The Incredible Shrinking MBA App by: John A. Byrne on July 16, 2012 | 3 Comments | 7,524 Views July 16, 2012 Copy Link Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Share on Reddit It started with Harvard Business Schoolās decision in May to cut in half the number of essays required of MBA applicants. Then, Stanfordās Graduate School of Business dropped an essay requirement, going from four essays to just three. MIT Sloan scrapped one of three required essays for this year. And only last week, Northwestern Universityās Kellogg School of Management cut by nearly a third the total word limit on its essays to 1,525 words from 2,200 last year. One of Kelloggās essaysāāWhat one interesting or fun fact would you want your future Kellogg classmates to know about you?āānow has a limit of just 25 words! One potential applicant quipped that the day will soon be here when business schools reduce their essays to a mere 140-character tweet. In fact, the University of Iowaās Tippie School last year awarded a free scholarship to an applicant who submitted a winning tweet as part of his MBA application. āSOMETHING IS BEING LOSTā āAlmost every school has either reduced the number of questions or shortened its word limits this year,ā says Linda Abraham, founder and president of Accepted.com, a prominent admissions consulting firm. āI donāt think anyone wants to write the American novel here, but something is being lost. The knee jerk response from some applicants is, āGreat. I can write less.ā But it means that a school wonāt get to know its applicants as well and applicants will find it more difficult to express the nuances in their applications that can improve their chances of getting in.ā Whatās behind the incredible shrinking MBA application? Dee Leopold, Harvard Business Schoolās managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid, has long believed that the essay portion of the application had become too large a part of the admissions process. āIāve been saying that admissions is not an essay writing contest and that is where a lot of the anxiety (among applicants) is,ā Leopold said. āWhen we never met anyone, essays were the only way we had for applicants to get some form of personalization of the application. But since the Class of 2004, weāve been interviewing all admitted applicants. The interviews are a big investment of our time, money and assessment energy, so I think itās time to have a corresponding reduction in that initial (essay) hurdle.ā Indeed, when the changes by Harvard were first announced on May 22, the school said that applicants who were invited to an admissions interview would then have to submit a third essay–a reflection on the interview itself–within 24 hours. Since then, however, Leopold has even scaled this requirement back to little more than an email with no word limits. “Think of this as an email you might write after a meeting,” she wrote on her blog. “We will be much more generous in our reaction to typos and grammatical errors than we will be with pre-packaged responses.ā Leopoldās change of heart also clearly signaled the schoolās desire that applicants not use MBA admission consultants to draft or polish the response. āEmails that give any indication that they were produced BEFORE you had the interview will raise a flag for us. We do not expect you to solicit or receive any outside assistance with this exercise,ā she added. IS A CONSULTING BACKLASH TO BLAME FOR THE CUTBACKS? Some admission consultants now believe the cutbacks reflect something of a backlash to their increasing involvement in the application process. To the top ten schools, some consultants now estimate that eight of every ten international applicants are using their services and as many as half of all domestic applicants. Reducing the number of essays required and shortening the word limit ostensibly gives applicants less reason to employ a consultant. Asked by Poets&Quants how Leopold believes consultants would react to Harvardās changes, she had said, āItās going to be disruptive to admission consultants who write essays.ā Continue ReadingPage 1 of 2 1 2 Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.