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Stuyvesant High School
The highest cutoff of the eight, and the deepest math and science bench.
Where it is
Battery Park City, Lower Manhattan — a purpose-built ten-storey building on the Hudson, its home since 1992.
How big it is
About 3,300 students. Big enough for an enormous course catalogue and club list; big enough, too, that nobody chases you — initiative is assumed.
Stuyvesant is the school the cutoff table points at: the last seat here has carried the highest score of the eight for years. Academically it is a mathematics and science powerhouse with unusual depth — the electives run past multivariable calculus and into serious computer science — but its humanities departments are strong enough that calling it a STEM school undersells it.
The trade-off is the intensity that reputation attracts: a large, self-selected cohort where the pace is set by the fastest. Students who thrive here tend to be the ones who arrive already knowing how to ask for help and manage their own time — the building supplies opportunity, not supervision.
The cutoff, with its year attached
"2026 Admissions" means the exam sat in Fall 2025 — a finished cycle, published by NYC Public Schools. The Fall 2026 exam decides 2027 Admissions, and its cutoffs do not exist yet. A cutoff is the score of the LAST student admitted — an output of one year's applicants and seats, not a pass mark anyone set.
Lowest qualifying score, 2026 Admissions (8th grade)
561
Source: NYC Public Schools, checked 2026-08-17 · NYC Public Schools ↗ · How cutoffs actually work →
How a seat here is actually won
- One exam, nothing else. No grades, essays, interviews or attendance records — admission to this school is decided by the SHSAT alone, for 8th graders and first-time 9th graders who live in NYC.
- Rank by real preference. Offers walk down the citywide score list, each student getting the highest school on their OWN ranked list with a seat left — putting this school lower 'to be safe' can only cost you a seat you would have won.
- Registration closes weeks before the test and is not automatic. The dates, and the three ways to register, are on the test-date page.
Registration deadline and dates →Sit a free full-length practice test →
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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