Some of those anxiously awaiting word from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business began to receive phone calls yesterday letting them know they’d been accepted, which we saw reflected on the Clear Admit LiveWire. Ross Admissions Director Soojin Kwon confirmed in a post to her Admissions Director Blog that she and her team were set to begin calling U.S. applicants yesterday and will make international calls today. “All decisions will be posted online at 12 p.m. EST on Friday, March 13th,” she wrote.
Kwon didn’t share updates sooner, she says, because her team was making final decisions right up until the last minute in a year when choosing who to admit proved particularly tough. “Not only did we receive more apps, the quality of the apps was higher all around,” she wrote. “I’m not just talking GMAT scores, but also the experiences and skills that applicants have. It was extremely hard to not admit more than we did.”
In keeping with an ongoing commitment to transparency, Kwon has posted a series of fun, informative videos demystifying the application process. As part of the most recent one, she offers some advice to applicants who may be trying to gauge their chances of getting in, sharing the “formula” her team uses in evaluating candidates.
“Think of your chances of getting in a bit like a Bayesian probability study where every data point builds and changes the probability of the outcome in question,” she offers. “It’s a function of applicant quality, interview quality, your career goals, our target class size, our target class profile, our prior year yield, the size of the applicant pool, the quality of your fellow applicants and the collective career goals of the applicant pool.”
She proceeds in the video to unpack each of those individual factors, including those within the applicant’s control, those within the school’s control and those over which neither applicant nor Ross has control. “In fact, there are no constants in this entire equation, meaning there is no sound way to predict the outcome,” she concludes. Kwon recommends forgetting the fancy formulas and giving up trying to predict your chances. “Be you and show us your best self.”
For those who did just that, we hope to soon hear reports that you, too, received one of Ross’s acceptance calls. Good luck!
