How MBAs Grade The Top B-Schools

And how do MBA graduates, who have spent two years being graded by professors, now grade the faculty that taught them in the classroom? The best scores were received by the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School. The professors at Carnegie were awarded an impressive 4.8 grade, higher than any other top 25 school, including the University of Virginia’s Darden which is generally known to boast the best teaching MBA faculty in the world. Darden still did well, scoring 4.7 and tying with the likes of Harvard, Dartmouth, Chicago and, surprisingly, New York University’s Stern School.

STUDENTS GAVE THE PROFESSORS AT ESADE THE LOWEST GRADE

ESADE in Spain was on the other extreme. The faculty at ESADE got the worst grades of any top 25 school: a 3.9 score. In fact, ESADE was the only top 25 school to receive the lowest grades in three of the five core categories measured by The Economist–the MBA program itself, the faculty, and the facilities where it tied with the London Business School in getting a 3.9 from its graduates. The institution which recieved the highest grades for its facilities was Tuck which got a 4.8. No school can top hotel-like dorm rooms at Dartmouth.

As for culture and classmates, two California schools did best. Berkeley’s Haas School and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business won the best grades for this category, a super high 4.9 average on the five-point scale. York’s Schulich got the lowest grade: a 4.1 for the quality of the school’s culture and classmates.

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS FOR THE SCHOOLS RANKED 26TH THROUGH 50TH

We also crunched the numbers for The Economist schools ranked 26 thorugh 50 and compared those grades within the peer group of the next 25 top schools. On a fairly consistent basis, the scores for the second group of schools were lower than the first–but not by very much. The highest single grade went to Cranfield for its facilities–a 4.8. The lowest single grade went to Melbourne Business School, an abysmal 2.8 for its career center. The equivalent of a grade of F, it was the lowest grade of 250 separate grades assigned to the top 50 schools.

THE BEST SCORING SCHOOLS IN THE SECOND GROUP: INDIANA & YALE

The best scoring school in this second group was Indiana University’s Kelley School. Kelley MBAs awarded their school the highest grades in three of five categories: the quality of the overall MBA program, the quality of the faculty, and the quality of the career center.

Yale’s School of Management also looked pretty good, scoring the highest grades in this second group for both culture and classmates and the quality of the professors in the classroom.

The worst? Melbourne was dead last in the grades it received for both its career center and its facilities.

There’s one other factor to consider when looking at these grades. Turner points out that in order to be included in the ranking, The Economist requires a school to have a minimum number of validated responses based on current intake.  If the intake is up to 43 students, 10 validated responses are required.  If 44-200 students, then 25% of intake.  If more than 200 students, then only 50 total responses are needed (50, not 50%). These are probably statistically sound, but still, it leaves open the possibility that a small school with only 10 responses is being put in the same student assessment ranking as a school with 150 responses.”

(See following page for our table on all the grades for the top 25 schools)

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