollees in the Class of 2019, 14 had low-end scores of 600 or less. That includes the elite of the elite: the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (530), Harvard Business School (580), Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management (600), MIT Sloan School of Management (580), and Columbia Business School (530). 

-  The average low score for the 21 schools: 585.7. The average low for the top 10 (all of which provided full-range data): 595.

-  Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business accepted a candidate with a score of 510. 

-  In the fall 2017 intake, three schools in the top 25 admitted applicants with low scores of 530 — the Wharton School, Columbia, and Indiana University Kelley School of Business. 

-  Another six schools said yes to applicants with scores of 580 (HBS, MIT Sloan, NYU Stern School of Business) or 590 (Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management, University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business). 

-  Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business admitted a 570 (48th percentile), and another top-25 school, Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, admitted someone with a 560 (44th percentile).

-  The high scores in each school’s range continue to be 780-790 for all of the top 10 schools.

-  Average GMAT scores continue to climb, led by Stanford Graduate School of Business’ remarkable 737. 

-  The top 19 schools saw improvement in their scores year-over-year or no change between 2016 and 2017.

-  As far as minimum scores, it looks like you need a 600 on the GMAT to get into a European B-school (though Cambridge does not make available their range, even the middle 80%), but Toronto Rotman last fall took in someone with a 500 score — more than 50 points below the average for all takers in the last three years.