KAPLAN: Most Top B-Schools Prefer GMAT to GRE

Kaplan reports that despite a majority of top business schools now accepting the GRE as an admissions alternative to the GMAT, just 16% of prospective business school students said they considered taking the GRE route.

Of the 84% who said they never considered taking the GRE instead of the GMAT, 60% said the primary reason was because some or all their target schools only accept the GMAT; 19% said it was because they felt applicants who submit a GMAT score have an admissions advantage over applicants who submit a GRE score; and 8% said it was because they thought they’d do better on the GMAT than on the GRE. 

Kaplan Test Prep believes an increasing number of business school will accept the GRE in the years to come, though applicants who submit a GMAT score may continue to hold an advantage, especially because the GMAT is adding an Integrated Reasoning section in June to reinforce its status as the best predictor of student success in business school.  Kaplan will continue to track this trend.

In 2011, there were a record 700,000+ administrations of the GRE worldwide.

Source: Kaplan

NYU Stern Accepting Applications for Shanghai

NYU Stern is now taking applications for a new master’s degree in business analytics, which will start in May 2013. The business-analytics students will the first to earn degrees at NYU Shanghai.

The curriculum will focus on data analysis and the use of modelling tools for business forecasting. It will be modular, with 12 months of coursework spread out over two years, and in-class sessions supplemented by online learning.
 

While some classes will be in New York, some will be at NYU’s new campus in Shanghai;. East China Normal University will help host the first undergraduate class, scheduled to start in the fall of 2013, and the Chinese Ministry of Education has given its blessing to a range of degree programmes.

Source: The Economist

GMAC Awards $7.1M to 12 Organizations to Improve B-School Education

The Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) has announced the second-phase winners of a $10 million program designed to enhance graduate management education. Twelve organizations, including business schools in the United States, Canada, Spain, India and Botswana, were awarded a total of $7.1 million in funding to develop ideas submitted as part of the Ideas to Innovation (i2i) Challenge.

The first phase of the i2i Challenge drew more than 650 initial ideas in response to the question, “What one idea would improve graduate management education?” 

Twenty ideas were selected; as part of the second phase, 25 organizations from seven countries were invited to create innovative graduate management education programs inspired by winning Phase 1 concepts. 

On April 17th, GMAC announced 12 finalists, including ESADE in Spain, the University of Botswana and Net Impact, an international network of top graduate business schools.

The winning i2i proposals each focus on one of three areas: creating social responsibility and service learning opportunities as part of business school, developing new business leadership opportunities for military veterans and encouraging global collaboration between educational institutions.

Source:  Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC)

Columbia Business School gets $25 Million for Manhattanville Campus

Leon Cooperman ’67, chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors and a member of Columbia Business School’s Board of Overseers, has pledged a gift of $25 million to support the construction of the School’s new home in Manhattanville.

The gift is the second largest donation in support of the cutting-edge facilities, which will be part of Columbia University’s expansion just north of its Morningside Heights Campus, the university said.

Henry R. Kravis ’69, cofounder, cochairman, and co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) and cochair of the School’s Board of Overseers, pledged $100 million for the project in October 2010.
 

In 2007, Cooperman established the Cooperman Scholarship Challenge, which helped to create more than 40 need-based scholarships. He also created the Leon Cooperman Scholarship in 2000 to support students who need financial assistance, with preference given to graduates of New York City public schools; the scholarship currently supports seven MBA students. In 1995, he endowed the Leon Cooperman Professorship of Finance and Economics, a chair held by Professor Geert Bekaert since 2000.
 

The School’s Manhattanville Campus — designed by New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro — will reflect the fast-paced, high-tech, and highly social character of business in the 21st century, according to Columbia Business School. The new buildings will encompass approximately 450,000 square feet, resulting in a net additional 170,000 square feet. The facilities will create multi-functional spaces that foster a sense of community — spaces where students, faculty members, alumni, and practitioners can gather to exchange ideas.

Source: Columbia Business School

 

Spain’s Esade, Georgetown in the US and the Brazilian business school Fundaçao Getulio Vargas are launching a tripartite degree for executives working in European and U.S. companies with tinterests in Latin America, according to the Financial Times.

 

The one-year programme will be taught in Madrid, Washington DC and Rio de Janeiro and also in Shanghai. The Corporate International Masters degree, as it is called, will award a corporate MBA from Esade, a Masters in International Business from Georgetown’s McDonough school of business and an executive masters degree from FGV. 

 

The first of the eight modules will begin in March 2013 and there will be online tutorials between each module. Completion of the degree will also require a thesis.

The new programme is building on the success of the Global Executive MBA run by Georgetown University and Esade. 

