SHSAT Cutoff Scores 2026 by School: Official Numbers, Trends and the IQ Question

The lowest qualifying SHSAT score for 2026 admissions ranges from 495 at The Brooklyn Latin School to 561 at Stuyvesant High School, according to the New York City Department of Education's own table. That number is the score of the last student who received an offer, not a pass mark, and it moves every year. Many pages that list SHSAT cutoff scores for 2026 by school quote the wrong table on the same DOE page. This guide gives the official figures for all eight testing schools, the 2024 to 2026 trend, how many students get in, and what the October and November 2026 test changes, and answers the question parents ask about the SHSAT and IQ.

SHSAT cutoff scores for 2026 by school

For 2026 admissions, which means ninth-grade entry in September 2026, the DOE page at schools.nyc.gov lists a "Lowest Qualifying SHSAT Score" for each school. Ranked from highest to lowest:

• 1. Stuyvesant High School: 561
• 2. High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College (HSMSE): 539
• 3. Queens High School for the Sciences at York College: 531
• 4. The Bronx High School of Science: 525
• 5. Staten Island Technical High School: 517
• 6. High School of American Studies at Lehman College: 507
• 7. Brooklyn Technical High School: 506
• 8. The Brooklyn Latin School: 495

The spread from first to last is 66 points. On the live page this first table carries no grade label; we read it as the ninth-grade table because earlier versions of the same page introduce the matching table as the fall admissions cutoffs and label the 10th-grade figures separately. The "2026" in the heading refers to the school year the students enter, not to the test they sat: these students took the SHSAT in fall 2025, and the DOE released results on 5 March 2026. There is no cutoff table yet for the test being taken now, which is for September 2027 entry.

Why SHSAT cutoffs differ by school

The DOE explains the cutoff in plain terms. Offers to the eight testing schools are made in descending order of SHSAT score, combined with each student's ranked list of schools. A student who misses an offer at a first choice, the DOE says, is outranked by students with higher scores for the seats, and the SHSAT is the only criterion used. A school's cutoff is therefore the score of the last student placed there, and the DOE's 2024 page adds that it changes each year "based on students' preferences and SHSAT scores". There are no waitlists. That is why Brooklyn Tech, which is large and has many seats, has a low cutoff, and why it is not a ranking of the schools by quality or by the difficulty of the work. A student who gave Brooklyn Tech a second choice behind Stuyvesant may hold a score well above 506.

SHSAT cutoffs 2024, 2025 and 2026: the trend

The ninth-grade cutoffs are stable. Brooklyn Tech has read 507, 505 and 506 over three years and Stuyvesant 561, 556 and 561. The 2024 and 2025 figures come from earlier copies of the same DOE page. School by school, 2024 then 2025 then 2026:

• Stuyvesant: 561, 556, 561
• HSMSE: 542, 526, 539
• Queens High School for the Sciences: 524, 518, 531
• Bronx Science: 526, 518, 525
• Staten Island Tech: 519, 527, 517
• High School of American Studies: 514, 504, 507
• Brooklyn Tech: 507, 505, 506
• Brooklyn Latin: 492, 496, 495

From 2025 to 2026 the biggest moves were HSMSE and Queens, each up 13 points, and Staten Island Tech, down 10. Stuyvesant rose 5, Bronx Science 7, American Studies 3 and Brooklyn Tech 1, and Brooklyn Latin fell 1. Between 2024 and 2026 no school moved more than 7 points. The DOE's own wording is that students testing for a different year should not use these scores to judge their chances.

The 10th-grade table: why 562, 543 and 652 appear online

Below the main table the DOE page prints a second one, introduced as "the lowest qualifying SHSAT score for 10th grade". It is for students who tested as ninth graders and enter in 10th grade, where seats are scarce. For 2026 it reads Stuyvesant 562, HSMSE 554, Bronx Science 652, American Studies 535, Brooklyn Tech 543, Brooklyn Latin 652, Queens 537 and Staten Island Tech 530. Bronx Science and Brooklyn Latin are both printed as 652 with no explanation, and the 2024 version of this table also had Bronx Science at 650 while its ninth-grade cutoff was 526. We cannot tell whether 652 is a typing error or a real last score among very few places.

