GMAT Strategy

Everyone seems to be posting their GMAT score on their stats but rarely does anyone post the percentile.

Obviously we all hope for 700+ but given tests vary what is more important, the score or the percentile?

For example, I scored a 680 - so close to 700 I could taste it - but I was in the 85th percentile... in reading another thread on BTGMAT I saw that someone scored a 710 in the 80th percentile.

Can anyone clarify what the adcoms are looking for and how candidacy is affected by getting a sub-700 score but a higher percentile ranking than someone who breaks 700?

Cheers and good luck to all!

Hey Pete,

On the official GMAT, the score and percentiles will move in lockstep, so you won't be able to separate one from the other. "Percentile" just means "percentage of people who scored lower", so if your 680 is the 85th percentile, that means that 85% of test-takers score below 680.

The percentiles may shift a bit over time (for example, back in around 2000 even a 720 or 730 could still qualify as 99th percentile, but since then closer to 5-6% of people now score 720-plus), but those shifts are pretty gradual so it's going to be negligible in your application.

So for your 680/85th, if that was on an official test, within the next year or two you may find that a 680 score drops to as low as 83rd percentile or as high as 86th, but it's such a small tweak that it's pretty unlikely that a school will care. You've put yourself in that "top 15-or-so-percent" of GMAT takers, and that's what they'll see you as.


Where reported scores in these forums may differ like you saw is either from practice tests (which may draw percentile information from an old database that hasn't been updated) or from long-ago tests. But if you scored 680 recently and it was 85h percentile, a 710 isn't going to be a 80th percentile anytime soon and probably wasn't at any point recently.

Thanks for the quick response, Brian!

What you say makes sense but check this out:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/2010-where-a ... 1-105.html

You can view what I was referencing by searching the page for "percentile" but here's the quote:

"I also just took my GMAT again and got my 690 up to 710 - same V score but upped my quant a few points. Still below the 80th percentile but I'm not complaining (Q44 V42)."

This was posted July 2009. Any further thoughts or is there some kind of mistake here?

Thanks again!

To be honest, people hype up their scores all the time. How do you know he wasn't adding a little fluff to his score?

There's a decent chance he's talking about his quant score not being quite 80th percentile - I guess it's not a classic Sentence Correction pronoun reference problem because there's not a pronoun, but by saying "still below the 80th percentile" when there are three percentiles given with your score (verbal, quant, and overall), there's a pretty fair chance that that's the case.

Just the definition of percentile ensures that score and percentile will move closely together unless enough time has passed that the pool of data has significantly shifted. If you had a 680 from within the last 6 months and retake the test in the next 6 months and score 700, I guarantee that your percentile (overall) will not go down.