Source: FT

Harvard MBAs to Sell Admissions Essays

A startup  by six Harvard Business School (HBS) MBAs will start a service MBA Bee to sell HBS application essays written by candidates recently admitted to the school, and is targeting international, military or other nontraditional backgrounds the same kind of access to information that counterparts from more traditional backgrounds like finance and consulting more typically have, say its founders. 

MBA Bee will build a database of successful essay sets which potential applicants can then buy according to key criteria that matches their own, such as career experience, age, and whether they are an international or domestic applicant. Initially fellow classmates willl surrender their own actual application’s essays for free, though they would consider a revenue-share agreement if it allowed them to build out the business and expand to other top schools, they told P&Q.
 

MBA Bee last month launched its first website, ArmedForcesMBA.com, where it will target military applicants, selling separate sets of essays from successful HBS applicants from each the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Marines Corps and Navy. The selling price will be $100 per set, though they are available now for a special introductory offer of $50.

Though not officially endorsed by the school, the new essay-selling startup is an outgrowth of HBS’s recently revised MBA curriculum, in which student teams receive seed money from the school to create and launch a new product or service development project, P&Q reports.

Source: CNN

Chicago Booth Encourages Candidates to Visit Campus

Kelley Curtin, Chicago Booth assistant director of admissions is encouraging candidates to visit the school and take advantage of the daily campus visit program, which provides opportunities to engage with current students, sit in on a morning or afternoon class, meet with members of the admissions team and explore the Charles M. Harper Center. 

Visiting prospective applicants will be greeted by Dean’s Student Admissions Committee (DSAC) volunteers, who also help lead a morning admissions information session, conduct tours of campus and arrange informal lunches with current students. 

 

Students should plan on visiting a class; classes are held  Monday through Friday, and class visits can be scheduled either in the morning from 8:30 to 10:15 a.m. or in the afternoon from 1:30 to 3 p.m. 

 

The Daily Campus Visit Program page also includes information about scheduling an informal lunch with student representatives from a range of student groups, including the Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital Group (EVC), Marketing Group, African American MBA Association (AAMBAA), Hispanic American Business Students Association (HABSA), Armed Forces Group,Chicago Women in Business (CWiB), and OUTreach (LGBTQ students and allies). Registration for the date of your preference is strongly recommended. Lunches take place from 12:30 to 1:15 p.m., and lunch is provided.

Source: Chicago Booth

MIT Sloan Use Neuroscience to Understand Consumer Spending

Researchers at MIT Sloan’s Neuroeconomics Laboratory are looking at brain activity to help  understand what ifluences people’s decisions to spend money, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center is scanning people’s brains as they make real decisions involving money, hoping to test traditional assumptions about consumer spending. 

Recent research using brain scanning found that when making personal financial decisions online, subjects were more likely to trust bank representatives whose faces resembled their own. 

 

Prelec and colleagues also have used brain scanning to understand how people feel about payment and personal finances, revealing that brain structures associated with pain were activated when subjects saw a high price appear next to a product they were considering purchasing. This could help explain why consumers favor purchasing arrangements that disguise the payment transactions, such as subscriptions, or why people seem more willing to pay a higher price when paying with credit rather than with cash. It may literally feel less painful.

Source: MIT Sloan

Goizueta to Help Applicants Prepare for GMAT

The Evening MBA admissions office at Emory’s Goizueta Business School is planning to help applicants with GMAT, a GMAT strategy course for prospective applicants who have completed portions of their application. 

The school is offering a free four-day course, designed to supplement individual GMAT study plans, will be held over two weekends, April 28th-29th and May 5th-6th. Participants will review more than 60 math concepts tested on the GMAT, learn simple tips and techniques to solve high-level GMAT problems and understand how to develop a study plan to achieve a target score.
 

Applicants to Goizueta’s evening MBA program must submit their completed application, except for GMAT scores, by April 27th. They then take part in the GMAT strategy session, take the GMAT exam and submit their score by the June 15th deadline for admission and scholarship review.

Source: Goizueta Business School

B-Schools Fight Plagiarism with Turnitin

UCLA Anderson School of Management thas rejected 52 applicants to its MBA program  this year on suspicion they had plagiarised more than 10 per cent of their admissions essays, according to the Financial Times. 

Many business schools are now seeing an increase at the admissions stage. Turnitin software is the main weapon to detect cheating as it has the largest English-language database: 20bn web pages, 110m “scholarly items” secured through partnerships with publishers, and 200m papers submitted to the service. About 300,000 dissertations have just been added from ProQuest, the clearing house for English- language theses. Any thesis or dissertation published since 2008 is now indexed in the Turnitin database.

