MBA Interview Acceptance Rates?

‘PRETENDING TO MAKE SOLID SOMETHING THAT ISN’T’

How accurate are Atwell’s estimates? Not very. Stanford admissions, for example, publicly states that it will interview roughly 1,000 of its applicants. Given the school’s actual acceptance rate, that would put the odds of getting into the school once you get an interview at about 55%–nine percentage points higher than the guess by the self-described MBA Data Guru.

At Harvard Business School, the gap is even higher. Atwell says 50% of those interviewed at Harvard will be admitted to the MBA program. “That’s just wrong from my experience and from what the school has publicly said in the past,” says Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com and a leading admissions consultant who works closely with HBS applicants. Kreisberg says the number is more like 60%–a full ten percentage point difference from Attwell’s estimate which means his data is off by a sizable 20%.

“He’d like you to believe it’s the truth and that it’s based on Bank of England statistics, but it’s BS,” says Kreisberg. “He’s pretending to make solid something that isn’t. The data is incomplete and its untrustworthy. On the other hand, a lot of people do that. It’s called economic forecasting.”

Atwell’s more conservative estimates may well be the result of the GMAT Club’s skewed sample. If his number crunching is accurate, it essentially means that people who share their data on the forums are less likely to get in than those who don’t open their anonymous kimonos.