Why are the average GPAs at some Top 10 business schools so low?
I was amazed that the average GPA's of Top 10 b-schools are so low considering how competitive to get in. According to Poets & Quants, some of the average GPAs for 2018 were the following: Wharton - 3.60, Booth - 3.60, Ross - 3.50, Tuck - 3.49, Sloan - 3.48, and Cornell Johnson was only 3.39.
A 3.5 GPA is barely above average at most schools for undergrad and is the bare minimum to be eligible for competitive jobs. So how are the average GPA's so low at these top schools?
I'll bet any amount of money you don't go to a top school
I go to a highly ranked school, better than most. I understand that it is difficult to get a 3.5 at MIT, Princeton, etc. but most students aren't in programs as competitive as those. The average GPA at Ross is a 3.6. The cutoff for most strong IB and consulting firms are a 3.5.
Dude maybe it's because some people actually go out and party and have friends and go to events instead of studying 24/7
Haha I know engineers with 3.3s and 2 years of WE and got into Booth...
One reason may be that these MBA programs take a good deal of applicants from engineering programs and undergrad b-schools where past grade inflation is kept to a minimum relative to other majors/schools. That said, this may change in the upcoming years as its seems there is a greater deal of coddling on campus and an "everyone gets a trophy" mentality these days to the point where I could see GPAs inflating.
Another reason could be it's a holistic assessment and after a certain point, a higher GPA is not that important. It would be like comparing NFL receivers to Olympic sprinters. Sure, receivers need to be fast but their numbers are nowhere near as fast as Olympic sprinters. That's because they need more than speed; they need hand-eye coordination, strength, good vertical jumping ability, etc. Simply focusing on speed at the expense of other traits would be mis-prioritizing things. Same thing for MBA applicants. They need a good GMAT, strong work experience, good teamwork skills, etc. A well rounded applicant is much better than one with only a high GPA. This of course assumes doing one thing happens at the expense of another, which is subject to debate.
you forgot being an URM/female candidate in your last paragraph
Fuck the hell off dude. People have forever bitched that URM/female students are "unqualified" and "taking spots away" from more qualified students. The recent college admissions scandal shows that it was actually unqualified rich white kids who were taking spots away the whole time
Undergrad majors in Wharton's Class of 2020: 45% Humanities, 29% STEM, 26% Business Undergrad majors in MIT Sloan's Class of 2020: 24% Humanities, 40% STEM, 41% Business (thereof 21% Economics), 5% other
Most certainly the differences among schools in the same tier are almost entirely attributable to student demographics.
Besides Sloan, most MBA business schools">M7 programs have 3.6-ish average GPAs. Notable exceptions are H/S, whose average GPA is >3.7. This makes sense because they admit the largest share of gold-platted candidates in terms of (a) undergrad institution (*cough* grade inflation) and (b) first employer (who usually prefer higher GPAs, as OP correctly states). Cornell is two tiers below the MBA business schools">M7, so you'd expect their average GPA to be lower.
One more thing to OP: Stop giving a damn about the averages, they don't tell you much other than the rough ballpark of where your raw stats should be and even then you're not competing with the TFA or military types for a spot, but (presumably) with the finance types. No matter how good you are, there's a shitload of applicants with equal or better stats than yours. You better work on your story than jerking off on your undergrad GPA.
Lastly, I want to respectfully say fuck you to the person who quotes URM and women as the reason. Your argument lacks even the tiniest grain of substance, because there are hardly any differences in the programs' percentages of URM and female students, so how on earth would that explain differences in the average GPA? You just like to believe the narrative that you -- I assume a white guy -- have to work harder than anyone else. You don't. Stop being an asshole.
Quick word about your last paragraph - never applied to an MBA, nor looking at doing one. Just surprised at the number of people disclosing URM/Female when they want people to evaluate their MBA chances - thought this has a true impact, just like for undergrad applications whereby URM applicants have lower raw stats. I am sorry but these are facts - never said it was a good thing or a bad thing, rather just something to consider. If anonymised individual profiles were released it would be interesting to support my argument with empirical evidence - I just did an econometric analysis of the gender pay gap in the UK, supporting the fact that the gender pay gap exists and suggesting better policies to reduce it. Would happily PM it to you.
