Those of you in New England will be excited to know that our next Business School Admissions Panel will take place at the Boston Center, on Wednesday, April 25th.

Admissions Officers from Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern) are all scheduled to attend. Our last panel discussion in Chicago was a huge success, with many questions answered and much insight gained.

For more information, or to register, just go to the main site or click here. It’s a great opportunity to get some of your questions answered, and get a better sense of the admissions process straight from some of the people who will be evaluating you (including, of course, how they weigh and interpret your GMAT scores).

Your GMAT Scores are good for 5 years . . . but to which date?

At our business school panel in Chicago earlier this month, specific schools clarified their policies:

a. At Chicago GSB and Kellogg, your scores are good if they are within 5 years of your application date.

b. However, at Harvard, the score should be 5 years before your matriculation date, which may be a year after you apply.

As a result, if you took the test 4 or 5 years before you plan on applying, you should check the specific policies at the schools in question. Still, for most people this is a total non-issue, as 4 or 5 years is plenty of time during which to apply to business school after taking the GMAT. Good for you if you’re planning ahead!

Most students, during our interactions with them, assume that it’s a bad thing, from a business school’s perspective, for an applicant to take the GMAT more than once. However, this is not really the case. In fact, many business schools see taking the test more than once as a sign of persistence and perseverance, and positively regard the applicant that wants to get into the best possible program.

But what if someone embodies the extreme, taking the GMAT 5 or 6 times? Last week, at our panel in Chicago, we asked admissions officers from 3 top schools, Harvard, Kellogg, and Chicago GSB this question, with interesting results:

Harvard – HBS asks you to self-report how many times you have taken the GMAT, and if it’s five or more, they tend to discount the top result a little bit as a result of preparation.

Kellogg – 5 or more times taking the GMAT is also regarded as a slight negative in relation to one’s score, similar to Harvard.

Chicago – The number of times one takes the test is irrelevant.

They all agreed, however, that taking the GMAT 2, 3, or 4 times was not any cause for concern, and that they would only consider the applicant’s highest score.

So the takeaway for applicants is that you should get the best score you can, and feel comfortable that you have up to 4 tries without doing your application any harm. When you’re up to 4 though, you may want to accept your highest GMAT score as given and proceed with your applications at that point, at least for certain schools.

Several interesting points came out of the Admissions Officer Panel held at our Chicago center this week. Possibly the most interesting was that Harvard Business School, represented by Assistant Director of MBA Admissions Nereyda Salinas, is focusing on increasing applicants to its program directly out of college. To back up this commitment, Harvard is offering undergraduate applicants:

1. Waived application fee (ordinarily $235);

2. Deferral and/or Postponement – HBS may either defer your admission to another year if you’d rather work for a year, or also postpone your admission if they feel another year or two would help you develop as an MBA candidate; and

3. Feedback – Harvard will give feedback to any college senior denied admission.

Sure enough, all of the above is indicated at Harvard’s website:

//www.hbs.edu/mba/admissions/collegestudents.html

I think this would be very surprising to most young applicants, as most people believe that business schools want you to develop a long work history before applying.

Still, don’t be discouraged if you’re applying to Harvard and you graduated a while ago – many applicants to HBS remain professionals who have been out of school a good long while.

We’ll have a couple of other insights from our panel early next week from Chicago GSB and Kellogg.

To start our blog off, we’re going to recap a long conversation we had with Graham Richmond, founder of ClearAdmit. Graham is a former admissions officer at Wharton.

Manhattan GMAT: Why do business schools require applicants to take the GMAT?

Graham Richmond: For a variety of reasons. First, they see it as a measure of certain specific math and verbal skills. Second, they see it as a measure of your ability to think under pressure – the exam is timed. Third, it allows them to compare the academic preparation of people from very different backgrounds. A high GPA from one college, for example, may not represent the same level of achievement as a high GPA from another. But the GMAT allows business schools to level the field, so to speak. Finally, it is important to remember that business schools are evaluated in several areas for the purposes of published MBA rankings, and that the average GMAT score of the incoming class is one of those areas. As such, the schools do have an additional incentive to require candidates to take the test (and to ideally accept students who perform well on the exam

Manhattan GMAT: Does one’s GMAT score correlate with one’s eventual performance in business school?

Graham Richmond: Studies have shown that one’s GMAT score is a pretty good predictor of one’s academic success during the first year of business school.

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