SHSAT cutoff scores: what they are, and why last year's number is not your target
A cutoff is not a pass mark set in advance. It is the score of the last student who got a seat — a result of that year's applicants, that year's seats and everyone's school preferences. It is worth understanding before you plan around one.
Where the number actually comes from
- 1
Every student who sits the SHSAT gets one composite score, and every student ranks the specialized schools they want in order of preference.
- 2
All test-takers are placed in one list, highest composite first. There is no separate queue per school and no minimum score to qualify.
- 3
The list is walked from the top. Each student is offered the highest school on their own preference list that still has a seat left.
- 4
When a school's seats run out, whatever score the last student to get one happened to have becomes that school's cutoff for that year. Nobody chose it in advance — it fell out of the process.
Four things move it, and none of them is you
How many sat the test
A larger cohort competing for the same seats pushes the last-admitted score up. A smaller one lets it fall.
How many seats there were
Seat counts are set per school and are not fixed forever. More seats, all else equal, means a lower cutoff.
How the year scored
The cutoff describes a position in one year's ranking. A year where more students score highly raises every school's number without any student having got worse.
What everyone put first
Preference order feeds straight into the walk down the list, so a school that becomes fashionable in one admissions cycle can move sharply in that cycle alone.
Where the official figures come from
NYC Public Schools runs the admission, publishes the qualifying scores once a cycle closes, and issues every offer through MySchools. That is the primary source, and it is where the table below comes from. A number that does not trace back to it is somebody's estimate, however confidently it is presented — most of the tables you will find while searching carry no year and no source at all.
Read the year label before you read the numbers
- "2026 Admissions" means the SHSAT sat in Fall 2025, by students who started high school in September 2026. That cycle is finished and these are its final results.
- The exam your child is preparing for — the Fall 2026 sitting — is 2027 Admissions. Its cutoffs do not exist yet, and cannot until that exam is sat and offers are made.
- So the table below is history, not a forecast. It is not a guaranteed score for the next cohort, and nobody — including us — can tell you what that number will be.
- Admission also depends on the order you rank the schools and on how many seats each one has left — a score alone does not decide it.
Lowest qualifying score, 2026 Admissions (8th grade)
| School | Score |
|---|---|
| Stuyvesant High School | 561 |
| High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at CCNY | 539 |
| Queens High School for the Sciences at York College | 531 |
| Bronx High School of Science | 525 |
| Staten Island Technical High School | 517 |
| High School of American Studies at Lehman College | 507 |
| Brooklyn Technical High School | 506 |
| The Brooklyn Latin School | 495 |
Source: NYC Public Schools, checked 2026-08-17 · NYC Public Schools ↗
How to use a cutoff without being misled by it
- Read recent years as a BAND, not a line. Several years of a school's numbers tell you roughly where it sits; one year tells you almost nothing about the next.
- Aim clear of the band, not at it. Landing on last year's exact number is the position where a normal year-to-year shift decides the outcome for you.
- Rank honestly. Because the list is walked in preference order, putting a school you want lower down to be 'safe' costs you the seat you would have been offered above it.
- Treat any estimate — ours included — as a range. A short diagnostic samples a small number of questions, so the honest output is a band with a margin, not a single number.
Turn a practice raw score into an estimated composite →
One more thing worth knowing: the exam format itself changed for Fall 2026, which is a separate matter from cutoffs but affects how you read anything written before it.
The official Fall 2026 SHSAT will be computer-adaptive. SHSATus currently provides fixed-form digital practice based on DOE-published content areas and question types. It does not reproduce the DOE's adaptive item-selection or scoring algorithm.
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