[#permalink]
10 Dec 2006, 01:19
Just to summarize, this is an admission consultant's website that ranks the various application elements in order of importance. His data is a bit dated, for example he lists average GMAT at top schools at 680, and the middle 80% at 630-730, where the current average is around 710 and the middle 80% is about 660-760. He ranks them in the following order:
1. GMAT
2. Essays
3. Timing
4. GPA
5. Work Experience
6. Recommendations
7. Interview
I can agree that work experience is very important, but as we have discussed before, there's a very good reason why it's difficult to use as an admissions criteria. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to determine what work experience most impressive. Consider the following:
1. 2 years in a regional consulting firm
2. 3 years in management training with a fortune 500
3. 4 years as an entrepreneur
4. 5 years in IT
Which is best? The answer is "who the hell knows"? Other than a few name brand feeder companies, schools have a really difficult time differentiating between work experience of different individuals. I believe that, unless you really have unique work experience, this criteria cannot help your application much.
GPAs have the same problem. Is a 3.0 in Physics better than a 3.3 in English? Is a 3.1 from an Ivy better than a 3.4 from a top state school? Some schools are known to have grade inflation, so how does that figure in? It's just impossible to determine how competitive a major, or a department, or a school is; so GPA has limited value as a comparison tool between applicants. The other problem with GPAs is that for many applicants, they can be 3, 5, 7 or more years old - so their correlation to the candidates current profile may be limited as well.
The problem with recommendations is that most successful candidates have stellar recommendations. This is a natural result because each person selects his own recommenders. A negative (or neutral) recommendation can be very damaging, but a stellar recommendation probably doesn't help a whole lot because they (should be) very common.
I understand that the importance of interviews varies according to the school, but I can understand why they are ranked so low. Interviews are useful to support or contradict other parts of the application but probably don't have much value on their own. In fact, if the rest of your app is not up to snuff, it won't even matter if you are the best interviewer in the world because you'll never get the chance (at most schools).