Tag Archives: WSJ

MBA Adcom, MBA Admissions

A GMAT Reality Check

A client recently sent me this handy new utility from GMAC, purveyors of the GMAT, which allows test-takers to rate their score with reference to their cohort filtered by intended degree, age, gender, country, and so on.

If you try it you will be able to see how you stack up against the sub-group you are really competing against.

You may also take heart that the median is much lower than you think. True, this doesn’t help “GMAT paranoia” when you look at your elite school and find it has an average accepted GMAT of 720 and your score is 680…

For that you need to absorb what the schools keep telling us — once again here in a recent WSJ interview with Derrick Bolton Director of MBA Admissions at Stanford GSB — which is that the GMAT is only one among many factors that determine admission.

WSJ: “Do you check out the GMAT score and if it’s below a certain number, put that application aside?”

Bolton: “That would rob us of a lot of talent. The GMAT is helpful in terms of understanding how someone can perform in the first year, but that’s one small piece of the overall M.B.A.”

What would be nice, for the next iteration of this GMAC utility, would be the ability to check a box that shows the GMAT arc of accepted students at Stanford, or Harvard, or Tuck, etc. That arc would by definition show the 50% below the incoming median score, and how low incoming scores can be, and that would be reassuring to the many hundreds of applicants who will get into elite schools despite not being “GMAT geniuses.”

See also I Scored 700, Should I Retake? and The Myth of the 800 GMAT.

 

MBA Adcom, MBA Admissions, MBA Essays, MBA Interviews

Business jargon will sell a book, but it won’t sell you to Adcom

I try to keep this MBA Admissions blog fresh and personal (like an MBA essay should be!) and don’t just rehash or repost keyword-rich MBA admissions news. In this spirit I offer you a bit of whimsey from The Wall Street Journal “Speakeasy” where Teddy Wayne explains how his job as an MBA essay editor provided the inspiration for his novel Kapitoil.

He says:

“Of the many jobs I held during my desultory postgraduate days in the early 2000s, the one that made the deepest impression was editing MBA application essays for a Web site. For two and a half years, I downloaded essays from strangers, made comments and suggestions, copyedited grammatical errors and uploaded them without any human contact. It wasn’t very rewarding work — but it did help inspire my debut novel, Kapitoil.”

So here’s insight number one. Dare I point out that if you go the big-MBA-admissions-consulting-shop route, this is the kind of person who is reviewing your essays. The business model is: your work is outsourced to unemployed graduates in the arts and humanities. These editors may not be empowered to have interactive contact with you, and they may not be highly motivated. (Yes, there are exceptions.)

Anyway, Wayne goes on to his main point:

“The applicants’ knowledge of business jargon was deeper than my own. Everything was “leveraged”; “skill sets” were “broadened”; they were all striving to achieve “short-and long-term objectives.”

“What if, I began thinking, I wrote a novel from the perspective of a character who, like these business-school aspirants, was so immersed in the language of late capitalism, so caught up in its buzzwords and phrasings, that he not only wrote and spoke in it, but thought in it?”

… “We all do it, consciously or not. Friends who are low-paid writers speak about how “at the end of the day,” “the bottom line” is that we have to “touch base” and reach for the “low-hanging fruit.”

“The language of commerce has now fully cemented itself in our vernacular, functioning the way sports, military, mafia and street slang has in the past: as a shorthand for when we’re too unimaginative or lazy to come up with original sentences.”

Here’s insight number two. Adcom members are as sensitive to business jargon as Wayne is, and view it in an equally dim light. Read Kapitoil. Have a laugh. But don’t talk like that in your MBA essays or interview.