Whites and Asians must work much harder to get into these schools due to affirmative action policies/handicapping. This isn't up for debate, it is a fact. GPA, GMAT, and work experience requirements are materially less stringent for "minority" applicants because these schools have quotas of how many they want to admit and have to set the bar lower to hit the numbers.
If you look at the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management (a program for URMs to get into B-Schools) statistics, both GPA and GMAT scores are way lower to get into the same program compared the normal application process. Even though URM / women still are not the majority, they do make up a sizable part any MBA class (which they are accepted to at higher rates with lower stats). This should not even be a debate.
Was going to write a long response to OP, but basically, this. A 3.0 in electrical engineering from MIT, hell even a 2.8, is better than a 4.0 in gender studies from Chico State.
And then, there's your performance outside of school. A low GPA who made it rain in B2B sales is better than a mid-office analyst from Stanford. True story, I met a risk analyst from Stanford at my old company. Smart guy but no real ambition or drive.
I agree with your second point, but it is hard for schools to know how much ambition and drive candidates have on paper and with a short interview. GPA and GMAT are much easier to see from their side.
I know that a 3.0 at MIT is better than a 4.0 at Chico St. but the vast majority of students did not study engineering at MIT or Caltech. The majority of students are glade inflated business/liberal arts majors or are from lower ranked and less competitive schools.
True. Majors matter. A lot. I had a buddy who was poli sci, and had a near 4.0 without ever going to a class. He subscribed to the note-taking services for all his classes, and used those outlines to study for the tests.
He went to no classes, and aced courses. You cannot possibly do that in engineering, computer science, or any hard-as-balls science. We would study our asses off for physics, doing piles of problem sets, doing labs, and turning in projects that had to either work or they didn't. Those grades cannot be compared. MBA programs look through the GPAs and consider the broader applicant backgrounds.
Hi! There's two components that will answer your question. The first is that many top wall-street men & women don't go to business school. Business school will get you an associate job, and a lot of strong bankers/traders/etc will get that with 2 years job experience (ie: they don't see the long-term payoffs, especially if their business-smarts outweigh what they believe they can learn at school). The second component is that business schools focus on much more than GPA, most importantly your work experience. The average work experience at most top b-schools is around 5 years, and where you worked and what you did matters so much. Look up what wall-street culture is like, and you'll realize that business is not all about smarts. Business schools will simply take whoever was most successful in their five years of work .
Success in business school, and business really, is almost never due to raw brainpower. I see posts like this all the time: "Should I take string theory courses to prepare for IB? Which major would be better for consulting, computer science or physics? Why do Amherst English majors have a better shot at Goldman than my state school engineering buddy?" These indicate a fundamental misunderstanding about how these industries work. High school is over, and no one cares how good you are at calculus. If you have some intellectual achievements that make you more impressive on paper, that's always a plus, but you have no edge over the other recruits by having a 1600 SAT score over their 1450.
A reasonably smart person that has a good pedigree, good social skills, good assessment of risk, and who can make good judgments of other people will go much further than the 4.0 brainiac with none of those things. This is not rocket science, this is business. It's about relationships, thoughtful decision-making, and influence. These are the things top business schools select for, so if you're trying to get into one I suggest you work on improving them.
It's not just the GPAs that are low, its the GMATs too. It's easy to get a 750+ GMAT and yet all the top schools average below that.
Main reason is that they have a lot of constituencies to address. They want a certain mix of male/female, of international/US, of bankers/consultants/strategy/other, etc etc etc. When you have to hit so many targets, you're going to naturally move away from other goals like high GPA/GMAT.
Another reason nobody wants to admit: a lot of the strongest people skip the MBA. In fact it's almost by definition that those who do the MBA are doing it to correct a misstep made in their early career.
