Is My GMAT Good Enough, and Other Modern Anxieties

How to Read and Interpret GMAT or GRE scores from MBA Class Profiles and Measure your Odds

#1. Is my GMAT/GRE good enough?

In a way, only those who’ve given the GMAT truly understand the nature of the beast. Those who’ve had to give it twice, for reasons undisclosed, understand this troublesome nature doubly so. And though it might seem like the GMAT is a game with clear winners and losers, there’s an anxiety all candidates share, whether their score stands at a 680 or a 730 – is my score good enough?

And in case you’re wondering exactly how high these cut-offs are, consider the self-reported numbers contained in the Employment Report of a Top-30 B-school: let’s say NYU Stern, to continue with the earlier name-drop. For the 2023 class, Stern’s MBA cohort boasted an average GMAT of 729 *initiate cold sweats*.

Look behind that number though – that 729 average is coming from a large GMAT range, with the absolute minimum GMAT anyone came in with being 620 (and it’s hard to say how many were admitted at that score), and the highest GMAT being 770. Stern, being a good transparent school, also shares the Middle-80 of the distribution of GMAT scores it receives – reporting it as 700-760. This means that about 10% of the 360 enrollments, or 36 candidates, were successfully admitted with a score below 700. There’s roughly an equal number applying with scores between 760 and 770.

We can also tell a fair bit about the variance or standard deviation of the distribution of GMAT scores by looking at the median, range and class size (Hozo, S.P., Djulbegovic, B. & Hozo, I. Estimating the mean and variance from the median, range, and the size of a sample. BMC Med Res Methodol 5, 13 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-5-13). With Stern’s class profile, we can estimate the standard deviation or dispersion of the GMAT scores as 25 points {Range/6 (sample size, n > 70)}. Applying with a score of 710 puts you within one standard deviation of the mean, which is a fair shot – it’s not, on its own, going to put you out of the running.

Applying with a score of 680, 49 points or nearly 2 standard deviations below the average GMAT, is where it gets really rough. Remember, there’s only 36 people with a GMAT lower than 700 at Stern. At a school with a broader GMAT range, the permissible deviations can be wider – at HBS, with a 730 GMAT average for the 2023 cohort, the standard deviation is about 35 – even a 690 may be considered close enough to pass through the filter.  

So the essential rule-of-thumb to decide if your GMAT/GRE is good enough is to see if you’re within one standard deviation of the median score at your target school. If you’re two standard deviations above the benchmark, you’re golden; but two sigmas below the median or mean GMAT/GRE probably means that it’s better to set your sights on another school, or to ensure that there are other aspects of your application that can balance out the lower GMAT score.

Safety Range: Your GMAT/GRE is two or more Standard Deviations above the School’s Median or Mean GMAT/GRE score

Target Range: Your GMAT/GRE is within 1 Standard Deviation of the School’s Median or Mean GMAT/GRE score  (above or below)

Aspirational or Stretch Range: Your GMAT/GRE is more than 1 Standard Deviation below the School’s Median or Mean GMAT/GRE score

Rule #1: Your GMAT is probably good enough; see above

#2 Do I have the right background?

Another common concern for many MBA aspirants is whether they are going into the contest with a fair chance in terms of their undergraduate and professional backgrounds. The right background can mean: having an undergraduate degree in the ‘right’ academic domain, or it could mean having spent a few years gaining work experience in the ‘right’ industry. Instead of gnashing teeth and pulling hair over subjective or anecdotal information about what ‘right’ means in these two contexts, let’s look once more to the Employment Reports and Class Profiles.

For instance, looking at HEC Paris’ 2022 cohort, its 285 graduates came from 55 nations, and the three most popular pre-MBA industries they came from were: Financial Services (16%), Utilities (12%), and Consulting (12%). In other words, 2 in every 5 seats at HEC Paris in 2022 went to people from one of these three industries. Given HEC’s more diverse class profile, that leaves 3 in 5 positions open to people from other backgrounds and sectors.

In contrast, Kellogg’s 500-strong 2021 MBA cohort saw Financial Services (29%), Consulting (28%), and Technology (12%) as the most typical pre-MBA industries, with the top-3 sectors accounting for a much larger share here (69%) than at HEC Paris (40%). At Kellogg, therefore, it’s much better to go with a more traditional profile – there’s simply less room for diversity in terms of pre-MBA industry.  

