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Management Consulting
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This is a WONDERFUL thread for us 2008-ers who are panicking and wondering if we will get dinged across the board. No, it doesn't mean that we should slack off, but hopefully rhyme and pelihu's excellent (though un-scientific) analysis of GMAT scores, acceptance rates, and yields will help you sleep better at night.

Thanks rhyme and pelihu! You definitely made MY day! :thanks
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Here are some posts transplanted from the "2007 Chicago GSB Applicants" thread here to seed the new discussion... If anyone wants to calculate some other schools' rates, please feel free to do so ;) I might give some of them a try when I get some time.

kryzak
I'm wondering, if they say roughly 50% of all applications are "junk" either because of the essays, recommendations or grades/GMAT, that means the acceptance rate for all the top schools are roughly doubled for people like us who are spending time revising and editing our essays over a period of months. If our GMAT/GPA are pretty decent, and our recommenders know to write very specific examples, and we don't bomb our interviews (since supposedly doing well in interviews doesn't change that much), then we probably have a 40% chance of admission to the top 15 schools.

Yes, it's a rough sketch and there are some amazing candidates out there, but in the end, most of each class in all the top 15 schools are probably "normal" over-achievers like ones we find here on GMATClub. Not everyone can be Iraq veterans, Olympic medalists, or Orphanage leaders...

Just a thought.


mNeo
Playing with percentages can give us a false sense of security. So, lets take a specific example. Let's take Kellogg. Assume that there are 4000 applicants and 960 get acceptance - giving a 24% acceptance rate.

Also assume that profiles of 50% of applications are weak in one or more areas. So, 960 applicants get accepted out of 2000 applicants who have good work-history, GMAT/GPA, recommendations, essays and interviews .. i.e. overall strong profiles. From a percentage point of view, we have a 48% chance of getting selected, which seems very high. But from a sheer numbers point of view, we have to beat 1040 very strong applicants (Who, just like you, do not lack in any area) to get accepted.

So, turning a 48% chance into a 100% chance of getting selected by the time your application gets reviewed is a hell lot more difficult than turning your 24% chance into a 48% chance.


dosa_don
kind of odd to hijack GSB's thread to discuss K but here goes:

Latest "Facts and Figures" for K:

https://kellogg.northwestern.edu/admissi ... 07_web.pdf

Well does not look like a huge jump in number of applicants to me: around 100 more overall when compared to 06 (around 70 in the 2Y and MMM pool). I am not sure about the acceptance % but the GMAT score bands are interesting.

I did the same analysis as Rhyme and came up with this.

640- = 12% acceptance
650-690 - 18%
700-740 - 27%
750+ - 30%
So what it shows I think is that over 700, your GMAT score does not really matter much.

I would take this as just a directional analysis. I assumed yields of 80%, 70%, 60% and 50%. Came up with a total of 961 admits and 589 enrolled (~62% yield).

kryzak
dosa: you should look at pelihu's analysis with the yield numbers. It makes sense and is supported by good logic. With that yield, your 700+ acceptance rates should go up to 40-50%.

mNeo: You are correct, competing against the 2000 applicants will require us to be better at essays, recommendations, and interviews. That's why I said this is just to help us sleep better at night, but doesn't mean our work is over! ;)
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Heres a spreadsheet summary of a lot of whats been said in this thread:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= ... Siew&hl=en
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Google spreadsheets? :roll: Seriously...
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nothing wrong with Google Spreadsheets... the ability to share and edit is great! :)
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guys,

:pray
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This may be mentioned elsewhere, but if you wanted to further break down personal odds, you could take percent accepted for each industry (and perhaps ethnicity) and then reverse analyze it for yield etcetera. The only problem that you have there is that you don't know what the GMAT score standard per industry is. From what I understand, Finance requires a higher GMAT than, say, peace corps dude because 1) you have a very large pool of applicants (assuming finance/business undergrads want and MBA...which is likely) and 2) that pool is made up of a very large amount of Ivy league, high GPA people.

Now, if you look at military, which is what I care about, you see a pool of 3% of accepted folk for Harvard. I think that goes to about 36 people. you assume of those, most are Ivy or Academy grads, but odds are their GMAT scores might not look very much like the investment bankers' pool.

This is mostly a known unknown. You can't know what your pool averages on the GMAT because that data isn't available, but it definitely should reinforce the idea that GMAT is no the only aspect of an application. If you're IT, you aren't competing against the pool of investment bankers, which isn't competing against engineers, etc, etc.
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mr_gondola
This may be mentioned elsewhere, but if you wanted to further break down personal odds, you could take percent accepted for each industry (and perhaps ethnicity) and then reverse analyze it for yield etcetera. The only problem that you have there is that you don't know what the GMAT score standard per industry is. From what I understand, Finance requires a higher GMAT than, say, peace corps dude because 1) you have a very large pool of applicants (assuming finance/business undergrads want and MBA...which is likely) and 2) that pool is made up of a very large amount of Ivy league, high GPA people.

Now, if you look at military, which is what I care about, you see a pool of 3% of accepted folk for Harvard. I think that goes to about 36 people. you assume of those, most are Ivy or Academy grads, but odds are their GMAT scores might not look very much like the investment bankers' pool.

This is mostly a known unknown. You can't know what your pool averages on the GMAT because that data isn't available, but it definitely should reinforce the idea that GMAT is no the only aspect of an application. If you're IT, you aren't competing against the pool of investment bankers, which isn't competing against engineers, etc, etc.
Could this also mean that they have quota per industry?
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sng

Could this also mean that they have quota per industry?
Definitely do, for the sake of diversity, these top schools can't have all IBs or all consultants in the same class, even though the schools claim there are many different ways to inject diversity.
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How in the world did this thread get resurrected? lol....

Tue Sep 05, 2006

Almost the two year anniversary of it!
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rhyme
How in the world did this thread get resurrected? lol....

Tue Sep 05, 2006

Almost the two year anniversary of it!


Resurrected again...... :lol:

Just gone through the thread. Are there any other threads for other b-schools?
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Rhyme

Amazing analysis ... everyone here is freakish I guess

good to see these analysis ...
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hey guys...any pattern analysis for gmat scores, yield and selectivity for the past two recession years.....this thread is again revived :lol:
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