Stanford Rejects Perfect Scores of Applicants

There's an applicant this year to Wharton who got rejected w/o interview, with plenty of work experience and 800.

2010-profiles-w-admit-dings-results-no-discussion-78475-142.html

I wonder if it matters to the adcoms whether an applicant has an 800 GMAT or "just" say 780. After some score level, there's probably not much difference in perception. And having an 800 GMAT and being rejected should not be unusual. Even if say all 4-5 applicants with 800s in an application season are rejected it shouldn't be surprising given a 90%+ rejection rate. Fit always plays a bigger factor.

The people who are spreading the myth that Stanford rejects applicants with perfect 800 GMAT scores are exactly those with problems with Critical Reasoning skills.

Stanford happens to have rejected many candidates with an 800, but that's just statistics combined with their policy of not making the GMAT an overriding factor in acceptance. It doesn't mean that they don't like candidates with an 800. Even my brother who's at Stanford right now made that same logical mistake (but that's why he got a 750 and I got a 780 ).

Here's the quote from a speech welcoming the MBA class of 2005:

Source: https://www.urch.com/forums/mba-admissio ... epted.html

Surely, you don't think Stanford rejects entrepreneurs because they are entrepreneurs.

This guy is 37.

Yeah, I posted a reference to that in another thread.

37, and already in a position where he'd likely be able to pick and choose MBAs to hire for his desk. His next stop in business life is to manage throngs of MBAs, not turn into one himself. That's what comes to mind for me.

Where does it say that he got dinged w/o interview?
Right now, it just says "School: Wharton - Submitted @ R2 deadline (Best of the best)"

If you go to the Wharton admits list, then you can find Lugo there in ding without interview list. That's probably a disadvantage of a too successful career

There's honestly not much an MBA could've offered him at that point. You also have to wonderr what the tone of his essays was - hopefully he didn't exude that same "best of the best" one-app mentality from his essays.

Super awesome. Thanks for the inspiration.

Agree...but as head of a quant group at an investment bank he might be a good candidate for an Executive MBA at Wharton. Perhaps trying to move into senior corporate leadership (CEO, COO, etc).

There's so much more than work experience and scores that go into an application. Some people feel entitled to got to Wharton or Harvard with a 780 or 800 core. I think this can get them dinged pretty fast.

hmm... rejecting a 800 scorer would make us try to score "less" than 800... not a frightening and irrealistic perspective to me :p

and btw, I totally agree with the fact that, as they take other things into considerations, it would be difficult to infer from this small (and unrepresentative) sample a rule such as "admission staff reject 800 GMAT scorers".
So please just go ahead and do not be afraid of scoring 800

You can be insanely smart and not be able to lead. The MBA is supposed to be a leadership degree at its core. I had an MIT grad in my Officer Candidate School class who graduated with something like a 3.9 in mechanical engineering, but he was so socially inept that he came across as stupid. He ended up attriting because no one would follow him.

That said, there's no way an 800 hurts anyone on its merit alone.

Leadership is definitely a "key" component of the application requirement... Not sure if everyone can be one though... and itis sometimes difficult to "prove it" don't you think? (even if it happens that people invent some stories... but I have been told that admission staff is used to that, and tend to be severe if they notice it)

btw: there are also 650 Gmat scores who manage to go to Wharton... another evidence that GMAT is JUST one of the stuff to take into account

this is a great post thanks

True, some 650's will get into Wharton, but at the same time, those guys had truly impressive applications in nearly every other metric, so it's still very unlikely that someone will get into Wharton with a sub 700 score.