Stern: How Important is the GMAT vs. GPA

I posted an updated analysis of Stern Acceptance rate for GPA vs. GMAT on this page.

NYU is currently ranked 10th by US News and World Report for full-time MBA programs and is tied for the 3rd highest average GMAT score. I expected to see Stern prefer GMAT over GPA, but that is not what I found.

Stern NYU GMAT GPA Admissions MBA Business School

It turns out that Stern has by far the smallest slope of any of the other schools I have looked at so far. The .0043 slope means that Stern would view a candidate with a 800 GMAT and 3.00 GPA similarly to one with a 700 GMAT and 3.43 GPA.

Other Schools:

Sloan

Wharton

Tuck

Columbia Business School

Methodology: The scatterplot represents the 50% of applicants who are accepted with the lowest GMAT and GPA. It isn’t helpful to look at the top 50% of applicants because those are not the marginal candidates who barely got in. I occasionally will remove very low outliers because those candidates may have been admitted due to very strong connections that most applicants don’t have. I never remove more than 5% of the total accepted students as outliers. The slope of the scatterplot demonstrates the point at which the school is indifferent to GMAT vs. GPA.

This entry was first published on February 6, 2014. It was last updated April 20, 2026 by Data Guru.