There are exceptions of course but a lot of of the class is less impressive than you might expect, and I'll be the first to admit it as an MBA business schools">M7 myself.
One thing I don’t miss about school is having to even slightly care who thinks I’m impressive or not - there aren’t as many truly impressive people in the world as many of you seem to think. Bunch of Brady clones
One thing I don't miss about school is people focusing on one word and missing the overall point.
Ivy league schools are quickly becoming a joke compared to their past rigor and candidate selection.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/us/black-commencement-harvard.html
I'm pretty sure many of these schools value work experience and GMAT over GPA. A lot of candidates who did exceptionally well in college might not want to attend business school, or are going to HSW. A lot of people applying might be the ones who didn't break into the most upper echelon of careers and are now trying to do so. I hear some schools are real gmat sluts, too.
If high GPAs at good schools and high GMATs are so easy, why are some of you so impressed with yourselves? It’s just table stakes isn’t it? What’s the point of this?
I hate dimestore psychology so I won’t suggest you’re still seeking validation now that you’re in the working world and realize there are tons of people as smart and pedigreed as you.
I hope the people who scream “Use the search function!!1!” about actual interesting topics will start saying so in these threads now that every angle of GPA is covered.
I don't argue that 3.5 GPA is low, but there are many cases when people become very successful with 3.5 GPA and low, so it's not only about your scores
Because they are evaluating you on a wide range of factors besides your GPA. B-schools are looking for future business leaders. There are other factors besides the ability to cram until 1AM every night that drive success in business.
There are plenty of 3.7+ candidates who also meet the GMAT bar. But when you layer on professional experience (quality of firm + quality of work + promotional track record), true leadership experience, soft skills, the quality and source of professional recommendations, and the ability to show that you are goal oriented and can accomplish those goals (including how you plan to launch pre-MBA experience into your post-MBA goals), plus whether you need an MBA, that pool of candidates drops dramatically. If you are strong in all other recommendations, a high GPA will help you in b-school admissions. If you are not, it is not enough to overcome the difference.
And yes, schools look to build a diverse class. Taking out any humanitarian argument, this is practical, because they care about recruiting metrics, and hiring firms are looking to hire a diverse workforce. Hiring firms are willing to be more flexible on requirements for diverse candidates, so schools need to do the same.
While I agree broadly with your suggestion that a wide range of factors besides GPA are evaluated, I think your ordering of the importance of those factors is too idealistic.
If business schools really evaluated candidates based on the factors you mentioned in your second paragraph. MBA business schools">M7 classrooms would be filled with investment bankers, private equity guys and consultants with a relatively smaller population of engineers/programmers. These are the professions that give 20 year olds exposure to critical business issues (M&A, Capital Markets, Financial Analysis, Legal Diligence, Market Research, operating plants, building software products, etc.). Broadly speaking these fields demand its professionals be both goal-oriented (and know how to sell that) and have high GPAs (presumably high GMATs) and they provide strong professional experience (leadership, soft skills, access to quality (i.e. high level MBA grads) references)). As a practical matter, these professionals are overwhelmingly Caucasian/Asian American men. The population of professionals in those industries is larger in the United States than it is in any other country and that population (the mere existence of corporate "diversity" programs attests to) is primarily Caucasian/Asian males. I'm not saying that there aren't women or Latin/Black men in these professions but, they are fewer and further between. I'm also not saying that no other profession provides exposure to critical business issues but again, those professions are fewer and further between.
I am fresh off of campus visits to Wharton and HBS and I can tell you that the distribution in the classroom by race, sex or nationality does not reflect the distributions of the populations of those professions. The men/women split was almost 50/50. The HBS classroom had all the flags of the countries represented in the classroom and they filled up three walls. I have been an investment banker for ~6 years and I've been to a number of conferences catered to C-suite executives in the sectors I cover. The ethnic diversity of the populations at those conferences is nowhere near the level of ethnic diversity represented in those classrooms (it was honestly like the Michael Jackson Black or White music video).
