About GMAT Exam Scores
Updated for the new GMAT in 2024
After your GMAT exam, you’ll receive an official score report with a bunch of charts and graphs telling you what happened on your test. Some of that information is very useful, but some parts don’t offer you many useful insights.
See below for more information on how to analyze the most useful pieces of the GMAT score report.
What is the GMAT score report?
You’ll receive your unofficial GMAT score immediately after taking your test, but it usually takes a few days for your official score, along with your detailed score report, to hit your account on MBA.com.
The detailed version of the GMAT score report provides additional information and statistics about your test performance. You’ll be able to see exactly which questions you got right and wrong, how long you spent on each question, and how many questions you reviewed at the end of your test.
Some of this information is presented in ways that might not feel 100% intuitive, but years of analyzing our students’ tests have given us some useful guidelines for helping you understand your GMAT score report.
LOOK FOR BAD STARTS AND FINISHES ON YOUR GMAT SCORE REPORT
The first step in analyzing your GMAT score report is to check for bad starts and bad finishes. The “Question Performance and Time Management” section can show whether you missed a disproportionate number of questions in the first or last part of a GMAT quant, verbal, or Data Insights exam section.
Here, have an example:
In this example, the test-taker struggled enormously at the beginning of the test section, missing 5 of the first 8 questions and blowing roughly 24 minutes – more than half of her total time for the section – in the process.
If you see this sort of thing on your GMAT score report, it might be a sign that you’d benefit from doing a few warm-up problems before your next attempt. It can also be a telltale sign of test-day nerves. If you suspect that jitters played a role in your performance, you might want to check out this beginner’s guide to GMAT test anxiety, this series of videos on test anxiety, or this quiz to help you understand the factors that contribute to test anxiety.
Similarly, some test-takers miss a disproportionate number of questions at the end of a GMAT exam section. If this is the case for you, it’s possible that anxiety is partly to blame, since it’s common to feel some extra pressure as the clock starts to wind down. A bad finish can also be a sign that you lack stamina, and perhaps you would benefit from studying in a way that builds your endurance; rearranging the order of your GMAT test sections might also help.
INCONSISTENT TIMING ON YOUR GMAT SCORE REPORT
After checking for bad starts and bad finishes, the same “Question Performance and Time Management” section of your GMAT score report can tell you whether you managed your time well for the duration of the exam.
If your average time per response gets shorter as you move through the section, you probably spent too much time on early questions.
In this example, the test-taker spent nearly 20 minutes – almost 45% of her total time for the section – on just three questions. Sure, she answered them correctly, but that was a pyrrhic victory: because so much time had elapsed, the test-taker scrambled through the last chunk of the section, and missed seven of the final eight questions.
That tradeoff simply isn’t worth it. No individual test question is worth spending THAT much of your time – and if you see this sort of pattern on your score report, you’ll need to become better at letting go of questions that give you trouble.
For more, check outthis video on how to manage your time on the GMAT.
OMITTING QUESTIONS ON THE GMAT
This test-taker didn’t answer the final question on the Data Insights section:
The current version of the GMAT punishes you very harshly for leaving questions blank. If you see omitted questions in your score report, remember to answer EVERY question on your next attempt – even if you’re just guessing randomly at the end. You’re much better off choosing a wrong answer than suffering through the severe score penalty for leaving a question blank.
TIME SPENT ON GMAT QUESTIONS ANSWERED INCORRECTLY
The next thing to look for in your GMAT score report is the time you spent on questions that you ended up answering incorrectly.
Suppose that you spent far too much time on a question you ended up getting wrong anyway. This could indicate that you got stubborn on that tough question, even though that time would have been much better spent on other questions.
If this is the case, then you’ll want to practice letting go of tough questions as soon as you realize that you don’t have a clear solution path – before you waste too much time chasing a question that you’re unlikely to ever catch.
What if you got a question wrong really quickly? This could mean two things. Perhaps you bailed out early on a question that was clearly too hard for you – if that’s the case, great job!
On the other hand, maybe you hurried through an easy question and made a silly mistake. If that’s what happened, then you need to practice slowing down and checking your work on easy questions. (This video will help you learn how to avoid careless mistakes on GMAT quant.)
If you had timing issues on your GMAT exam, you probably already knew it. But your GMAT score report can confirm your hypothesis and deepen your understanding of where things went wrong with your timing.
PERFORMANCE BY GMAT QUESTION TYPE
Another thing to look for when analyzing your GMAT score report is whether you encounter particular difficulty with certain question types.
It can be remarkably easy to overreact to this data. If your performance by percentile shows only minor differences by GMAT question type, then you can probably ignore it, mostly because the data on individual question types is derived from just a few questions (we’ll say more about that below). But if you’re seeing truly HUGE differences in your performance by question type – such as an outsized gap between your CR and RC performance on verbal – it can potentially help guide your GMAT studies.
GMAT QUESTION REVIEW AND EDIT SUMMARY
This section tells you how much time you spent reviewing questions, how many answers you changed, and the result of those changes.
In this section, you’re primarily looking for any unusual patterns. Did you spend a ton of time reviewing questions? If so, that time might be better spent on carefully answering questions on your first pass through the section. Did you change answers from correct to incorrect? That could indicate that you’re second-guessing yourself in a way that isn’t terribly helpful.
HOW THE GMAT SCORE REPORT IS NOT USEFUL
While your GMAT score report can show you some valuable things about your performance, it can’t show you everything.
For starters, the GMAT score report does NOT show you any actual GMAT questions. Sorry for the bad news.
Also, the “Performance by Fundamental Skills” section can be particularly dubious. The sample size is so small that any conclusions that could be drawn would be questionable.
For example, GMAT quant questions are divided into four “fundamental skills” areas on the score report -- so it’s possible that the data is based on as few as three or four questions. So please take that information with a grain of salt, and don’t overreact to modest differences in your performance in these categories.
Beyond that, the GMAT score report offers little guidance about what, exactly, the “fundamental skills” mean. For instance, the GMAT score report lists “Analysis/Critique” as one of the four fundamental Critical Reasoning skills – but pretty much every CR question requires analysis, so it’s a bit strange to say only a quarter of the questions fall under this domain, and it’s hard to know what to do with this information.
Finally, while the GMAT score report may give you some insight into the types of GMAT questions you missed, it rarely gives you information on why you missed those questions. For example, the GMAT score report may show that you had a bad start on quant, but unless you remember specifically what happened, those that issue could have been caused by any number of factors: you may have been stubborn, test anxiety may have set in, or perhaps your mind was still stuck on the section that you completed before quant.