Category Archives: Admissions

How important is the GMAT to Tuck

Tuck is a school that is well known for its close-knit friendly community. During my interview, the second year student told me that the admissions committee specifically selects for people with terrific people skills who know how to collaborate in a team environment. Given that Tuck is looking for team players, does this mean that they put less of an emphasis on the GMAT? Lets find out.

In the chart below you can see that the slope the GMAT vs GPA scatter-plot is .0057. This means that for admissions purposes, Tuck would view a person with 800 GMAT and 3.00 GPA the same as someone with 700 GMAT and 3.57.

Tuck Dartmouth GMAT GPA Admissions MBA Business

 

The slope of .0057 is slightly lower than Wharton and Columbia who have slopes of .0061 and .0063 respectively. This supports Tucks claim that they weight interpersonal skills higher than they do test scores.

Methodology: The scatterplot represents the 50% of applicants who are accepted with the lowest GMAT and GPA. It isn’t helpful to look at the top 50% of applicants because those are not the marginal candidates who barely got in. I occasionally will remove very low outliers because those candidates may have been admitted due to very strong connections that most applicants don’t have. I never remove more than 5% of the total accepted students as outliers. The slope of the scatterplot demonstrates the point at which the school is indifferent to GMAT vs. GPA.

Harvard vs. Wharton: How Does Age Affect Acceptance Rates

Admissions consultants often claim that Harvard prefers younger applicants, so I decided to take a look at how age impacts Harvard acceptance rate compared to Wharton. I have heard that Harvard will ding you for waiting too long to apply. I used GMAT Club data for this analysis.

Below is a graph showing the GMAT by age. You can see that for both schools, 25-year-olds score the highest on the GMAT, then the score consistently drops from there.  Both schools have relatively similar scores, but Harvard is higher for the 27 to 29 age range.

Harvard Wharton Age GMATGiven just the GMAT information one would think that younger applicants would have the highest acceptance rate. This is not the case because top MBA programs value leadership and work experience so that students add value to the classroom.

I combined some age ranges because the accept/denied data was a little thin after I removed everyone who didn’t include their age. Wharton has a relatively flat acceptance rate, with a dip in the 29 to 30 age range. Harvard on the other hand had a large spike in the 27 to 28 age range, roughly 50% higher than any other age range. It seems that Harvard prefers applicants who are roughly 5 to 6 years out of school significantly more.

Wharton Harvard MBA Acceptance by Age Business SchoolSurprisingly, applicants who are older than 30 did pretty well. I have heard that the older you are the more difficult it is to be accepted. The over 30 group also has the lowest GMAT, so clearly the longer you are out of your undergraduate program, the less schools care about GMAT. I took a quick look at which industries had the lowest and highest application age. It wasn’t surprising to find that consultants generally applied younger, and military veterans and lawyers generally applied when they were older.

 

 

How Important is the GMAT to Wharton

I posted an updated Wharton acceptance rate analysis which is more accurate than this article. It shows how GPA and GMAT affect your odds of admissions.

Continuing the series on GMAT vs. GPA, here is the article on how much Wharton values the GMAT. Wharton is the 3rd ranked school according to US News and World Report.

Over the past year, both the director of MBA admissions Ankur Kumar and dean Dean Thomas S. Robertson have left Wharton. Many people have suggested that the quality of a Wharton MBA is declining due to dropping application numbers and prominent staff quitting. I personally think that Wharton is just as strong as it has ever been, and that it has just had an unlucky streak of staff quitting.

Some experts have suggested that because Wharton has seen a drop in applications and has had high level staff quit recently, Wharton will have a very conservative year for admissions and will focus on raising the measurable statistics such as GPA and GMAT. Lets see how recent events have shaped Wharton’s weighting for the GMAT.

The first graph was created using the admissions data from the past three years. The slope is .0036 for accepts. This means that over the past 3 years Wharton values 10 GPAT points the same as it values .036 GPA points. An application with an 800 and 3.00 would be viewed similarly to a 700 and 3.36.

Wharton MBA GMAT vs. GPA Admissions StatisticsThe interesting question is how have recent events shaped Wharton’s admissions decisions. In the graph below you can see that slope of the accepted students has increased from .0036 to .0061, suggesting that this recruiting cycle Wharton has been weighting GMAT more heavily than GPA compared to previous years. The slope is now .0061, which means that 10 GMAT points are considered similarly to .061 GPA points.  An application with an 800 and 3.00 would be viewed similarly to a 700 and 3.61.

Wharton GMAT vs. GPA Admissions MBAAlthough recent data suggests that Wharton has decided to weight GMAT as more important than GPA, this conclusion is premature. This recent data is very thin (it is based on only 14 accepts) and should not be considered completely accurate.

Methodology: The scatterplot represents the 50% of applicants who are accepted with the lowest GMAT and GPA. It isn’t helpful to look at the top 50% of applicants because those are not the marginal candidates who barely got in. I occasionally will remove very low outliers because those candidates may have been admitted due to very strong connections that most applicants don’t have. I never remove more than 5% of the total accepted students as outliers. The slope of the scatterplot demonstrates the point at which the school is indifferent to GMAT vs. GPA.

How Important is the GMAT to Columbia Business School

Every person who has ever considered applying to business school has considered how important the GMAT is to the admissions committee. It could be because that person did well and is hoping that their GMAT score will get them in or it could be that the person is trying to overcome a low GMAT score. I used the admissions data from GMAT Club to come up with actual data to answer this question.

Here is my analysis of how much important to Columbia GMAT is. I looked at everyone who was admitted to CBS and also provided both GMAT and GPA. I found the slope of the admitted students with the lowest score to find out how much the CBS values the GMAT scores.

I used this methodology because it is obvious that most schools will accept someone who has a 4.0 and an 800; it is the people who are on the border who matter. I also removed a few outlier data points on the low side because they probably had very influential connections to get in with their low scores, and that information isn’t relevant to the average applicant.

Columbia GMAT vs. GPA

Columbia GMAT Business School Admissions Application GPA You can see that the slope of the line for accepted students is .0063. This means that for every 10 points higher you score on the GMAT, it is the equivalent of having a GPA that is .063 points higher. So Columbia would roughly consider an applicant with a 800 GMAT and 3.00 GPA as similar to an applicant with a 700 and a 3.63 GPA. The value of .063 is higher than most schools other than Harvard, which is at .093.

Columbia GMAT and GPA. It isn’t helpful to look at the top 50% of applicants because those are not the marginal candidates who barely got in. I occasionally will remove very low outliers because those candidates may have been admitted due to very strong connections that most applicants don’t have. I never remove more than 5% of the total accepted students as outliers. The slope of the scatterplot demonstrates the point at which the school is indifferent to GMAT vs. GPA. The data for this analysis comes from Columbia GMAT Club.

How Important is GMAT vs. GPA for MBA Admissions

Almost all MBA applicants stress over their GMAT score. This series will demystify how different schools weight GMAT vs. GPA. I will be adding additional schools to this post as I complete the analysis. For this analysis, I use GMAT Club application data.

Columbia Business School

Wharton

Tuck

 

MBA Data Guru is Launched

I started MBA Data Guru to provide detailed data and analytics to MBAs and applicants. I will initially be focusing mainly on data surrounding the application process because I am currently applying to MBA school and am interested in the subject. My goal is to demystify the application process for applicants, help aspiring MBA students to chose the right school, and allow graduates to get the most out of their MBA.