candidate will be able to both crunch numbers and communicate well. Assuming that the
overall GMAT score is alright, only a seriously low score on the section that will be
examined most closely for a given candidate would be a liability. For example, if you are
a native english speaker and have good grades from an Ivy League college in Literature,
they probably won’t be too concerned about a low score on the verbal section, and just
consider it an aberration. However, a low score on the quantitative section – regardless of
how strong your combined GMAT score is – could be a major liability. The AWA score
is not important for most applicants, and is not factored into the overall GMAT score
anyway. In some cases, the actual text of the AWA section might be compared to an
applicant’s essays if the schools are skeptical about either’s authenticity.
How the GPA is evaluated – top business schools are not as focused on undergraduate
grades as other professional programs. If you have a 99
th
percentile LSAT score, and a
4.0 GPA in Political Science from Princeton, you will almost definitely get into Yale Law
School. If you score 9.2 on the MCAT and graduate with a 3.4 in music, you will almost
definitely not get into Johns Hopkins Medical School. On the other hand, if you graduate
first in your class in finance at NYU, get a 780 on the GMAT, and work at Boston
Consulting Group for three years, the admissions committee at Stanford Business School
could decide they’ve already let in enough people like you, and the spot could go to
someone with a 3.2 GPA in English who worked in a NGO in Africa. The bottom line is
that if you are still in school, you should try to get the very best grades you can, but
afterwards you just have to live with them. If you did poorly in undergraduate, good
graduate degree grades help offset the impression that you’re incapable of getting good
grades, but they don’t undo the damage your GPA does to the school’s average. Thus,
letting you in becomes a very context and timing-driven judgment call.
Essays – there are typically two to seven essay questions in each application, with
between 2000 and 3000 words required in total. While the first application will take you
the longest, and you can cut-and-paste many paragraphs into subsequent essays, overall
the differing nature of school’s questions will require you to spend many days on each
package to create a satisfactory product. The essays are your primary opportunity to
convince the school to let you in. They will evaluate you on two dimensions: what you
will bring to the school as an MBA student, and what you will bring to the school as an
alumnus. The second criterion is obviously the most important. Schools are trying to
select the applicants they believe will be the most successful in their careers based on
their backgrounds and accomplishments to date. Put another way, the 10-20% of
applicants who get into a top business school are the ones who least needed the top MBA
degree to succeed in their careers. Ironic, but true.
Of course, most of the applicants to top schools are reasonably successful in their careers
already, so your essays need to distinguish you from others in your peer group. Your peer
group – those applicants who are most like you – is who you are competing against
primarily. For example, any top school could fill up their entire class with analysts from
consulting firms with high GMAT scores and GPA’s. But they won’t. Instead, they will
have a certain number of spots for such applicants, and someone who was a sculptor
would not be competing for one of those spaces. This makes some peer groups more