Last week I posted an article discussing the Indian application disadvantage at Wharton. I received a request to go into more detail about how GMAT impacts the Wharton acceptance rate for Indian applicants. Given that only 5% of applicants identified as Indian and the acceptance rate is low, I don’t have enough data to look at that relationship in isolation. However, I have built a model that can predict what that relationship would be for Indian applicants based off of data from other Wharton applicants.
Wharton Acceptance Rate by GMAT
As you can see, my model predicts that there is a relationship between GMAT and the Wharton acceptance rate. This acceptance rates in the graph assumes a GPA of 3.54, which is the average for Wharton applicants. As you would expect, the higher the GMAT score, the higher the chance of getting in. Unfortunately, even with an 800, the forecast acceptance rate is still less than 10% for Indian applicants.
Wharton Acceptance Rate by GPA
I decided to also look at the relation ship between GPA and acceptance rate as well. Similar to GMAT, higher GPAs increase your chance of acceptance. For the graph below I used the average Wharton GMAT score of 728 to calculate the acceptance rate. Even for candidates with a 4.0 GPA, they only have an acceptance rate of 6%.
After that I made a graph displaying the relationship between GMAT and GPA on acceptance rate for Indian applicants. With a 4.0 GPA and 800 GMAT, the acceptance rate increased to 12%, but that is still very low for such a qualified candidate.
The final question to answer is which is more important to Wharton, GMAT or GPA. I already had suspicions that Wharton cared more about GMAT than GPA, and this analysis confirmed it. I looked at the average candidate (both Indian and non-Indian) then compared the average acceptance rate to the acceptance rate one standard deviation above and below for both GMAT and GPA.
As you can see the slope for the line is steeper for the GMAT than for GPA. What this means is that a candidate who score one standard deviation above average for GMAT will be rewarded more than a candidate who has a GPA one standard deviation above average. Similarly a candidate will be punished more for having a low GMAT. This suggests that GMAT is more important to Wharton than GPA.
The data used to make this post came from GMAT Club and included applicants from 2012 through 2014.