Another example that what’s ‘right’ has to be figured out independently for every school you want to apply to – At Kellogg, accounting for those with a double major, people with undergraduate degrees in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) and Business and Economics accounted for a whopping 84% of the cohort. How much room does that leave for those with backgrounds in Journalism, Art and Film, Literature and Critical Theory, Psychology, Architecture or Video-game Design?

Not much.

But look at Fuqua in North Carolina’s upstart ‘Research Triangle’ – here, the top-3 pre-MBA industries – Financial Services (14%), Consulting (13%), and Healthcare (8%) account for only 35% of the incoming cohort’s skill-set and background, leaving a long-tail that’s populated by niche sectors including Environment & Sustainability (1%), Media & Sports Entertainment (1%), and International Development (1%).

With a class size of some 450 graduates, Fuqua therefore accepts far more diverse profiles than a more orthodox school such as Kellogg with a similar class size. So, next time you’re wondering whether your academic or professional background is a good fit for the Business School you’re targeting, remember the second golden rule:

Rule #2: The MBA Goldilocks Maxim: It’s not about having the right profile, it’s about finding the right fit      

 #3 Should I worry about my undergraduate GPA?

Short Answer?

– No.

Long Answer:

Your undergraduate GPA is too much a matter of a long foregone and hoary past for it to influence your MBA admission.

Ultimately, while it is a relatively objective quantitative indicator of certain intellectual and scholastic capabilities, your undergraduate GPA is simply too distant an example of your reasoning capabilities to impress someone too much. The typical reader would be far more interested in seeing how your college-era intellect has fared dealing with open-ended problems in the under-resourced real world.

So, if you have already spent three or more years in the workforce (MBA applicants typically have an average of 5 years of work experience), it’s a much better idea to rely on professional accomplishments to signal intellectual and managerial competence. How does it matter if your undergrad GPA was low, if you can evidence extraordinary career growth in a challenging and rigorous industry like data engineering, or financial analytics? Everyone knows Bill Gates flunked high school math, right? Right.

Companies, at least some in positions of leadership and influence, are also clued-in on this fact. In a New York times interview, circa 2013, with Google’s then Senior Vice President for people operations, Laszlo Bock, admitted that:

“One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything …

After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.”

In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal, The New York Times, 2013

What Laszlo said in 2013 (a thousand years ago in technologyland) should let you know that your future employers really couldn’t care less about your GPA – unless you’re at the very early stages of your career. For an MBA program where the typical applicant is well over 25, a low GPA therefore really shouldn’t be a cause for alarm.  

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t point out the three reasons I think Business Schools persist in asking – and seemingly caring – about your undergraduate GPA.

Firstly, with a bit of massaging, undergraduate GPAs from different global institutions across academic domains can be broadly brought into line with each other, so a global comparison is possible. Of course, a 3.8 GPA from an Ivy-league undergrad major is likely weighed differently than a 3.8 GPA from a no-name university in India/Ghana/Slovenia/Insert Country, but a rough comparison is possible. Along with the GMAT/GRE, and years of work experience, this is about the extent of directly objective KPIs that a B-school adcom has to go on.

Secondly, when B-schools are ranked by those who rank, the undergraduate GPA of the incoming cohort is used as a benchmark for ranking. Schools at the very top of international rankings, where competition is razor sharp, probably do zealously guard their (very high) average GPAs. GPA is probably also high on the agenda for nearly-there schools who are hoping to break into the Top-20 or Top-15, and figure here’s a lever they can pull to move up a rung or two.

Thirdly, GPAs can possibly be used as tie-breakers in the event a school has more than one viable candidate with a similar profile that the school is looking to a fill an open role in the cohort. However, I’ve always felt that such situations must be unlikely, because I imagine that an adcom would find more significant differences between two profiles, even those with the exact same GMAT/GRE, years of work experience, GPA – qualitative differences I mean, such as the purpose, values or vision driving the particular profile.     

Even so, you must ultimately recognize that one profile with a lower GPA doesn’t make a dent in the average at schools with hundreds of graduates. Which is to say: if a school loves your profile and your story, and wants to have you on-board, accepting a lower-than-median GPA is quite literally no skin off their bones – it barely registers as a blip on their radar.  

Thirty candidates like that – no way! But a handful of select people who have demonstrated logical ability through real-world accomplishments – there’s likely room enough for you.

Rule #3: For people with a strong overall profile, a low undergraduate GPA is rarely a significant bottleneck – and therefore, little cause for concern

Related Articles