Interested in exploring this further, I looked at ~200 LinkedIn profiles of current Wharton students. I recorded sex, ethnicity, international vs domestic (as determined by location of undergrad institution) and pre-MBA experience. In that random sample the M:F ratio was ~45:55 and International:Domestic ratio was ~40:60. One really fascinating thing I found was that the overwhelming majority of Domestic males came from a Private Equity or MBB Consulting background. The only exception was a guy with a SpecOps background. The international males had broader backgrounds i.e. tech sales, engineers, etc but still heavy finance. However, women, both domestic and international were all over the place with regard to pre-MBA profession. There were women with backgrounds in Marketing, non-profit work, Teaching, federal regulation, etc. My conclusion was that if you are an American male, unless you did 2+2 banking to PE or MBB Consulting, you had almost no shot of getting into Wharton but if you are a woman, you can have done whatever the hell you wanted and still gotten in. I'll caveat this by saying 200 people is only ~11% of the class size.
This is not meant to be a criticism of the MBA adcom methods. They have decided that class diversity is very important (maybe for the recruiting metrics reason you mentioned) and as such, build the class around that. But, there is a give and take between building the most "qualified" class and building the most "diverse" class. We are fooling ourselves if we think prioritizing one does not mean some sacrifice of the other and from what I learned on my visits, they are firmly entrenched in prioritizing diversity.
Just went through the process. Strongly agree
So true.
I remember a story from my MBA days (I went to an M7). Was at a party and met an IB recruiter who recruits at my school. We get into talking and she says my school isn't diverse. I told her that's very strange to hear, because for me it's been hands-down the most diverse environment I've been in. Almost half the class came from another country. She says "yeah but that's not the diversity I meant . . we care about four groups: female, black, latino and military". As such, my school didn't meet her standard for diversity because it was behind other schools in those categories. Meanwhile I had a ton of classmates from China and India who were some of the most interesting people I'd ever met.
The whole diversity thing has become such a joke, schools just want to check boxes to meet the standards of others, who in turn are just trying to check their own boxes as well.
Graduated from an ivy MBA business schools">M7 and this is spot on
It's about incentives and positioning.
If you're in undergrad and you want to go to grad school for anything - medicine, law, mba, etc. you're going to look at the averages of the schools you want to attend. Also, if you want a certain profession, say banking, you will look at average grades needed. So if you're pre-med or pre-law you mirror your grades to averages of the schools you want i.e. 3.8+. For people that want to one day get a job in whatever field and/or go to bschool you can see you only need a 3.5 +/- and thus mirror grades to those averages. To an extent its a self fulfilling prophecy.
I went to a decent school and they had grade curving. If the average was 80%, everyone would lose 10% on their final grade to push down the average GPA. Not sure if they do that in the schools you mentioned, but it would explain why the GPA is not higher.
Sorry, but I don't understand Why did they push down the average GPA?
So there are no classes that have an 90% average due to being easy and making sure that having a good GPA actually means you are good compared to your peers.
Is a 4.0 GPA really worth anything if your school has an average GPA of 3.8? How do you determine who is actually good?
Because the MBA is NOT an academic or professional degree. Higher GPAs (w/ no work experience) tend to herd into law school/med school/academia.
Business schools require a few years' work experience, so GPA is much less important when weighed against, you know, actual career success and accomplishments. The GMAT is what's used to benchmark your mental horsepower. Anything over a 720 puts you in the top 6% of exam takers for the key skills b-schools want (pattern recognition, the ability to perform conversions and to express one thing in terms of another, reading comprehension, data sufficiency and materiality, estimation skills, critical reasoning, etc). The interview component screens for EQ (which is really their way of ensuring you won't embarrass yourself when placed in front of recruiters). Taken in tandem these far more effectively measure and communicate what hiring managers expect/desire from their candidate pools.
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say that it is not an academic or professional degree? Most people get an MBA to advance their professional career?
I don't see how law and med school relate to an MBA. Most people who are interested in business aren't even looking at law and med school.
I think the point was that law and med school don't require prior experience, they are "professional" in that they teach you all the basic skills in the classroom so their only criteria is ability to learn (GPA/tests). MBA different because they care more about what you've already developed before showing up.
