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Zohran Mamdani’s SAT Scores Revealed Amid Columbia ‘African American’ Application Controversy
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s SAT scores have been revealed after a Columbia University database hack.
Mamdani, who won the Democratic mayoral primary, applied to the university as a high school senior back in 2009.
While he was rejected from Columbia, his application reportedly shows he scored a 2140 out of 2400 on the SAT, according to Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo.
- Zohran Mamdani’s SAT score of 2140 was revealed after a Columbia database hack, showing a score on the lower end of admitted students' range in 2009.
- Mamdani’s application listed him as Black or African American and Asian, sparking controversy over his racial identity and college admission claims.
- Mamdani denied using race for advantage, explaining he selected multiple racial boxes to reflect his complex background as an Indian-Ugandan.
- NYC Mayor Eric Adams criticized Mamdani for identifying as African American, calling it offensive to exploit his identity for personal gain.
- The leaked database targeted Columbia’s use of race in admissions, banned by the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, stirring debate over race-conscious policies.
Zohran Mamdani’s Columbia application was leaked after a university database hack
Image credits: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The score was on the lower end of the average results for students who were admitted that year, Rufo claimed.
While Mamdani’s application was not the reason for the cyberattack, details of it were leaked to the press afterward.
The New York Times initially revealed the leaked documents and reported that Mamdani had ticked he was Black or African American, as well as Asian, on the application.
The information was seen as controversial, as a focal point of Mamdani’s mayoral pitch has been him embracing his Muslim faith and South Asian ethnicity.
Image credits: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Mamdani was born in Uganda but raised in the U.S. and has full citizenship.
At the time of his application, Columbia was using a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program.
This has led to some critics claiming that Mamdani had deliberately stated he was Black so he had a better chance of being admitted.
But Mamdani denied those claims in an interview with the NYT, saying he did not feel there were enough options to adequately describe his complex background.
He said he considered himself “an American who was born in Africa,” but not as Black or African American.
Image credits: Noam Galai/Getty Images
“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” Mamdani, 33, said.
Mamdani said he later added “Ugandan” to a section of the application that allowed applicants to provide “more specific information where relevant.”
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” he added.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who is Black and will run against Mamdani in the upcoming mayoral election, condemned Mamdani’s application after the NYT report.
Eric Adams condemned Mamdani’s application after he selected ‘African American’ as his race
Image credits: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
“The African American identity is not a checkbox of convenience. It’s a history, a struggle and a lived experience,” he said, according to The New York Post.
“For someone to exploit that for personal gain is deeply offensive.”
It is believed the database was targeted to check whether Columbia is still considering an applicant’s race as a factor in the admissions process, a practice that was banned by the Supreme Court in 2023.
There is controversy surrounding the NYT’s decision to use the stolen documents, as the leak came from a source who is known to express white-supremacist views.
Zohran Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application https://t.co/fShJoQcbUSpic.twitter.com/DgVZpOjlte
— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) July 4, 2025
Some staff members had complained about the story on social media, but those posts have since been deleted.
“I think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi,” NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie said on Bluesky, as Semafor reported.
He later shared a post that said, “NYT & many of its elite white readers are still obsessed with race-conscious college admissions.”
NYT columnist Lydia Polgreen also shared a series of posts on X about her identity struggle after moving to the U.S. from Kenya as a child.
“All of which to say: I can see why a political young man like Zohran might fill out his college application the way he did,” she wrote.
“Because if you are like me, you struggle to be known in this country. Our visual sorting is so simplistic and quite brutal.”
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