Calling all Kellogg Fall 2010 Applicants!

I get the difficulty in perpetuating the sense of community norms in a growing community. And I think it's a shared responsibility - for the new members to take it on themselves to understand the expectations (and be open to guidance from more experienced members and mods), and for the mods/admins to help guide new members and take action when appropriate. This year the mods (myself included) took a more hands off approach than last year because of some criticism that last year we were too heavy-handed. Obviously this approach has it's problems as well, so our approach to moderation will continue to evolve. So I think you'll probably see a bit more active moderation of this board going forward. In terms of ground rules, I think they're pretty straightforward:

1. Be polite and helpful. If you want to be a jerk, there are plenty of other MBA forums for you.
2. Don't argue with the current students. Trust that we have a good sense of what's going on at our school (and that includes the admissions process) and when we don't know or are speculating we will tell you so. We're here to help you guys, like we were helped last year.
3. Do your homework before asking questions. It's frustrating to repeatedly answer the same questions over and over, or to be asked questions that could easily be found on gmatclub or the school's website.
4. If you're new, introduce yourself. Ask to be added to the roll call and a moderator will add you to the applicant listing. Also, fill out your profile so people can see basic info about you (GMAT, schools applying to, etc.). This will cut down on the need for people to keep asking about stats (which gets incredibly boring to read through)

Which leads to a personal pet peeve of mine. The stats of GMAT score, age, gpa, and years of experience tells you next to nothing about the strength of a person's candidacy and are practically irrelevant to make comparisons based on. You fill out an application with almost 10 pages of information about you. If your candidacy could be summed up in one line, the applications would be a lot shorter (and the readers' lives a lot easier).

If you guys think those ground rules are unfair, I'm happy to discuss them with you. To avoid completely turning this thread OT, send me a PM if you have concerns rather than posting them here.