By virtue of being a standardized test for aspiring business school students, GMAT is widely considered to be a means of assessing the students’ knowledge and skills; still, it is as much a way of evaluating the business school quality and effort
According to recent research (by Poets and Quants), the increasing GMAT scores of business school students show that the university is becoming popular among the brightest applicants. A decrease, however, would show that the school is not trying to make its program more interesting for prospective students.
The research was based on a five years worth of GMAT results collected from top fifty American business schools. It’s not always easy to spot the program’s trend over less than 5 years; still, the general result of the research proved that the best US business schools are fighting for popularity among students. For instance, Harvard Business School has seen an 8 point increase in its students’ GMAT scores. Among the top business schools, the highest average GMAT result is 732 for Stanford and 723 for Chicago Booth. There was only one top university that has shown a decrease due to California’s cutting back on school financing: Berkeley Haas School of Business. This drop is not ascribed to the school’s failure to get students interested, but rather to a lack of funding.
In 2010 and 2011, the scores for Berkeley Haas and UCLAs Anderson School have dropped significantly, but afterwards have remained quite stable. It shows that, despite the difficult economic situation in the state, the schools still uphold their reputation.
Many other schools did not manage to show such good results. For instance, schools like the University of Washington’s Foster have seen a drastic decline in their students’ average GMAT result. The same picture is observed for Yale and Cornell schools.
The overall changes in students’ GMAT points are shown in the tables below.
According to the research mentioned above, decreasing average GMAT score shows that the school is not trying hard enough to attract the best students, instead resting on its acquired popularity.
The results are not always conclusive: it’s difficult to say for sure that, if a business school like Berkeley Haas has dropping scores, its curriculum or program in general became worse over time. Still, when choosing what business school to apply to, the students’ average GMAT scores are a factor one must take into consideration.
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