Last night saw the Business School Admissions panel here in New York, with Admissions officers from Harvard, Kellogg, NYU Stern, and Wharton in attendance. Each school aired a presentation highlighting the specific features of its MBA program, and then answered questions for over 140 prospective students in a lively Q & A session.

We will be posting some of the insights generated via the panel in this space in the coming days. One early tidbit – Harvard is reducing the total number of essays it requires, and also increasing flexibility to give applicants more choices for essay topics (2 required + 3 chosen from a number of different topics).

Andrea Mitchell Kimmel, Associate Director MBA Admissions at Harvard Business School answers a question, as Ellen Kim of Kellogg and Alison Goggin of NYU Stern look on.

The event was tremendous, and we’d like to thank our panelists for sharing their time. Again, we will be posting additional points raised and addressed by the panelists in the days to come.

Also, while we’re thanking people, here’s a picture of the organizer of the panel, Jessica Eliav (on the right), Director of Corporate Accounts for ManhattanGMAT, with Katie Buongiorno from the Marketing Department. Kudos to a great event! 🙂

Due to an immense level of interest, we are going to be capping attendance at our Business School panel on June 21st here in New York (Admissions officers from Harvard, NYU, Kellogg, and the recently added Wharton are scheduled to attend). If you missed out this time, we will be having another similar panel here in New York later in the year. If you’re already coming, see you on the 21st!

Recently, we interviewed a potential instructor who said that he had gotten a 99th percentile score a number of years ago, but that his total score was a 730.

This did not seem correct.  As many people know, the current score threshold for a 99th percentile score on the GMAT is a 760 or higher (out of 800).  This is a change from just last year, as even the most recent edition of the Official Guide indicates that 750 is a 99th percentile score.  But a 730?

So we examined a copy of this gentleman’s score report with great interest.  His score was reported as follows:

October, 1998

Quant Raw Score – 49

Quant Percentile – 97%

Verbal Raw Score – 41

Verbal Percentile – 94%

Raw Score Total – 730

Total Percentile – 99%

It turns out that he was correct – a 730 WAS indeed a 99th percentile score in 1998 (when GMAC first went to the computerized adaptive test format).

It is worth noting that this person’s raw scores NOW would translate to:

Quant Percentile – 90%

Verbal Percentile – 93%

In other words, over the past 9 years, it has become MUCH harder to be at the top percentile in the Math, and slightly harder to be at the top percentiles in the Verbal.   His scores now would not place him near the 99th percentile overall.

This just goes to show that it’s gotten, and continues to get, increasingly difficult to get a distinguishing score as competition heats up and preparation levels rise.

(on a side note – we did not hire this particular instructor candidate)