If you want to get into business school, be a young Australian physicist

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) just released two reports (pdfs here and here) on who exactly is taking the GMAT, the make-or-break exam for admission into business schools worldwide—and its findings should relieve business school administrators. While the last few years have seen around the same number of test-takers 28,000 more people took the GMAT in test-year 2012 than the previous year—an almost 11% increase.

Here are some things you might find surprising:

• That jump is mostly thanks to China. More than 16,000 of the higher numbers in 2012 hailed from the Middle Kingdom. Here’s the regional breakdown:

• Australia and the Pacific Islands nailed the GMAT. The mean score among that crowd was 594. That’s compared with the global average of 548. (Middle Easterners choked—they averaged 440.)
• Physics majors turned out to be crackerjack GMAT-ers, scoring an average of 614. The worst-performing undergraduate majors were agriculture and fine arts, with 500 and 506, respectively.
• Young people are flocking to B-school (probably because the scarcity of jobs). A majority of Asian and European test-takers were younger than 25. Here’s a look at how that’s been trending:

• Sorry, women—men scored higher, everywhere.
• In some places, that differential was gaping—like Central and Latin America, where men scored 534, and women just 484. The gender score-gap was almost nonexistent in East/Southeast Asians and Australia/Pacific Islands, though.

• Women from China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Russia are preparing to storm the business world—they formed a majority of exam-takers in those countries. Central and South Asia had the smallest proportion, with only 26%.
• The US is losing ground as the MBA destination of choice—while more than 81% of test-takers sent their scores to a US school in 2008, just over 75% did in 2012. Meanwhile, the UK, Canada, India and France round out the top five countries to which examinees sent their scores. And their shares are growing each year.
• So does the increase in test-takers signal (something that’s been )? Maybe not. GMAC expects that part of the increase was due to the crush of people aiming to sit for the exam before a new GMAT section was added last June. Plus, more and more test-takers—29%, compared with just 17% in 2008—are using the GMAT for non-MBA programs.