Clear Admit’s MBA LiveWire continued its run of intense activity last week as the applicant focus shifted from Harvard Business School to the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The Booth admissions team fueled this influx of news by dishing out dozens of interview invitations during the second half of last week and then releasing all Round 1 applicants who didn’t make the interview phase on Friday. Therefore it should come as no surprise that for this briefing, we are examining the data from those who applied to Chicago Booth in Round 1.
For those curious about the HBS R1 interview invitation stage, check out last week’s MBA LiveWire briefing.
In total, 166 Booth candidates shared their status from Round 1 on MBA LiveWire. As always, with MBA LiveWire, we preface our analysis with a reminder that we’re still dealing with a relatively small sample size, although this is a larger number of candidates that we received for our HBS analysis. Of course, the more of you who upload your results, the better MBA LiveWire and these analyses will become. So if you have news, head over to MBA LiveWire to post!
More Than A Numbers Game
There were 58 candidates who posted to MBA LiveWire to indicate that they were denied without an interview. This comprises 35 percent of the Booth applicants we heard from. The average GMAT score of this group is 735, with a range of 650 to 760. The average GPA (of those who reported a GPA on a 4.0 scale) is 3.55. As we mentioned in our HBS analysis last week, there averages are really impressive and would be head-of-the-class stuff at other business schools—yet each and every one of the candidates was rejected by Booth without an interview. One fun tidbit — and again, remember that it is based on a small sample — is that those who were denied by Booth actually had a higher average GMAT score than those who reported being denied by Harvard Business School.
But Numbers Help Keep You In The Running
There were 108 candidates who posted that they had received an interview invite at Booth. This comprises 65% percent of the applicants we heard from. The average GMAT score of this group is slightly higher at 739, with a similar range, 690 to 790. Their average GPA is 3.65, also slightly higher.
What Does It All Mean?
While it would be foolish to draw too many conclusions from this data (see our comments above), the numbers do support the notion that GMAT/GPA are important, but that they are also simply qualifiers. Candidates are given a positive decision (interview invite in this case) based on many more factors that will include the quality of the work experience, community service record, overall impact, leadership qualifications, personal background and goals. We should also acknowledge that there might also be a small bias in terms of the candidates that chose to report their statuses to MBA LiveWire.
Stay tuned for more insights from MBA LiveWire data as the admissions season continues!
