Chances of Getting Admitted After an Interview [Data Crunch]

What are the chances to Get Admitted After an Interview?

If you got an interview, chances of admission are already looking up, but invitations from different schools have different implications.
While we are all waiting and biting our nails about the R1 decisions or Interviews for some of us, we have something to spend your time give your brain a workout! We have analyzed our historical data of interviewed applicants to know the post interview acceptance rates of previous GMAT Club members:

• This analysis is aimed at estimating the weight schools place on admission interviews by calculating historical post interview acceptance rates of applicants and studying the impact of interview performance, interview type, GMAT score on applicant's acceptance rate.
  
• We have studied the data of around 10000 applicants from top 20 most popular schools on GMATClub for the analysis. Among the 20 school studied, 3 are international (LBS, INSEAD, & ISB) and rest are US schools.
  
• The analysis is based on historical data from the last 3 years. i.e. 2014, 2015, & 2016 intakes.

MBA Interview Acceptance Rates of Individual Schools

Sample Size: 10433 Applicants

• The acceptance rate ranges from 37% to 74%. The overall post interview acceptance rate is 56.3%%
  
• NYU Stern jumps out as the highest acceptance rate followed by INSEAD, Johnson, & UCLA. If you have been selected to interview at any of these schools then you have close to 3/4th chance of attending these MBA programs.
  
• Kellogg and Tuck have lowest post interview acceptance rates for obvious reasons; They allow anyone who visits their campuses to interview, so it is not surprising that they admit significantly fewer applicants who are interviewed.
  
• Apart from Kellogg, there are four other M7 schools whose acceptance rates are lower than the overall post interview acceptance rate.

MBA Interview Acceptance Rate and GMAT

Sample Size: 6386 Applicants

• Here we are trying to know if any relationship exists between applicant's GMAT score and his/her acceptance chance post interview. And here we got quite surprised results.
  
• Even if your GMAT is equal to or less than 650, if you are shortlisted for the interview then you have 47% chance of getting in and for those with 780+ GMAT scores, it's 58%. This finding tells us that a high GMAT score may not necessarily increase your chance of acceptance post interview dramatically. Even if you score 780+ on the GMAT, your chance of acceptance post interview will not be greater than 58%. (BTW, there were 4 applicants with 800 GMAT in this data sample and all of them were admitted: 3 at NYU Stern, remaining one at Wharton)
  
• This analysis takes us to a logical conclusion that applicants performance in interview has more impact on his post interview acceptance chance than his/her GMAT score. I've also shown, in bar charts, the distribution of applicants by GMAT scores.

MBA Interview Acceptance Rate and Applicant's Location

Sample Size: 3501 Applicants

Now let's see whether your location matters in your post interview acceptance chance. Here we assume that US and Canadian applicants are more likely to appear for campus interviews than other applicants, so this experiment is really about whether campus interviews have any edge over skype or outstation interviews.

• I admit that our data sample is biased towards users from US and India. Roughly 60% of the applicants considered for this survey are from these two countries.
  
• In light of the assumption that US applicants are more likely to appear for campus interviews than Indian applicants, if we look at post interview acceptance rates of applicants from US and India, we find that acceptance rate of Indian applicants is actually higher than that of US applicants.
  
• This leads us to believe that campus interviews won't give you the decisive advantage over applicants who could not visit the school. Note that, I am not at all suggesting that campus interviews or school visits are less important. Almost every MBA expert will advice you to visit the school if it is possible for you. Here we are just talking about its impact on applicants' acceptance chances.