The Old GMAT Is Fading Away. Here’s What Top MBA Scores Look Like Now At 50 Top U.S Programs

Though Legacy GMAT scores remain valid through 2028, the transition to the shorter, redesigned GMAT is well underway.

For the Class of 2027, students submitting the new GMAT Focus outnumbered those submitting the old version (officially the 10th Edition) at 45 of 47 top-ranked U.S. business schools with comparable data. A year earlier, the Legacy exam still dominated at 44 of 45.

Take Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management where the share of the entering class submitting the new GMAT jumped from just 3% in 2024 to 46% in 2025, a 43-point increase. It jumped 35 points at Chicago Booth, from 4% to 39%.

The table compares 2024 and 2025 submission rates for the redesigned and Legacy GMAT at leading U.S. MBA programs, based on schools ranked among the top programs in Poets&Quants’ 2026 U.S. MBA ranking. It shows how quickly the balance shifted toward the new exam across many of the country’s most selective business schools.

That means MBA classes enrolling this fall can include students who submitted either version, or even the GRE at an increasing number of top schools. And because the two exams use different scoring scales, a 730 on the old GMAT cannot be compared directly with, say, a 675 on the new one.

The result is that the clean, year-over-year GMAT comparisons of the past are giving way to a transition period in which applicants — and rankings watchers — have to pay much closer attention to exactly which test a school is reporting.

COLUMBIA POSTS THE HIGHEST REPORTED NEW GMAT AVERAGE

Columbia Business School posted the highest average score for the new GMAT Focus for the Class of 2027 with a 690. Stanford Graduate School of Business was just behind at 689, followed by Northwestern Kellogg at 687.

Michigan Ross was the only other school in this group above 680.

But, not every elite business school reported a new-GMAT average. Harvard Business School, for example, reported a median rather than an average. Its 685 median was tied with Kellogg for the highest reported median among the schools in this group, ahead of Booth and Tuck at 675 and Darden at 655.

Poets&Quants compiled data from business schools’ official MBA Class of 2027 profile pages and reported to U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 ranking of the best business schools in the U.S.

MAKING THE NUMBERS MAKE SENSE

Tracking GMAT trends at the top business schools used to be fairly straightforward. Compare this year’s average with last year’s, then look back three, five or even 10 years to see which programs were gaining ground.

That’s no longer the case. Some schools report averages, others medians. Some report the full range of scores for admitted students, others a range for the middle 80%. Some report new scores, others still report the old.

That makes the numbers far more complicated for MBA hopefuls trying to gauge their chances at target schools.

Start with the scoring scales. The averages now appearing on class profiles can look substantially lower than the 700-plus numbers applicants have associated with elite MBA programs for years. That doesn’t mean admissions standards suddenly plunged. Columbia Business School, for example, posted a 690 average on the new GMAT compared with a 734 average among students submitting the 10th Edition. Stanford reported 689 versus 738. Those are scores from different exams and different scales. Putting them side by side without that context can be misleading.

For applicants, it also creates more strategic choices. Someone sitting on a strong 700-plus Legacy GMAT may have little reason to test again while that score remains valid. Someone whose old score falls below the historical range at a target school, however, can take the redesigned GMAT and compete on its new scale, switch to the GRE, or retake the new GMAT and potentially benefit from GMAC’s new GMAT Superscore, which combines a candidate’s best section performances across multiple attempts.

And the GRE is increasingly a real alternative. Across 26 leading U.S. MBA programs analyzed by Poets&Quants, 35.8% of the Class of 2027 submitted GRE scores, up from 32.9% a year earlier and 31.7% two years ago. At 10 of those schools, at least 40% of the class submitted a GRE, including 56% at UC-Berkeley Haas, 54% at Dartmouth Tuck and 48% at Duke Fuqua.

Click through the following pages for GMAT submission rates, averages, medians and score ranges at 50 top U.S. MBA programs for both the redesigned and Legacy GMAT, along with historical Legacy GMAT data.

NEXT PAGE: GMAT Focus submission rate, average, median and ranges at the 50 top U.S. MBA programs.

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