After receiving your Official Score Report, you may be tempted to focus on your Total Score. However, with GMAT™ Focus Edition's new score scale, it will be just as important to review your percentile ranking as you look to understand your results.
Rest assured: Schools have been provided with the necessary tools, training, and resources to compare performance across the two different versions of the exam.
Percentile rankings indicate what percentage of test takers you performed better than. For example, a percentile ranking of 75% means that you performed better than 75% of other test takers, and 25% of test takers performed better than you.
For the GMAT™ Focus Edition, because the Total Score scale AND the score scale distribution have both changed, comparing total scores or section scores from a previous version of the exam to the GMAT™ Focus Edition is not appropriate, accurate, or a meaningful comparison of performance.
If your competitiveness based on the GMAT™ Exam - Focus Edition needs to be compared to the previous version of the GMAT™ Exam, it’s more appropriate to compare percentile rankings rather than comparing total scores.
Watch the video to learn more about scores and percentiles.
Interpreting Your Percentile Ranking
Total Score Percentile
Your GMAT™ Focus Edition Total Score is composed of the Quantitative Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, and Data Insights sections of the exam. The contribution of each section score to Total Score is equally weighted across sections. Total Scores for the GMAT™ Exam - Focus Edition range from 205 to 805.
The GMAT™ Focus Edition’s Total Score ranges from 205 to 805, while the GMAT™ Exam has a Total Score range of 200-800. Because the exam scores are not on a common scale, GMAT™ Focus Edition scores cannot be compared to scores from the previous version of the exam. While scores of 600 and 605 may look similar, they represent very different performance levels on different skills.
If you are trying to understand your relative competitiveness, you can use the concordance tables below to show score distributions between the two versions of the exam by percentile.