Video Screen Tests Come To Admissions

Kate Smith, Kellogg’s new director of admissions. Photo by Andreas Larson

At Kellogg, MBA candidates will have several minutes to answer a spontaneous, randomized question on a Skype-like screen. “We felt like this was a great opportunity to meet our applicants from wherever they might be in the world,” says Kate Smith, Kellogg’s assistant dean of admissions and financial aid. ”We felt that we were past the tipping point in terms of video technology and comfort with it – most applicants would have used Skype or FaceTime.”

Kellogg’s applicants will have the luxury of three tries to record a compelling answer. If they bomb the first question, they can discard it and request another one – they’ll receive a different question each time. While it sounds stressful, the admissions team hopes it will lead to more authentic interactions with the more than 5,000 people who apply to Kellogg each year.

VIDEO QUESTIONS AT KELLOGG WILL HELP ‘BRING TO LIFE THE PERSON WE’VE LEARNED ABOUT ON PAPER’

”The spirit of the questions is to get to know our candidates on a more personal level in a spontaneous format,” Smith says. “They’re designed to bring to life the person we’ve learned about on paper in the application, including their passions, interests and ideas.”

The video component will not replace Kellogg’s personal interviews – a mainstay of the B-school’s rigorous application process. Instead, it’s hoped the taped responses will give the admissions committee a chance to meet the candidate in a video format, Smith says. Currently, second-year students and alumni conduct many of the in-person interviews.

Kellogg’s decision to go with a video requirement got a welcome response from some admissions consultants. “Schools should be taking advantage of technology to get closer to students,” says Betsy Massar, founder of Master Admissions. “It’s just what’s going on these days, pretty much everywhere so it doesn’t surprise me. It’s just another way of communication. I hope that Kellogg makes clear and students remember that the best videos will be the most honest ones, not the fanciest or the trendiest.”

Kellogg, says da Silva, consulted with Rotman a few months ago before deciding to launch the video test for its more than 5,000 annual applicants. Rotman claims that even jittery applicants have generally given the new video test a thumbs up. “They thought it was a little daunting but they liked it because they knew that at least they would be able to get in front of the admissions committee virtually,” she says. “It gave them the chance to tell their story, although it was a little intimidating.”

But it was more often than not revealing to the admissions folks. One of the questions used to remotely quiz Rotman candidates last year was, Who inspires you? “Some will go down this path about the mother who raised them alone and sacrificed everything to do it,” says da Silva. “Something like that might never come up in another part of the paper application. More than just screening for communication skills, it gives us a more authentic picture of the candidate.”

During its pilot year, Rotman didn’t grade the videos. But now it intends to do so. “About 10% to 15% were just not very strong,” estimates da Silva. “Then there was a small percentage, about 20%, that really stood out, largely because of the content and not just delivery. The rest were fine.”

ROTMAN IS EXPANDING ITS BANK OF PRE-RECORDED QUESTIONS FROM JUST 25 TO MORE THAN 100 THIS YEAR

Rotman is making some adjustments. During the pilot, a standard question was asked of all applicants and then a second question was randomly chosen from a bank of some 25 queries. Each question required a response no longer than one and one-half minutes.

But the element of surprise was sometimes lost when applicants anonymously began posting the questions on message boards. So this year, the standard question has been tossed and the list of questions has been expanded to slightly more than 100—half of them involving values and the remaining half on experiences and interests. “You need a lot of content because it certainly gets out in the virtual world,” says da Silva. “Answers to the standard question came off like an over-prepared interview.”