Impact of GMAT Score on Admission Chances at Top Business Schools!

Question

Here is latest analysis of trends observed in round1 of 2017 application season.. https://gmatclub.com/forum/r1-admission ... 32055.html

Hello GMAT Club!!

Taking GMAT is often called as foremost step in the MBA application process. It's also termed as crucial factor of the MBA application. Almost every applicant strive hard to obtain highest possible score on the GMAT. Many applicants think of GMAT as a most significant factor of the MBA application. Sometime we even hear extreme arguments such as a high GMAT score is an entry pass at any Bschool of your choice. Admission committees of business schools and MBA experts, on the other hand, always reiterate that GMAT is just one of the many factors that adcoms consider while evaluating applicants and that all other factors have equal importance. To determine how much of a role GMAT plays in the application process, we decided to do a thorough analysis of GMATClub members who applied to world's top 25 business schools this year.

For our analysis we classified these schools in to 3 categories. In first category we included three most prestigious business schools: Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. In second category we included other super elite Bschools such as Booth, Kellogg, Columbia, etc. Third category consists of rest elite schools of the world.

Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton

These three are most competitive schools. Every year thousands of applicants apply to these schools but only few get admitted. Last year Harvard had received 9543 applications on which only 1053 were admitted; Numbers speak for themselves! These are the most coveted MBA programs on the earth. Since their admission stats are very different than all other top schools, we decided not keep them in a different category.

We surveyed a total of 609 applicants who applied to these programs in Round 1 this year and who reported their GMAT scores on forum. As we can see only a handful of applicants with GMAT below 700 were lucky enough to get admitted in to HSW. Compitition is also extremely fierce among applicants whose GMAT is the range of 700 - 750 inclusive. For applicants with GMAT above 750 there is some ease on GMAT's front and they can work on rest parts of their application. If your GMAT is above 750 (i.e. 99th Percentile) no one will advise you to retake and get a better GMAT score. Any improvement beyond this point won't matter. So it's wise to stop working on GMAT and focus on other parts of the application

Here we can see there are very few applicants in the HSW applicant pool with less than 700 GMAT. So those who are planning to apply HSW with lower GMAT should prepare themselves for tough fight from folks with higher GMAT. Those with very decent profiles can survive and win here.

Other Super Elite Business School

This category comprises 7 other popular Bschools among applicants: Kellogg, Chicago Booth, MIT Sloan, Columbia, Fuqua, ISB, and Berkeley Haas. Here figures are slightly improving for low GMAT applicants. Fuqua (with low GMAT admission rate of 23%), Columbia (15%), Berkeley (12%) are giving some cheer to applicants falling in this score range.

We can't see significant change in the applicant pool of Super Elite Schools and HSW except for proportion of applicants in 99 percentile range is reduced to 10%

Elite Business Schools

This category includes 13 other best MBA programs. The schools in this category are Michigan Ross, INSEAD, Tuck, UCLA, NYU Stern, UVA Darden, Yale SOM, McCombs, UNC Kenan-Flagler, Cornell Johnson, CMU Tepper, London Business School, and Kelley While admission rate for low GMAT applicants at these schools is almost same as it is at super elite schools (which is quite surprising), we can see the admission rates for applicants whose GMAT is above 700 have improved by atleast 5 percentage points.

No surprise that proportion of applicants with low GMAT score is increased in Elite schools.

This chart shows the admission rates by GMAT of all Bschools that we selected for our analysis.

As we can see at all schools, except for Kelley and LBS, applicants with higher GMAT tend to have greater chances of admission.
For 99 percentilers, admission rates at Johnson, Yale, McCombs, Darden, UCLA, and Ross are even greater than 50%. Can we call them GMAT friendly schools?
Admission rates of low GMAT applicants at Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Sloan, Tuck, and Ross are almost equal to zero. Clearly anyone applying at these schools have to have a killer profile and compelling story to tell to adcoms.
We surprised to learn that admission rates of low GMAT applicants is greater than even those of 99 percentilers.
We also noted that LBS, Kelley, Fuqua, and (to some extent) UCLA are giving better chance to low GMAT applicants in comparison with other schools surveyed here.