Search summaries and test-prep pages often pick up this table and call it the 2026 cutoffs. Doing so overstates Brooklyn Tech by 37 points (543 against 506) and Bronx Science by 127 (652 against 525). Other pages are simply old: one prep page's 2024 column differs from the DOE's 2024 table by 1 to 23 points, with HSMSE at 519 against the official 542, and another quotes a 496 to 556 range that matches the official 2025 table but not 2026. Read the grade label before you copy a number.

How many students get an offer? Test takers and offers

The DOE's spreadsheet for fall 2024 admissions is the last full official file we could read. It shows 25,678 testers and 4,072 offers, 15.86 per cent, or about one offer for every 6.3 testers. The offers by school were Brooklyn Tech 1,422, Stuyvesant 744, Bronx Science 712, Brooklyn Latin 508, Staten Island Tech 294, HSMSE 142, Queens 139 and American Studies 111. Divided by all testers, those are:

• Brooklyn Tech: 5.54 per cent of all test takers
• Stuyvesant: 2.90 per cent (about 1 in 35)
• Bronx Science: 2.77 per cent
• Brooklyn Latin: 1.98 per cent
• Staten Island Tech: 1.14 per cent
• HSMSE: 0.55 per cent; Queens: 0.54 per cent; American Studies: 0.43 per cent

Each student gets at most one offer, so the school shares add up to the 15.86 per cent. For fall 2025 admissions the DOE figures reported by the Queens Chronicle were 25,933 eighth-graders tested and 4,023 offers, 15.51 per cent. For 2026, Chalkbeat reported roughly 26,100 testers, roughly 4,000 offers (about 15.3 per cent), nearly 300 offers at Staten Island Tech and about 800 invitations to the Discovery summer program, and NY1 reported 777 offers at Stuyvesant. An offer count is not an enrolment count. We could not find a DOE per-school file for 2025 or 2026.

SHSAT 2026 test dates and format: the first adaptive SHSAT

The DOE says that beginning in fall 2026 the SHSAT is a computer-adaptive test, built by Pearson under a five-year, $17 million contract reported by Chalkbeat in January 2025; the fall 2025 test was the first to be taken on a computer. Registration closes on 30 October 2026 in MySchools. Eighth graders in public middle schools that end in eighth grade test at their school on Wednesday 18 November. Other eighth graders test at central sites on Saturday 14 or Sunday 15 November, and all registered ninth graders test on Saturday 21 November. Chalkbeat reports that offers will be sent on 4 March 2027.

The test has two sections, English language arts and mathematics, each with 50 questions and a standard 180 minutes in total; English language learners get 360. The DOE adds 10 unscored field-test items per subject, and it does not say whether they sit inside the 50. Students can start with either section and cannot return to one once they submit it. The DOE says performance scores on each subtest become scaled scores, which are added into the composite used to rank students, and that the conversion is consistent with earlier years. It publishes no scaled-score range, no raw-to-scaled table and no percentiles, which is why we cannot give a "good" score. Our note on the digital adaptive SAT explains how adaptive scoring differs from counting right answers.

Is the SHSAT an IQ test? SHSAT score to IQ

No. The DOE describes the SHSAT as an admissions test of school content: English questions aligned to New York's Next Generation standards, and mathematics based on state learning standards through Grade 7 on the eighth-grade forms. We found no DOE or peer-reviewed study linking SHSAT scores to IQ, so there is no conversion and any "SHSAT score to IQ" chart is invented. Our guide to achievement tests versus IQ tests explains the difference. The 15.9 per cent who receive an offer are the top scorers among students who chose to register, many with preparation, not the top 16 per cent of the population, so the figure is not an IQ percentile. Critics say as much: Brooklyn College's David Bloomfield told NY1 that the test "selects for test prep it doesn't select for brightness".

For comparison with other admissions tests, see our guides to the SSAT, the ISEE and the HSPT, and on the gifted side universal screening for gifted programs, the gifted cutoff scores guide and the practice effect. To turn a measured IQ into a percentile, use our IQ percentile calculator.

The bottom line: the 2026 SHSAT cutoffs are 561 at Stuyvesant down to 495 at Brooklyn Latin, they are the last scores that earned a seat rather than a pass mark, and the 652 and 543 you may see belong to a separate 10th-grade table. The test now being taken is adaptive, so use these numbers as history, not a target. If you want to see where a reasoning score falls on the bell curve, take the IQ Metrics IQ test.

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