SHSAT Cutoff Scores by Year, 2020–2026
Estimated cutoff scores and official admissions data for all eight NYC specialized high schools, from the 2020 cycle through 2026. See how selectivity has shifted, how many students tested, and where the offers went.
The NYC DOE does not publish official SHSAT cutoff scores. The cutoff figures below are community estimates of the lowest score that earned an offer each year — useful for context, but not official and not a prediction.
Estimated cutoff scores by year
Each cell is the estimated lowest score that earned an offer to that school that year, out of a maximum of 700. Schools are ordered most to least selective. Tap a year below for the full breakdown, including official offer counts.
| School | 2026 | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stuyvesant | 561 | 556 | 561 | 561 | 563 | 559 | 566 |
| HSMSE @ CCNY | 539 | 526 | 542 | 518 | 532 | 515 | 522 |
| Queens Science @ York | 531 | 518 | 524 | 527 | 523 | 515 | 522 |
| Bronx Science | 525 | 518 | 526 | 521 | 524 | 517 | 531 |
| Staten Island Tech | 517 | 527 | 519 | 521 | 527 | 525 | 529 |
| HSAS @ Lehman | 507 | 504 | 514 | 510 | 516 | 502 | 517 |
| Brooklyn Tech | 506 | 505 | 507 | 503 | 506 | 493 | 507 |
| Brooklyn Latin | 495 | 496 | 492 | 493 | 497 | 481 | 494 |
What the admissions data shows
- Offers are concentrated. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech together accounted for about 72.6% of all offers in 2026 — Brooklyn Tech alone made roughly 34.9% (1,403 offers), more than any other school.
- Most testers don't get an offer. Across 2020–2026, roughly 15–18% of students who sat the SHSAT received an offer to any of the eight schools.
- Applicant numbers have softened. The testing pool peaked near 27,831 students (2021 cycle) and has run closer to 25,933 more recently.
- Offers skew heavily by race. In 2026, Asian students received about 53.5% of offers and White students about 25.9%, while Black and Latino students together received roughly 9.9% — a long-running disparity that has driven much of the debate over the exam.
- The Discovery program is a second path. About 785 students entered through Discovery in the 2026 cycle — a summer program offering seats to qualifying students who scored just below the cutoff.
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Frequently asked questions
- Does the NYC DOE publish official SHSAT cutoff scores?
- No. The Department of Education has never released official per-school cutoff scores. Every cutoff figure you see online — including on this page — is a community estimate of the lowest score that earned an offer that year, inferred from the DOE's published offer counts and students' reported scores. The DOE does publish official offer and applicant data, which is what the offer figures here are drawn from.
- What was the highest SHSAT cutoff score?
- Stuyvesant is consistently the most selective specialized high school. Its estimated cutoff for 2026 was about 561 out of a maximum of 700, and it has ranged from roughly 556 to 566 across 2020–2026.
- How many students get into a specialized high school?
- For the 2026 cycle, 25,933 students took the SHSAT and 4,023 received an offer to one of the eight testing schools — an overall offer rate of about 15.5%.
- Why do cutoff scores change every year?
- There is no fixed passing score. Each school's cutoff is simply the lowest score among the students offered a seat there, which depends on how many seats are available, how many students applied, how they ranked the schools, and how that year's test was scored. So the same score can earn an offer one year and miss the next.