EssaySnark

WARNING: All adcom advice is specific to THEIR school

by EssaySnark - Discusses Leave a Comment

We probably should’ve posted this a long time ago, but given that this is Call Out the Adcom Week (after our rant on MIT Sloan on Tuesday) then it seems appropriate to talk about this today.

As you’re doing your research and preparing your applications, you must keep this truth in mind:

Whatever an adcom person says is relevant and accurate and applicable ONLY TO THEIR SCHOOL.

There’s a lot of commonalities, and similarities, and overlapping truths – if your GMAT score is too low, it’s harder to get in to a top school; if you’re over a certain age, you may have more luck at an EMBA program; etc. etc. etc.

As we posted in September, there are some school-specific application idiosyncrasies that you need to be aware of – things like when the recommendations must be received by in relation to a round deadline, that sort of thing.

You definitely need to research the policies carefully.

You also may need to take more global-seeming advice with a grain of salt.

Specifically, what we need to discuss today is something that we heard Yale SOM Admissions Director Bruce DelMonico offer up in an admissions webinar back in December 2012, where he said that when you’re thinking about re-taking the GMAT, “it needs to be a 40-point change in order to be statistically meaningful, per GMAC.” (Yes, that’s a direct quote; we take copious notes during those things.)

We brushed that off at the time; we didn’t actually think that he was committed to this as advice to offer to the full population of MBA applicants. It was an anecdote; an interesting datapoint to share.

However, his statement has since been codified in a post on the MBA.com Ask The Expert column which we’ve captured here. Specifically he said:

[T]o really make a difference in your score, as a general matter you need to feel as though you can improve it by 40 points or more. If you’re looking to improve by 10 or 20 points, that’s really not a meaningful change in your profile.

We pretty much agree with the last line. Ten points aren’t going to do much of anything for you in your chances at admission. It may help in that it shows you’re committed to the process, which is often useful. But we get it. A 10-point increase ain’t much. Agreed.

However, we pretty much fully and completely disagree with the first part. It’s rather ridiculous to claim that a re-test is not meaningful unless you get a 40+ point improvement.

And we’re not the only ones. Here’s an exchange on Twitter – first we said this:

And then our friend @akilbello picked it up and sent it to some real-life adcom (or former adcom) peeps (thanks Akil!):

Here’s what they replied:

In case you’re not familiar:

Moral of the story:

Anything you hear from an admissions person is accurate and actionable for their school only. Don’t extrapolate to other schools. Just, don’t.

And for the record: If you can raise your GMAT score, you probably should retest – even if it’s “just” 20 points, that can often make a difference! It partly depends on which 20 points we’re talking about – 600->620 ain’t gonna cut it, but 710->730 looks an awful lot better depending on your candidate pool – and if the increase in your total score comes from an improvement in the quant where you were previously weak, it can make a MASSIVE difference.

All GMAT scores are not alike. To paint with such a broad brush is doing a disservice to BSers everywhere. Adcoms, please be more responsible with your statements.

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