The dimness of MBA adcoms

I think grades do matter especially at the top schools. The test is learnable, but the median score is a 540, nowhere close to the medians at top schools and I'd imagine most people with a 540 or worse did try hard and study for that score.

Work experience also trumps GPA and that's what most MBA students have.

The only graduate schools where grades will matter almost as much if not as much as the standardized tests are law schools and medical schools. You're not getting into Yale Law School, even after the current law school app drop with all A's and four B's in your college transcript and an LSAT score of 171, even though these still amount to extraordinary stats. You're not getting into any decent medical school with a sub 3.5 college GPA in the vast majority of circumstances, even if you have a good MCAT barring other extraordinary variables. But for these schools, post-college work experience doesn't matter at all, or is considered "icing on the cake" rather than the "meat and potatoes" which is what business school generally wants and requires.

So maybe some of us didn't have the best grades in college, but we did great things in our companies after graduation. I think we deserve a shot to go to top schools as well.

Lastly with college rep. With college, many if not most of us didn't have complete control over where we went to college, because federal student loan limits have strict limits and parents don't want to pay any more than they have to. I certainly was in this position and many others here probably are too. You can't just look at guy from school X vs. school Y and automatically write off the guy from school X because his school is not as prestigious as school Y.