lawgonebusiness
brainhurt
hazay
One small question aside guys.
Dont you think we over play the combo "GMAT-GPA-EC" on GC to compare profile ?
I understand that it s easier to compare profile, but we usually leave out the work experience.
I do think we overplay the profile generally, even with WE. At these top schools I believe that the various components of ones profile merely serve to get you consideration by the adcom, but the content of your application (i.e., the essays plus how you communicate what you've done) is what determines your outcome.
So in my imagination they see the profile and say to themselves, "yup this person fits the bill, let's see what they had to say" or "this person is borderline, let's see if what they had to say is compelling to me" or "nope this person doesn't fit the bill, ding".
Assuming my imagination is right, from the profile alone you can guess which of the three first categories someone might fit in but it doesn't tell you much about their ultimate chances of being accepted.
actually, according to your theory, it's exactly contrary to what you just concluded. If you fit in cateory 1, you are more likely than not to be accepted. if you fit in category 2, then you will have an average chance, which is about 15% to be accepted at columbia. if you fit in category 3, then you have almost zero chance.
Maybe I need to expound more on my theory.
In case 1, you have a 100% chance of being considered, but your chance of being accepted depends on what you say in your essay. E.g., someone who fits in category 1 could have a 100% chance of being accepted if they put together a cohesive story that is well-articulated and resonates with the adcom, or a 0% chance of being accepted if you do a poor job on your essays, making spelling and/or grammatical errors, not answering the questions, naming other schools by mistake, etc. In reality, most people probably will fall somewhere in between these two extremes.
On average, this group might have a 50% chance of being accepted, but the point is that this tells you nothing about the
individual. My point is that without knowing anything more than someone's profile, you really don't know anything about their individual chances of getting in, or looking at it another way, if he/she got dinged you can't really assess why.
A similar process in my model would apply to group 2, but all things being equal in the rest of the application there would be a discount factor applied to the average chances of the group. So perhaps a 30% discount to group 2 for an application of exactly the same strength as someone in group 1 (excluding profile). Clearly, this is a gross simplification, but this is for illustrative purposes only, and not meant to model the thinking of the adcom. Same conclusion though, you don't really know anything about an individual's chances of getting in. E.g., you could have someone in group 2 who has an excellent application who has a much better shot at acceptance than someone in group 1 who has a terrible app.
In group 3, however, you are absolutely correct, it doesn't matter how amazing someone's application is, they're not getting in and you can assess that from the profile alone.
04 Aug 2010, 11:42
