Do I stand a chance at Booth?
I'm applying to the Booth Scholars Program. It's offered to fourth year UChicago undergrads. It consists of a $10,000 annual scholarship and a 2-year deferral to Booth. http://www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/admissions/e…
I'm confident in most aspects of my application: I have three strong recs, a 3.8 GPA, general honors and departmental honors; I've been active in student consulting groups; I spent my past summer at a Target Corporate internship; and I will be entering a 2-year rotational Business Analyst program at Sears Holdings.
My GMAT is the issue. I received a 95th percentile in the verbal and a 58th percentile in the math for a total of 660. How damaging is this particular verbal-quant skew?
I don't know much about MBA admissions, but I do know that Booth is known to be more quantitatively rigorous as far as MBAs go, and your quant score will definitely hurt you. I think you should retake it and aim to get at least in the 80th-85th percentile range.
Pretty damaging. Typically the cutoff for quant section is 80% at top schools. Right now, you are WELL below that. You can squeak by with less if you are a URM or have really outstanding experience and accoplishments, but I'd imagine anything lower than 65% is an automatic deal breaker (just my opinion) at a quant focused school like Booth.
Go buy the Manhattan GMAT math books, practice practice practice, and get that quant score up to the 80% threshhold. Then you have a great shot. You should be able to do this in 30 days or less if you put in 3-4 hours a day.
The difference in your Quant and Verbal will be a huge red flag. The AdCom will have doubts about you being able to handle the coursework. Like blue4you said, get some MGMAT books and get your quant up after a couple months of studying. You would probably want your total score to be around 700, with as high a Quant percentile as possible.
Given that you you go to UofC, if you took any hardcore math courses those grades can help bolster a poor outing on the quant portion. I'm guessing you weren't a math major however so I'd say retake it if you didn't rock it in the honors calc sequence (16100-16200-16300).
I'd retake it, but the program deadline is April 13th and I took the GMAT on March 19th (the GMAT can only be taken every 31 days). I've tried to preempt the red flag by acknowledging the skill discrepancy and admitting that I've needed to put forth extra effort in quantitative classes, but noting that I have still managed to get good grades. Is there any better way to mitigate the gmat score skew?
Worst comes to worst, I study for the GMAT and reapply in 2-5 years via the traditional route. Still, this program would be sweet...
I honestly think they will not be able to overlook your quant score and thus your chances for admission are likely pretty low. But, I'm not an admissions officer and I don't know anything about this particular program, so if you have the time it couldn't hurt to throw out an app. Like you said, you can always reapply in 3 or 4 years. Best of luck!
58th percentile is a 31 on the quant. That's what I got the first time I took a practice GMAT without any prior knowledge of the exam or studying. I'm sure you can raise that. Buy the manhattan gmat books, they're geared for a high 700s score.
Do you know if they'll accept a GMAT taken after the application deadline but before the decision date? See if they would.
Thanks, I've just emailed one of the admissions people. Do most programs tend to allow this?
Start studying your GMAT quant asap. It's not hard, and there are a lot of patterns to look for. Questions will be asked across a variety of topics, but once you know the strategy of how to solve them quickly you will know exactly what to do when you see that question pop up on your screen. The biggest hurdle for me when it came to the GMAT was seeing that I was running out of time on the math section because I took too long to "double check" my answers. Get into the habit of not doing that, or not second guessing. What I did was use the official GMAT book and went through every of those 1000 math questions twice, beginning to end. Then I retook the two free full length practice tests they offer when you sign up and did that for an entire week (woke up extra early to get into the habit of the 8 AM time slot) first thing in the morning. The questions change as you continually get them right (they will repeat in the beginning) so that is also a good database of questions to use. I would say a good two weeks of solid math preparation will get you ready in no time.
Thanks for the idea. I definitely had the same problem with the quant timing. I ended up having 15 questions with 5 minutes to go, so I essentially guessed on the last 33% of the quant. I was actually glad to have scored above 50th percentile with such an egregious amount of guessing.
I may try to study on my own, but I haven't taken any class yet and I figure it might help. Does anyone know of a decently affordable quant-focused class? Studying verbal would just be diminishing returns.
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