Should I honestly disclose my salary?

Just be honest. I've heard of apps with figures as low as 4000.. They wont give a darn what your current salary is.

I second that.. my startin sal was jus 4600 pa and after a year its about 8000 pa.. Adcoms will know the rest of the stuff. And in most cases, this figure is just used for their statistics viz. pre and post-mba salary..

I agree with everyone here, but I did hear the director of Wharton state that they look at salary as one indicator of career progress. (https://www.wharton.upenn.edu/mba/mba_pr ... layer.html, its the slide titled, "Admissions Process Professional Development").

Sure, and that makes sense - but its in relative terms, not absolute.

salary growth within the same currency, not across. In fact, even that doesn't make much sense - so all they can realistically look at is the growth and if it is a reasonable increase.

For e.g. in the US, your salary growth per year could be as little as 2% and could be higher as in 7-8%, but a good engineer in India could have annual increments of even 40%-60% (yep, happens quite a lot). But that doesn't mean that the one in India is better than the guy in the US, or if his/her career progression is somehow more impressive - it's just how the local industry can compensate from its own base salaries. If you looked at the absolute numbers, the numbers in most of the developing nations around the world would be really low compared to the US.

Bottomline - don't worry and don't lie.