HBS and Haas study says-- Always Go for an Easy 'A'
This should give more hope to those of us at non-targets... Can you taste the irony?
Want to get into B-school? Go for the easy A.Business-school applicants with a high undergraduate grade-point average—even those who attended schools identified as practicing grade inflation—are more likely to be admitted than those who performed slightly less well amid tougher grading standards.
"Experts take high performance as evidence of high ability" but don't consider how easy it is to achieve that performance, wrote researchers from University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, polling firm CivicScience Inc. and Harvard Business School. The research was published last week in the journal PLOS ONE.
This should be expected considering the USN ranking uses average class GPA as one of its ranking factors.
I was going to post a forum about this subject, but you beat me to it. More details over at Poets & Quants : http://poetsandquants.com/2013/08/01/inflated-gpas-good-for-mba-applica…
I read through the studies pretty carefully, just making sure that this phenom is not just headline fodder, and sadly it is not. I read the academic study pretty carefully, and even went back to the 2010 studies preceding -- this is not just stirring the pot. Admissions people willfully disregard other data that include rigor of the undergraduate school's grading system.
Here's the money quote from the most recent study: "Candidates from the schools with lower grading norms were admitted 12% of the time while those from the schools with higher average grades were admitted 72% of the time" And "Across all our studies, the results suggest that experts take high performance as evidence of high ability and do not sufficiently discount it by the ease with which that performance was achieved."
So, what does that mean? It does mean, that your overall GPA has to be at least as high as the MBA program's average.
I wish this study weren't really strong and verifiable, but it does indicate that admissions officers are willfully ignoring the context in which the GPA is granted. Sad to me.
This does not surprise me at all based on how I've seen HR/Adcomm function. They are the most lazy and stupid people in the corporate world. Even with the numbers before them, they are too lazy/stupid to do the inflation calculation to adjust the GPA for school.
If people were more serious about this combating this issue, they'd just give HR/adcom the adjusted GPA directly since they won't do it themselves.
how do you adjust for grade inflation when many schools will not publish average GPAs?
Here's something in the study that is just killer: " we were able to obtain average GPA data from 198 institutions, corresponding to 20,913 applicants or 77% of the domestic applicants in our sample.. " ....
" it might not be fair to assume that admissions staffs have perfect information about average grades at all other academic institutions. After all, these data were costly for us to collect. Without the data, it would be difficult for admissions departments to use the information to discount grades appropriately, and they would simply have to rely on absolute GPAs as useful (if imperfect) measures of academic performance. On the other hand, this information is critical to their ability to interpret applicants' GPAs, and admissions offices are likely to have better ways of obtaining these data than did we. A failure to demand it, in and of itself, suggests a failure to appreciate its value.
action item?
I'm so very glad I attended a school that curved everyone down to a C+ and only graduated 55% of its freshmen in four years.
LOL higher education is a racket
Sucks for someone like me who had no idea what to major in until my junior year and took every weed out class possible across different majors as I was trying to figure it out If I stuck with the major I ended up graduating with and not took a bunch of theoretical higher div unnecessary courses, I would've graduated with at least a 3.5.
You know what I find ironic? Adcoms typically have extremely limited real world exposure, not unlike HR at banks. I'm thinking that could network their way into a school and have the student/alumni base push them through admissions....can anyone speak to this?
I think the proposal of attaching a grading distribution is a pretty easy and straightforward measure to combat this problem (if it can be done). Grade inflation is a problem everywhere, but if you can say something of how common it is getting a certain GPA at your school, you're adjusting for the grade inflation there.
Grading distribution of the entire class doesn't account for differences between majors offered by the university.
Wouldn't the adcoms also have to adjust for the classes the application took? (I know I am pushing it a little here.)
Example: At ABC College, the mathematics and arts department are incredibly hard, while the economics department is super easy. We have student A and student B with a GPA of 3.7 applying from this school to the MBA program of DEF University. Student A takes only classes in the mathematics and arts department, while student B only takes classes in the mathematics and economics department. Both take the same mathematics classes. Which one of the students' GPA should be higher when you are adjusting it for grade inflation? Obviously, student A should have a higher GPA.
Admissions committees say they adjust for the type of class taken, and I believe them. It doesn't take much to look at the quality of a transcript in the blink of an eye. But what the study seems to have said (and they tested 15 different ways) is that those selecting, for an MBA class or for a job or promotion, tended to bias toward absolute high grades in spite of seeing other information. It may not have even been conscious, which is why the schools need to change their processes to do what they can to eliminate this bias. I hope they consider this a wakeup call, and don't just fight back with a knee jerk reaction
My uni didn't even hive GPAs, it gave percent scores. So while it is possible for someone to get 4 GPA, it is impossible to get 100% here. The highest I saw (in the entire uni, my program was lesser) was 85%.
Can someone tell me how screwed am I in this? A 75% score was considered extremely good but the nebulous (and frankly impossible) "conversion" to GPA makes it 3. Some just think 100% = 4 on the GPA which is laughable.
Couldn't you use a curve? E.g. if the best person gets an 85%, then that would be considered a relative 4.0, and then convert from there?
the study deliberately did not include non-US universities because of what you describe. To be charitable to the admissions committees, they do not convert international scores to US scores.
Think of it this way the study is showing that : if 80% is considered top, your 75% is considered good, even if everyone else in your school got similar grades
And this is why I wish I could do ugrad over again sometimes. Started in engineering, then went to computer science. Both were overall hell, wish someone told me to take bullshit classes :(
The only way to level the playing field is if schools provide adcoms average GPA information on all transcripts they send out. I simply can't see this happening any time soon. Private schools in particular have a vested interest in seeing their graduates place into top programs/jobs. i.e. Brown doesn't want you to know that their 3.8 GPA kids getting into top programs/jobs aren't that special because the average GPA there is 3.5. Nothing against Brown, of course--it's probably a smart idea in this context.
As if we need another reason to be told to strive for the 4.0...
So, the bottom line is that the system is rigged?
Cool, thems the rules, I'm playing in someone else's world.
Now I don't have to have any guilt or moral compunctions about raping the system to my advantage.
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