EssaySnark

MBA Essay Questions by Business School

The EssaySnark blahg is a veritable treasure trove for learning to write MBA essays. We have essay critiques for you to study, and dos and don’ts (mostly don’ts) on how to approach this task. On this page you can find a directory of all the top U.S. business schools’ essay questions, each page of which also includes the examples we’ve collected over the years. And the snark. Definitely the snark.

1 = this school is using standardized recommender questions version 1 in 2017
2 = this school is using standardized recommender questions version 2 in 2017
= this school is using semi-standardized recommender questions in 2017
= this school is doing their own thing with recommender questions in 2017
= a 2017 SnarkStrategies Guide has been released for this school

  1. 2 Harvard Business School •
  2. Stanford GSB •
  3. University of Pennsylvania Wharton •
  4. 2 Chicago Booth •
  5. Northwestern Kellogg •
  6. Dartmouth Tuck •
  7. 1 MIT Sloan •
  8. 2 Columbia Business School •
  9. 1 NYU Stern •
  10. UC-Berkeley Haas •
  11. Yale SOM •
  12. 1 University of Virginia Darden •
  13. Duke Fuqua •
  14. 1 University of Michigan Ross •
  15. 1 Cornell Johnson •
  16. 1 UCLA Anderson •

MBA application guides have been published for 2017 (Class of 2020) for all schools except Cornell, which is still the 2016 edition – we’ll try to get to them too but don’t know when it’ll happen. If you subscribe to the online version of a guide here on essaysnark.com, you get a 90-day subscription, and if the 2017 version is released during that subscription period then you will get free access to the new one at no additional charge.

We also have an application guide for European MBA programs that covers strategies for INSEAD, LBS, HEC-Paris, and more. This guide was first published a year or so ago, and it does not go in-depth on specific essay questions but instead is a more general strategy guide for what these schools need to see from you and how to put together your pitch.

EssaySnark’s Top 19
Our ranking of schools based on how “easy” it is to get in
(from 2014 — see a 2017 version called EssaySnark Unranked)


Remember, the MBA essay materials we post throughout this site are not “samples.” We don’t publish samples. It’s because reading sample essays won’t help you be authentic in your pitch to the schools. We only publish essays that are flawed… then we tell you why. These pages list out the schools’ questions, and we provide guidance on how to tackle them. Our essay reviews are of drafts that people tried earnestly at, but came up short. Navigate these waters carefully, Brave Supplicant.