More than 70% of higher education institutions in North America and almost 95% n the UK have a Turnitin licence. Faculty staff checking essays against the Turnitin database are given a plagiarism percentage score, leaving it to them, or their institution, to decide what is acceptable.

Grenoble Graduate School introduced Turnitin to the school and this resulted in a drop in plagiarism from about 1 in 10 essays to 1 in 100.

Turnitin costs about $2 per student per year.

Some have questioned the ethics of a supplier that also markets software to students (WriteCheck) that enables them to check their work against the database – essentially arming both sides in the plagiarism war. 

Source: FT

Price of a "Top 20" MBA

Poets and Quants has an excellent report on the costs of a "Top-20" MBA.

After years of price inflation for all the top schools, Columbia works out as the most expensive at a staggering $168,307. At the same time, Columbia reports the lowest percentage of MBA students who are receiving financial aid from the school–at 55%, well below 81% at Duke, 80% at Dartmouth, and 75% at Stanford.

But the real figure for most MBA students would appear to be much higher as the estimates for schools factor in "frugal" lifestyles that most people who have already come from well-paid jobs would find it difficult to live on- for example Cornell says its estimate of $11,250 a year for living expenses is “based on the cost of sharing a moderately priced apartment” at a cost of $700 a month rent and putting aside $425 a month for food. Try living on that in a major U.S. city!

Other notes:

In most cases, the  real cost of your MBA will be 10% to 20% higher, given your lifestyle, than the advertised costs.  

Also watch out for catches: 

 

1. Wharton’s $168,000 does not include the cost of its Global Immersion Program, which ranges from $5,800 to $7,800, or the cost to join clubs, attend conferences and “parties." 

2. Stanford’s estimate doesn’t include a required $4,000. “global study tour.” 

Source: Poets and Quants

Why an MBA Is Not Always the Right Choice

Businessweek has featured a guest post from Rose Martinelli, former admissions director at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where she wrote a popular admissions blog, The Rose Report.

 Martinelli believes if candidates do not  undergraduate business degree, the MBA may be a good option because of its focus on the fundamentals of business and experiential opportunities, as well as the breadth of career support available. "Even students who have pursued economics majors or who have done consulting can benefit from the MBA degree if one of the driving reasons for pursuing education is the chance to explore and experiment," she says.

But: "If you have an undergraduate business degree and want additional depth in a particular area, a subject-oriented masters degree may be ideal, however," she says.

To read more, please go to the Businessweek article.

Georgetown McDonough Pushes Real Estate Finance Initiative

Georgetwown's  McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University has raised $6.5 million of $15 million for its Real Estate Finance Initiative, thanks to a $5 million gift by Lauren and Robert Steers (BSBA ’75), the school announced this week. 

The Real Estate Finance Initiative is supposed to be a knowledge-sharing forum where industry leaders and policymakers come together to examine changing trends in the real estate finance sector.

Robert Steers is co-CEO of Cohen & Steers Inc., a global investment firm specializing in real estate investment securities, listed infrastructure, large cap value and preferred-stock portfolios. Steers is also chair of the McDonough School of Business Board of Advisors and a member of Georgetown University’s Board of Directors. Several other alumni have also contributed toward the Real Estate Finance Initiative, putting it well on its way to its fundraising goal.

Source: Georgetown McDonough

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LBS Appoints New Associate Dean

LBS has Wendy Alexander former Member of the Scottish Parliament, has been appointed Associate Dean, Degree Programmes and Career Services, effective 30 April 2012.

She will be responsible for directing the Degree Programmes and Career Services’ departments and for the strategic development, operational management and academic oversight of the Masters programs. She began her business career at Booz & Co, specializing in strategy and organizational issues for global clients, after gaining an MBA from INSEAD. 

Following the 1997 elections, Wendy was appointed Special Adviser to Donald Dewar when he became Secretary of State for Scotland. She went on to become an elected politician in the first Scottish Parliament, subsequently serving as Cabinet Minister with responsibility for both business and higher education.  She was later named as Leader of the Opposition.

For the last nine years, Wendy has been a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde Business School In addition, Wendy has also been working in venture capital and private equity in the energy field. 

Source: LBS 

MBA Program Admissions Deadlines in April

Here are upcoming Round 3 (or 4 or 5) deadlines:

April 4: Darden R3, Chicago R3, Stanford R3
April 5: Kellogg R3
April 10: HBS R3
April 11: INSEAD R1 (January intake)
April 11: CBS RD
April 12: Yale R3
April 18: LBS R4, UCLA R3
April 20: Judge R5
April 23: Tepper R4
April 27: Said R3