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How do admissions officers evaluate your GMAT score?
What weight will admissions officers give Integrated Reasoning when evaluating your GMAT score? Should administration problems at Stanford GSB be a worry for admissions? Why are more MBA programs enrolling non-traditional applicants? Check out what’s happening on the business school landscape.
Integrated Reasoning and your GMAT score
In Kaplan Test Prep’s 2015 survey of admissions officers at more than 200 MBA programs across the United States and United Kingdom, 59% said an applicant’s score on the GMAT’s Integrated Reasoning section (launched in June 2012) is an important part of their evaluation of a prospective student’s overall GMAT score. This represents a significant change of opinion from Kaplan’s 2014 survey, when just 41% said an applicant’s IR score was an important part of their overall GMAT score evaluation. As you probably know, IR has a 1–8 scoring scale and includes four question types: table analysis, graphics interpretation, multi-source reasoning, and two-party analysis. What’s Kaplan’s take on the survey results? Now that MBA programs have an additional year’s worth of data on the Integrated Reasoning section and have become more familiar with what it measures, it’s understandable why more have decided that it should be an important part of how they evaluate an applicant’s overall GMAT score. Because Integrated Reasoning receives its own special score, scoring well on it can distinguish you in a positive way—especially if your performance on other sections is lacking. On the flip side, a low score can hurt you. (Poets & Quants)
The Stanford GSB soap opera
More details are emerging about the scandal rocking Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, which is currently ranked as the country’s top program in U.S. News & World Report’s most recent rankings. What seemed to be “just” a scandalous love triangle involving administrators and faculty has brought up larger issues in the management of the academic community—including screaming fits and a difficult working environment that caused many female employees to quit. Will this unfortunate situation affect the school’s application volume? Many business school admissions landscape watchers doubt it. (The Wall Street Journal)
Duke Fuqua makes admissions gains
It’s a good time to be a student at Duke University’s Fuqua Business School. Among its accomplishments, the school climbed up Bloomberg Businessweek’s most recent MBA rankings—a whole five places to stand as its top-ranked full-time business school. Understandably, the school is proud of its exceptional new class of students: “Over the past year, the admissions team conducted more than 250 recruiting events, in 78 cities around the globe, hosted more than 5,000 visitors on campus and conducted more than 2,500 admissions interviews! While we received approximately the same number of applications to the Daytime MBA program, we saw a significant improvement in the overall quality of our applicants,” said the school’s associate dean for admissions. The average GMAT score of this year’s entering class is 696. (Poets & Quants)
The spice of business school life
Many business schools are embracing the mantra of “Vive la différence” by enrolling students who don’t come from traditional MBA backgrounds. As a result, the graduates that business schools are churning out this year and next year may look and think a lot different from the ones who graduated ten years ago. Part of this is because many recent business school graduates are eschewing traditional MBA jobs in lucrative industries, such as banking and consulting, for jobs at startups and non-profits that may not be as high-paying, but which are no less important. (The Financial Times)
Fishing for compliments
A recently released working paper from Harvard Business School shows that praising your coworkers, family, or friends leads “people to perform at their best.” According to the authors of the report, workplace and social praise would encourage people to succeed. “By activating people’s best-self concepts and highlighting examples of them making extraordinary contributions, we found positive changes in their physiology, creative problem solving, performance under pressure, and social relationships,” the authors of the report says. In other words, don’t be stingy or too proud to compliment others. On the flip side, if you receive a kind word, accept it with grace, humility, and say “thank you.”
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The post GMAT Score Evaluation: Emphasis on Integrated Reasoning appeared first on Business School Insider.