What We learnt from this survey??

GMAT is the very important component of your application. While other factors i.e. GPA, professional achievements, post MBA goals, essays, recommendations, mutual fit, are also important GMAT score is still the crucial factor.

Aggregate admission rate of low GMAT applicants is 11%. This clearly shows that schools evaluate these applicants very critically. Without a strong application and convincing reasons for the low GMAT score, these applicants are very likely to struggle in getting interview invites from these schools.

We do not claim that the findings of above survey are completely true. We are aware of the limitations of survey sample and self reported data. The objective of this survey is to analyse general admission trend.

If anyone doesn't agree with above findings, we respect their opinions. In fact the whole idea behind this project is to generate thoughtful discussion which will shed light in various components of MBA application process.

burgeoning · Answer

Nice post. Especially interesting is that Kelley has a similar acceptance rate across the "bands" which perhaps indicate they dont care much for the GMAT? Not sure..

However, the data could have had more granularity - it would have been better if the graphs were presented with the 10-point steps that the GMAT has. This is because, with the current buckets, you dont really understand the variance of admission rates with GMAT scores other than see a graph that reinforces that a 750 is better than a 650.

For example, 700 is the 89th percentile, while 750 is the 98th. The band, therefore is fairly arbitrary and there will be many more who scored a 700 than scored 750, hence pulling down the acceptance rate.

Narenn · Answer

Thank you for feedback! The primary reason for keeping broader GMAT range is the limited data sample. For this survey we have chosen only those R1 folks who have reported their GMAT scores and final decisions on forum. While experimenting when we tried to add two new categories for GMAT, 700 - 720 and 730 - 750, we observed that in quite many schools there were very few people reporting GMAT and admission results in 700 - 720 range and as a result we got strange results in some cases. e.g. admission rates of 700-720 applicants too high than other folks, etc.

We are going to do another survey at the end of the current admission cycle. This survey will involve applicants from all rounds and will definitely be more granular.

dentobizz · Answer

Hi Narenn, Thanks for sharing this useful analysis. I wanted to ask whether there was any ranking system used to select top 25 schools or super-elite and elite B-Schools? 
Seems quite odd that schools such as ISB Fuqua are classified as super-elite along with likes of Booth MIT Kellogg whereas schools such as TUCK INSEAD LBS are ranked below in the elite category, contrary to most rankings by Forbes,US News,FT,P&Q etc 
Are the ranks and categories based on applicant pool this year/last year or some other metric?

Narenn · Answer

We decided to categorize these schools as per their popularity on GMAT Club, because , in many cases, multiple ranking publishers rank schools very differently. e.g. Economist ranked Darden 2nd whereas BusinessWeek ranked it 12th. Stanford tops USNews and Forbes rankings but Economist ranked it 11th.

ARINGO · Answer

Great post and very helpful analysis!
There is no doubt that GMAT score is an important factor in MBA admissions, but you can get into top MBA programs with a low GMAT score. Your GMAT score gives schools information about your analytical abilities. In order to gain admittance in spite of a low GMAT score, your application needs to highlight your analytical achievements.
For tips on how to get admitted with low GMAT, please visit: https://aringo.com/top-mba-with-low-gmat/

iVoRy · Answer

Oh well, now I have second thought about retaking my 700 GMAT.

HiLine · Answer

Thanks for the helpful survey summary! Can we get an update now?

HanoiGMATtutor · Answer

Thank you for the wonderful analysis, Narenn. Now that the 2016 admission cycle is over, are you still planning to perform another analysis with admission results from all rounds?

Narenn · Answer

Here is analysis of admission trends observed in round1 of 2017 intake applications.... https://gmatclub.com/forum/r1-admission ... 32055.html

MBAbot · Answer

Hello from the GMAT Club MBAbot!

Thanks to another GMAT Club member, I have just discovered this valuable topic, yet it had no discussion for over a year. I am now bumping it up - doing my job. I think you may find it valuable (esp those replies with Kudos).

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