MBA Admissions Misconception: Average GMAT Score

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Right up front, I have to warn you that this MBA admissions post is meant to be a bit interactive. I’m going to ask you a variety of questions as you read through this and you should be prepared to ‘stop’ to answer them before proceeding on with the article.

The GMAT will ask you to deal with a variety of common math concepts. One of the bread and butter concepts is averages. You’ll see references to the average, you’ll have to use data involving averages and you’ll even have to calculate averages. If you’ve done the proper studying, then you’ll likely answer these questions without too much trouble; you might be surprised by how many people seem to misunderstand what an ‘average GMAT score’ at top business schools actually means.

Average GMAT score

Question 1: You have to explain to a child how to calculate an average. How would you describe the process?

Assuming the child in question isn’t a math prodigy, you would have to come up with an explanation that would be pretty simple. It would likely be something akin to, ‘Add up all of the numbers, then divide by the total number of numbers.” That explanation is just fine; make sure to remember it (you’re going to use it later on in this article).

Question 2: You have a group of three unknown numbers, and the average of those numbers is 10. What could those three numbers be? How many examples can you come up with?

There are a lot of possibilities. You might start with the obvious ones:

10, 10, 10 or 9, 10, 11

But since the sum of the three numbers has to be 30 for the average to come to 10, there are plenty of other options:

1, 2, 27

0, 0, 30

-100, 10, 120

Etc.

So far, the questions have been pretty easy, so let’s see if you can apply these concepts to a real-world scenario.

Question 3: Last year, incoming students at Stanford GSB’s part-time MBA program had an average GMAT score of 730. Does that mean that everyone who received an invitation from the MBA admissions committee to attend one of the top business schools scored 730? If you plan to apply to top business schools this year, does that you mean that you must have received at least the average GMAT score to apply? And by extension, if you do hit the average GMAT score, is that a guarantee that you’ll receive an invite from Stanford or other top business schools?

Hope for MBA admissions

If you answered the first two questions in this post correctly, then you should realize what an average is and what is isn’t. You’ll also know that the answer to all three parts of question 3 is no. Clearly, some of the invitees scored at (or above) a 730, but a significant group of them clearly scored less than 730.

Now, just stop for a minute and think about what you assume about your MBA admissions applications. What GMAT score do you think that you need to apply to the top business schools that interest you? And WHY do you think that? You clearly do not need to score at (or above) the average GMAT score for a particular school to receive an invitation to attend. You need a competitive score, and you need a strong overall profile, but there’s always a range of scores that top business schools will find acceptable. If your score is in that range, then you still have a reasonable chance to receive an invite from the MBA admissions team to your ‘dream’ school.

The very concept behind averages proves it!