It’s that time of the year again: It’s our annual Radcom Awards!
“What are the Radcom Awards?” you say?
But of course, the Radcom Awards are where EssaySnark recognizes the radness of a specific school’s adcom!
We’ve tried to give recognition to great admissions teams even from the very beginning of this blahg, and six years ago we formalized this into a tradition that every January, after the crush of Round 2 is over, we step back and examine which of the admissions teams has implemented policies or demonstrated commitment to being applicant-friendly.
We had significant internal debate this year over whether Darden should win it again (spoiler alert: Darden was last year’s Radcom winner). They are certainly one of the more innovative admissions teams out there right now.
We actually had decided on who would win this early last week — and then Booth extended their deadline. That was perhaps applicant-friendly in a way, however this award has nothing to do with that! The reasons for honoring Booth with this award are that we really appreciate how they have changed the way they are reporting on their MBA classes.
Have you seen the Class Profile page from Chicago Booth lately?
They have significantly increased transparency on what they report, especially on test scores.
For example, they are now sharing the percentage of students who got in with the GMAT vs GRE, and they’re publishing the full range of both scores, with both average and median for GMAT.
(Why don’t all schools publish the median??)
They have also adopted the federal standard guidelines on reporting race. And, now publishing last 5 years of core data all in one place.
When we consider which schools are being transparent and trying not to have their process seem like some mysterious black box to candidates, then Booth gets the compliments.
In terms of their application, they have MINIMUM word counts, not maximum — wow! How freeing!
In addition, their Round 2 deadline was slightly later than many of their peers — not significantly so — not like MIT or NYU (bows down) — but still, they were kind enough not to schedule that deadline on the Monday of the first week in January when everyone is still in vacation-mode and just trying to get used to the fact that holidays are now over.
We appreciate that they’ve maintained their requirement for two letters of recommendation, while many other schools now ask only for one. While this may be a controversial stance, and we know how challenging it is to get recommendations, we don’t think it’s in the applicant’s best interest to only allow one.
Of course, as with all schools and adcoms, there are some things we take issue with about Booth admissions (notably, how many applicants they invite to interview, and how many they typically waitlist; plants hope artificially which seems unfortunately a little bit cruel). However, on the whole, we are keen on this school and what they are doing with transparency.
Past Radcom of the Year Winners
Tell us what you think.