($) Do the schools look at all your scores?

The instructions on the MBA applications around reporting your GMAT or GRE test scores have a surprising amount of variation.

This comes into play especially if you’re sitting on a score for a test that you took nearly five years ago, and you’re trying to determine if it’s still going to be valid when you apply. You probably know that the score expires in five years but what stage do you have to have your app in when that five-year anniversary rolls around? It’s different at different schools.

Another way schools are different from each other is what they want you to report about your test history in the application. Some schools (Yale) want the top two test scores, if you tested more than once, no matter how many times you tested. Other schools (Columbia, Darden) ask you to disclose how many times you tested. One school (Tuck) invites you to share your test results with the two tests you did the best on, and they will consider your top quant and top verbal score, though they don’t combine them to recalculate a new total. (Side note: Combining the two quant and verbal scores for the GRE can be misleading, be careful if you’re doing that in how you’re assessing your profile against the schools’ published class data.)

Those are just examples of how policies differ.

What you probably want to know is, can the schools see your full history of test scores, if you don’t enter those scores in your app?

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What can the schools see about your test history?
 
 

 
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The tests can cause so much stress and anxiety — they cause stress before you take them, because they are stressful, then they often cause stress as applicants feel that their test score will hold them back, and there’s imperfect information about how scores are judged. Our category of blahg posts on GMAT/GRE has a lot of those scenarios covered, and if you have a specific question we can assist with, you can always leave a comment for us and we’ll answer it, or the Private Consult is sometimes a good option for a quick personal one-on-one on targeted issues like this.