2024 OMBA RANKING: Average GMAT, GRE, GPAs & Work Experience For The Top Online MBA Programs

University of Texas at Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management was the only school in our online MBA ranking where more than 50% of students submitted test scores for admission. Courtesy photo

For top full-time, residential MBA programs, a strong test score is often still a marker of a strong application. That’s not the case for many online MBAs.

Online programs more and more offer generous test waivers, allowing students to forgo the GMAT or GRE in lieu of work experience or strong academic credentials – a trend that only accelerated during and after the pandemic. Many programs that do require an entrance exam score have lower thresholds for admission than their in-person counterparts.

In Poets&Quants’ seventh annual ranking of the best OMBAs, just one of 51 programs accepted GMAT or GRE scores from more than 50% of enrolled students: University of Texas at Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management, ranked No 3 overall. There, 33% of students submitted GMAT scores with an average of 635; 27% of students submitted GRE scores with an average of 314.

The next closest school was University of Washington Foster School of Business where 40% of students reported test scores, 21% reporting GMAT (average 620) and 19% reporting GRE (average 315).

In last year’s ranking, none of the then 50 ranked programs accepted test scores from at least half of their enrolled students. In the previous year’s ranking, five schools did.

HOW GMAT FIGURES IN OUR OMBA RANKING

Test scores do not play a major part in our methodology, but we do consider an adjusted GMAT score as part of the overall admission score which also includes the metrics of admission rate, undergraduate GPA, and years of work experience. The admission score accounts for 33% of the final score in our ranking.

Two years ago, we reduced the weight of the average adjusted GMAT score from 50% of the total admissions score down to 20%. Several schools have introduced generous test waivers for work experience and other attributes, and others have gone completely test optional. In fact, this year, 27 of 51 ranked schools did not report any GMAT scores at all. However, we still consider GMAT a robust measure of admission standards and so our methodology rewards schools that report GMAT stats.

To calculate our adjusted GMAT average, we multiply the school’s average GMAT score with the percentage of students who reported GMAT scores plus the percentage of students who had the test waived because of 10 or more years of work experience.

FEWER SCHOOLS REQUIRING TEST SCORES

There’s just no denying that test scores, particularly the GMAT, play less of a role in online MBA admissions than they used to. Just 4 of 51 schools had at least 10% of students who reported GMAT scores in the 2024 ranking, compared to 14 of 50 schools for 2023 and 13 of 52 schools for 2022.

It was similar for GRE scores. Just 4 of 51 schools reported GRE scores from at least 10% of students. That compares to 7 of 50 schools for the 2023 ranking and 8 of 52 for the 2022 ranking.

In the 2021 ranking – for which data was collected in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic – 17 of 47 schools had 10% GMAT reporting and 18 of 47 had the same amount in GRE reporting.

With fewer schools reporting, it makes it harder for meaningful comparisons. The chart below shows schools in our latest ranking with the highest combined percentage of students who reported either a GMAT or GRE score as part of their admission application.

Continue to the next page to see all the average reported GMAT & GRE scores at the ranked online MBA programs.

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PAGE 2: All average reported GMAT & GRE scores at all our ranked schools
PAGE 3: Undergraduate GPA scores
PAGE 4: Average years of work experience