You get a JD specifically to become a lawyer. You get an MD to become a doctor. The degree is a step in a process for getting licensed to do a specific job. And since you don't need work experience in either case, GPA has to weigh more.
What does one become with an MBA? What does it qualify you to do that your previous professional experience hasn't?
It's a generalist business degree mostly used for signaling purposes. So it's neither an academic degree or one required for any professional licensing.
I would agree with some of the sentiment below.
These really these are averages so the range is going to be quite large. I have had clients with a 2.9 get into top schools, as well as 4.0s. Despite having a relatively low GPA, that does not necessarily preclude you from being accepted to a top school; low GPAs can be mitigated either with additional coursework you have done after undergrad, or a blow-it-out of the water GMAT.
A good story about why your GPA is so low also helps. That is why I tell my clients to "data mine" their GPA. Did you maybe bomb freshman year? Then you can say your GPA for Sophomore - Senior year was much better. Or maybe your GPA in your major was much better, let business schools know. If you have a low GPA, look for a story you can tell admissions in the optional essay that you really did a lot better than your GPA shows.
It's because you fucking nerds with high GPAs don't know how to exist in a social setting and don't make it to MD or CEO because your inability to talk to someone skullfucks you
lol truth
haha cheaaa, but replace MD with getting a job at all lol, +1 sb
Some people went to schools without grade inflation.
Simple as that.
UChicago/Cal/UCLA/Princeton/Northwestern i think are some of them. I honestly don't think people who have a 3.3, 3.5 are worse than kids that went to other top schools with 3.8-3.9?
I actually think 3.6-3.7 is pretty high for avg. (but that's probably because I studied in a major & school where the median grade was forced to be B- for all major courses.
I hate GPA as a benchmark and I wish the system was done away with altogether when it comes to relevancy in your post graduation job search. There are a lot of factors that go into GPA, for which I don't think it should be taken at face value.
I transferred into finance halfway through undergrad because the engineering program I started out in just wasn't right for me. I had a 3.9 GPA in that program, but switched schools where my credits transferred but not the grades and in finance I was starting more advanced classes with 0 credits to buffer. I even tested out of a prerequisite class which was an unusual accomplishment that gave me additional credits to finish sooner but didn't factor into GPA. Then, despite getting torpedoed by a "C" in a class which was made difficult largely due to the professor's disorganization, I still managed to pull through B-school with a 3.45, which I rounded up to 3.5 on my resume.
Looking back, I feel like the pressure of the GPA system encouraged me to game the system and pass up on opportunities which would have given me better life skills. For example, I wanted to take a class in Mandarin, but I knew it would be hard especially given my other course load that semester. So... I took an easy elective instead where an A+ was much more attainable. Looking back I wish I just went for the riskier classes and not worried what anyone would have thought if it cost me a lower GPA.
What I'm trying to say is that a high GPA might be more of an indicator that the student "played it safe", or just got lucky and the "+" or "-" shenanigans worked in his or her favor. A student with a lower GPA might not be dumber than anyone else - but instead chose a more challenging load of courses.
Past your first job nobody gives a damn what your GPA was, so in the long run it doesn't matter anyway. Experience after college weighs much more. All that counts from college is that piece of paper accrediting that you made it through the program!
no one cares about grades at B School anymore, unless you have a scholarship and need to maintain.
True!
GPA is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to a strong b-school application. You need to check the box when it comes to GPA, but the adcom cares more about the quality of your work experience (i.e. have you led teams, driven increases in revenue, launched new products, or otherwise made a quantifiable impact on your company?) as well as your GMAT score, which is a good indicator of whether or not you are up for the rigors of b-school.
Any thoughts on getting an MBA after day getting an MSRED? Have a engineering degree from a target school and MSRED from top tier school. What are the odds of getting into a Booth, NW, Wharton with a 3.8 in the grad program and slightly below 3 from Target undergrad?
.
.
Try do an engineering major at a top/ivy level school and you'll know
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