Does a GMAT score of 750 increase your chances of admission more than a score of 700?

Most students think that a GMAT score of 700 is the magic number for acceptance into a top-ranked business school. Many applicants aren’t comfortable until they have that magical “7” in the hundreds digit of their score. However, you may be wondering if an even higher score - a 99^th percentile score - will differentiate you from the other applicants to top MBA programs. Increasing your score from a 700 (94^th percentile) to a 750 (99^th percentile) may require a great deal of additional study at a time when you are swamped with essays and applications, and you may wonder if it’s worth it.

To answer this question, I used data published by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In 2009, Kellogg had a total of 5,795 applicants, and 689 students enrolled. That’s an 11.8% enrollment rate.

Now here’s a key point: the enrollment rate differs from the acceptance rate. Not every student will accept an offer, so adcoms have to admit more students than will actually enroll. These two figures are related by what is called the yield – the percentage of students that accept their offer. The most recent data I could find for Kellogg indicates their yield is 57%. This means that 1,208 students were actually given offers in 2009, an acceptance rate of 20.8%.

Kellogg is kind enough to give us the GMAT score distribution of their applicants, as well as the distribution of the students who actually enrolled:

Score	Up to 640	650-690	700-740	750-800
Total Applicants	14%	24%	45%	16%
Enrolled Students	8%	24%	46%	22%

With a few more calculations, I used this data to back out the chance of acceptance at each GMAT score level. I will spare you the math, but here are the results:

Score	Up to 640	650-690	700-740	750-800
Total Applicants	811	1391	2608	927
Enrolled Students	55	165	317	152
Offers Made	97	290	556	266
Acceptance Rate	12%	21%	21%	29%

The data in this second table indicates that you have a 29% chance of admission with a 750+ score, as compared to a 21% chance of admission with a 700-740 score. So there does appear to be a small but legitimate advantage. However, here’s the kicker: this table assumes a flat 57% yield across all GMAT score levels. This may not be an accurate assumption. The adcom at Kellogg knows that if they extend an offer to a <640 scorer, that applicant is much more likely to accept than a 750+ scorer.

In other words, the yield for <640 scorers is much higher than the yield for 750+ scorers. A 750+ scorer will likely be weighing admissions offers from a number of different schools, whereas a <640 scorer has a very high chance of accepting the offer to Northwestern. As a rough guess, the yields may look something like this:

<640: 80% likely to accept

650-690: 60% likely to accept

700-740: 50% likely to accept

750-800: 30% likely to accept

This means that the advantage of scoring 750+ is probably even higher than indicated in the second table.

Of course, the GMAT is but one part of your overall application. The important question for an MBA applicant is: is it worth it spending the extra time to reach a 750+ score, or spending that time on the other parts of your application? To be continued…

I'm a GMAT Tutor based in Los Angeles, CA and the author of the DVD Advanced Tips for Data Sufficiency Success. Contact me for in-person GMAT tutoring in Los Angeles or online GMAT tutoring worldwide. I can be reached at support@thegmattutor.com or through www.thegmattutor.com.