New Wharton, HBS Research Shows Last Interviewee of the Day is the Worst

A research paper co-authored by Wharton operations and information management professor Uri Simonsohn, shows MBA candidates interviewed at the end of the day are more likely to be rejected than those interviewed earlier. 

On a five-point scale, with five being the best possible score, a similarly qualified applicant who interviewed on the tail end of his top-scoring competition got lower scores overall than what he or she would have otherwise received. Conversely, those who interviewed after a group of weaker competitors got better than expected evaluations. The data covered more than 9,000 interviews done by 31 interviewers, none of whom were alumni.

So if an interviewer interviewed four people, and all four were good, they will think the fifth person is less likely to be good, they say. The effect very well could be unconscious.

They say a phenomenon called "narrow bracketing" was affecting how those late-day candidates were being judged. Narrow bracketing is when an individual makes a decision without taking into account the consequences of many similar choices.

The report is called "Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment" 

Source:  Knowledge@Wharton

Top B-Schools to Go Bankrupt?

Larry Zicklin, former chairman of asset manager Neuberger Berman, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a lecturer at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business says following hte fall of Wall Street and the publishing industry, business schools may go out of business.

On Feb 13, in an article Why Business Schools Teach Transparency but Practice Ambiguity at Knowledge at Wharton  Zicklin said if faculty members assumed larger teaching workloads, while doing less research, universities could deliver a college education at a fraction of its present cost. 

Professors are judged is 99 percent dependent on their research and 1 percent dependent on everything else. 

The money to pay for research should not come from student tuition, he arges.

"I think schools are going to go out of business. You can’t have 100 schools vying to be in the top 25 and spending the money to get there. The new technology, higher cost of universities, and smaller amounts of money available will force the wholesale revamping of higher education, especially in the business area. This is very serious stuff," he says. 

For more information, read the link below. 

Source: Knowledge at Wharton