Lifetime Achievement Award In MBA Admissions: Dawna Clarke At UVA Darden by: John A. Byrne on October 30, 2024 | 1,884 Views October 30, 2024 Copy Link Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Share on Reddit Darden MBA students at commencement. They are among the more than 70,000 students that Dawna Clarke has had the final decision to admit to an MBA program. Photo/Andrew Shurtleff Photography, LLC GOING BACK TO DARDEN WAS NO EASY DECISION FOR CLARKE While her return to Darden may seem a no-brainer, the decision was still difficult in itself. At the time, Clarke had been in a new role for only two months as the chief MBA strategist and senior consultant at mbaMission, a leading MBA admissions consulting firm. She had left Tuck after an 11-year stint as admissions chief to take the opportunity to work with Jeremy Shinewald, who she had admitted to Darden in 2001 when Clarke was head of admissions. No less concerning were the implications for her husband, Jon Damren who owns and operates a sporting goods business in New Hampshire. Her husband had driven the two hours north from their own summer home in Maine to meet with Beardsley for what was meant to be a one-hour session. After dropping her off, Damren decamped to Pugnuts Ice Cream parlor where he could get an Internet connection and do some work. “I had a fantastic conversation with Scott in his living room followed by continued conversation on a long walk on the beach,” remembers Clarke. “We immediately connected over several topics including our mutual love of Maine. I was impressed with how much Scott had accomplished at Darden within such a short period of time as higher education tends to move a bit slowly.” RETURNING AMID A FULL-BLOWN CRISIS The one hour stretched into four. When Damren finally picked up his wife, he could see her keen interest in the opportunity and expressed his willingness to travel back and forth between New Hampshire and Charlottesville if the job was offered. “I recall him saying ‘It’s such a great opportunity for you, and I really think we can make it work.’” A big draw to the job, Clarke acknowledges, was her admiration for its new dean who had then been in the job for two years. “I was really impressed by the momentum at Darden when I interviewed with Scott,” she recalls. “It wasn’t just a good first impression. One of the things I love the most about representing Darden is the ongoing continuous positive momentum including Darden’s commitment to maintaining its stellar reputation for its educational experience and outstanding faculty.” Nonetheless, she re-entered her old stomping grounds at a moment of crisis. Even though the Unite the Right protesters came in from out of town and even though it was a random event in a place known for its progressive values, the incident had a predictable impact on early applications to both the wider university and its business school. For international students, who have little understanding of American politics and protests, it was enough to scare off many who might have had Darden on their target lists. For underrepresented minorities and Jews in the U.S., the torchlight procession and racist chants on the university’s grounds—meant to evoke marches of Hitler Youth—was to erase (see Darden: After Hate Came to Charlottesville). Dawna Clarke on one of many international recruiting trips. In 2019, she was in Manchu Pichu after a recruiting trip through Latin America. As soon as she arrived, Clarke began organizing retreats for the entire admissions team at her home to brainstorm ideas to offset the expected plunge in applications. The team began an early action admissions round, created a diversity conference, and launched a marketing effort to promote reasons why a student should come to Charlottesville (see How Darden Is Putting The Charlottesville Protest Behind It). While applications to the MBA program plunged 18% and the acceptance rate jumped to 32.9% in the year after the rally from 24.5%, Clarke’s team averted the worst of it. In fact, Darden was able to enroll a class of 334 first-year MBAs in 2018, slightly better than the 326 the school enrolled in 2017. DRAFTING A JANUARY TERM CLASS DURING THE PANDEMIC In common with other schools, Clarke then had to deal with the massive disruptions caused by the pandemic. Many international students could no longer travel to the U.S. to start their studies. So Darden became the only top school to create and offer a January term to deal with the fallout from COVID-19. “We navigated Covid with ultimate kindness. The staff was willing to replicate the entire curriculum for the January term to do it. No other team did that. We recruited and delivered the first January term of 58 students in January of 2021. It came from the understanding that many students couldn’t get here in August. Some were international students who couldn’t get here in time and some were people who wanted to cut the opportunity costs. We needed to accommodate them.” More consequently, though, Darden became one of the first highly selective business schools to go test-optional. She and Dean Beardsley had long felt that standardized test scores were being over-indexed in admission decisions for years, partly due to their inclusion in some MBA rankings (see Should MBA Programs Make The GMAT and GRE Optional?). After all, they reasoned, does a candidate with an undergraduate degree in a STEM field or one who does significant analytical work truly require a test score? ‘FABULOUS CANDIDATES WHO COULDN’T BREAK 700 ON THE GMAT’ “I have had strong feelings over the years about the over-amplification of test scores in the process,” says Clarke. “At mbaMission, I would interact with fabulous candidates who couldn’t break 700 on the GMAT. That fueled the passion to overhaul the practice. Not all stellar applicants are equally stellar test takers, and people shine for different reasons. I don’t think there is any kind of cookie-cutter approach. There are so many different leadership styles out there. These are people in the beginning stages of crystalizing their skills.” Darden has since moved to a test waiver approach, resulting in the fact that nearly one in five current MBA students did not submit a GMAT or GRE result. “The performance was strong enough among the group of test-optional candidates to continue with the process,” says Clarke. “At first, we were completely test optional during Covid, but we found that it was not in the best interests of the applicant to be test optional because some needed a test. We wanted to come up with a policy that would maximize an applicant’s chance of admission. We pivoted to the test waiver. “Before you apply to Darden, you can apply for a test waiver. A committee will then look at the application to find out if there is enough compelling alternative evidence to succeed at Darden. We are not so rigid to think that can only be proven by a test score. There are so many certifications out there from a CPA to a CFA. We are making data-driven decisions. We should ultimately be looking for people with high leadership potential, not just a high score on a three-and-one-half hour exam.” The school has found that the predictive power of a candidate’s undergraduate GPA and insights gained in the admissions interview strongly correlates with success at Darden, in some cases even more than test scores. Listen To Our Business Casual Podcast With Darden’s Dawna Clarke Previous Page Continue ReadingPage 2 of 3 1 2 3