GMAT & MBA Admissions Blog

Now that the calendar has turned to 2018, millions of folks have set (and are hopefully still following!) their New Year’s resolutions. For most, these involve some measure of personal improvement – eat healthier, exercise more, boost savings, or maybe improve career prospects. Many looking to further their career will potentially consider building upon their scholastic resume with an MBA. Of course, one of the early steps on the road to an MBA is taking the GMAT and getting a score that will be enticing for your target schools, but with so much to do it can be challenging to decide how to start.

This summer at mba.com, the GMAC released new raw scores to percentile guidance based on nearly 800,000 tests administered from 2014-2017. In the newly released time-period, the average overall score out of 800 has risen by more than 4 points to slightly above 556 from just below 552 for the previous period of 2013-2015. Interestingly, this increase can be almost entirely attributed to improvements in the Quantitative section. For the reporting period ending in 2015, the average GMAT Quantitative raw score was 38.91. In this newly reported data, that score has risen by almost a full ½ point to 39.4. Concurrently, the GMAT Verbal average score improved, too, but only at a factor of about one-tenth that of the quantitative improvement – from 26.8 to 26.86.