GMAT

It's depressing that I have a whole blog category called "Cheating," but there you go.

From BusinessWeek:

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid $30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be effectively over.

On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site, Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information.

GMAC said any students found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat, your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."

Read the rest of the article here.

I've decided that I need to be posting more of the discussions I have (largely by email) over the course of the day. I yak all day long about things that might be of interest to readers of the Ivey Files, and I need to get over the fact that reproducing things I've written in an email will by necessity offer up writing that is less than polished (although Lord knows that's true for blog postings as well).

So, just today, I was chatting with some people who were commenting on the habit of finance employers to ask job applicants for their SAT scores (as well as LSAT or GMAT scores, as the case may be). On the one hand, we laughed our butts off -- we're in our mid-thirties and can't imagine that a test we took back in, oh, 1989 (!!) could possibly say anything meaningful about us. Can SAT scores say anything meaningful about someone who just graduated from college? Maybe yes, maybe no. Some argued that SAT scores do say something about raw horsepower under the hood, while others argued that good SAT scores just prove you're good at taking the SATs. Either way, to people who aren't routinely dealing with recruiting practices in the the finance world, it seems weird to ask for the scores.

However, if employers are asking for the scores, then employers obviously see some value in that information, and I'm very curious where that value comes from.

From one of my emails:This is, I suspect, also a reflection of the fact that college grades, and college transcripts  as a whole, don't really mean squat [to the interviewer].Unless you have very inside-baseball *and* recent knowledge of a school's grading practices, as well as knowledge of the grading practices and substantive difficulty of individual courses and professors, transcripts really mean nothing. When I look at a transcript, I have no idea whether PHYS 325 is string theory or "Physics for Poets" (as the gut physics class was called at Columbia in my day). And when I was still on the job market, I was bummed that my law school transcript didn't say who taught my Financial Accounting class at the business school -- it was Roman Weil, and that actually means something to some people, but I never got the benefit of that on my transcript.

The uselessness of transcripts also leads to over-reliance on the name brand of the school to signal something about the applicant.We went on to discuss grade inflation more generally, and I recalled a Boston Globe article from the early 2000's about the fact that 91% of Harvard undergraduates had graduated with honors that year. (The rest of the ivies are pretty inflationary too, so I'm not just picking on Harvard, although it has seemed to be the worst offender.)

So I throw that out there, because transcripts are so unhelpful not just in the job hiring process, but also in the graduate school admissions process.  When applicants complain about the seeming over-reliance on standardized test scores, understand that most transcript are in fact very, very hard to interpret in any meaningful way.

There I days I don't miss being an admissions officer. Last week I attended an MBA admissions panel. I used to do those roadshows, where five admissions officers sit on a stage talking to an audience of hundreds about the admissions process in vague generalities and answer audience questions with vague generalities. Admissions officers are very limited in the candor they can express in public, but there were some nuggets that were dead on, so I'll condense them here and paraphrase a little bit:

1. If your college grades weren't so hot, be upfront about that and explain why. Show that you are in a better position now to do the work. How do you prove that? By taking classes and guiding your recommenders to cite examples from your job that could allay fears about your ability to hack it in a competitive academic environment. Admissions officers care about your undergraduate performance not because they want to obsess needlessly over who you were five or eight or ten years ago, but because they don't want to set you up for failure. They'll also scrutinize your transcript for evidence of both quantitative and verbal skills, so if your background appears to be lacking in one or the other, go make up that deficit either in the classroom or on the job or on your GMAT.

2. Recommendations from people who've seen your day-to-day performance on the job are the best predictor of future performance. Ideally they'll talk about what kind of impact you've had on the organization and on the people with whom you work. Admissions officers know that you likely have not been managing other people yet at this stage in your careers, so you need to think about what impact you've had, and how you achieved those results without direct authority over people (meaning, you managed from the side and managed from below).

Guiding your recommenders is fine: take them out for coffee (the best five bucks you'll spend) and give them examples that you think highlight and demonstrate that impact. Admissions officers insist that you can't and shouldn't write those recommendations yourself, but honestly, they are delusional if they think that even a majority of the recommendations they receive were written by the recommenders rather than the applicants. If admissions officers enforced the rule, they'd have to cut their applicant pool in half. The fact is, most recommenders will not take the time to write the letters themselves and delegate that task to the applicants to varying degrees. Still, it's in your best interest to find recommenders who are willing to write the letters themselves. Those letters are almost always stronger, in my experience, than when you try to speak for your recommenders.

3. Admissions officers are not impressed by long lists of activities. They'd rather you whittle that list down to the activities that really matter to you. Schools are building communities, and they seek people who are engaged with the world around them. They want to see demonstrated, continued involvement, so banging some nails for Habitat once a year isn't going to cut it. Activities are also often a great way to demonstrate your leadership experiences and lessons in your essays.

There were a few statements that made me scribble furiously in disagreement:

1. "Try not to worry about your essays." Huh? That makes no sense. The essays are the most labor-intensive part of the application. I would hope applicants worry about them, if that means taking them seriously and expending a lot of effort on them. It's insulting to require all those essays and then tell applicants not to worry about them.

2. In your essays, "be yourself." "Differentiate yourself." How is that helpful advice? It's not. At all.

3. "Embrace the opportunity to interview." "Be yourself in the interview." Except that some people really stink at interviews. Not everyone is good at interviewing. It's a learned and learnable skill, but it takes practice and plenty of feedback.

4. It's not enough that admissions officers from top business schools butcher English grammar; apparently they have to butcher Latin grammar as well. My ears bled a little bit when one of them referred to her school's "curriculi."

One other observation: I spotted a large number of women dressed inappropriately for a professional event. Simple rules to remember: no miniskirts, and no high-heeled slides (which, aside from looking unprofessional, also sound unprofessional: slap, slap, slap. Not good.)

A last note: this particular admissions event was co-hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Alumni Club of Boston and Kaplan. The venue was papered in slick Kaplan brochures and folders and fliers. Do not choose Kaplan just because of their huge advertising budgets. There are much better GMAT options out there.

Learned about this cool new test prep service based in NYC -- it promises a "holistic" approach to test prep, so you're not just learning how to ace the test (SAT, GMAT, LSAT, etc.), but also learning how to tackle your test anxiety and stress using tools like hypnosis. I haven't ever tried a holistic approach to test prep, but given the number of applicants I hear from who feel absolutely crippled by their test anxiety, I thought I'd share it with you here. Apparently the founder (Bara Sapir) also has a 5-CD course coming out.

More info here.

I received an interesting question recently from Nick, instructor at Mentor Test Prep in DC:

Several LSAT students have asked me what sort of discount an LSAT score that is won under accommodated testing conditions (usually extra time) is given in the minds of law school admissions officers.

I've told most of them that you likely won't hear it from the lips of admissions officers, but I imagine there would be a not-insubstantial discounting of that score, given the implications for the student's ability to excel under the strict timing requirements of law school exams and later practice.

Would you care to tackle that one?  I'm operating on pure gut instinct, and I'd like to be able to speak with some measure of authority on this matter.

This is a controversial topic, and I’m sure I’ll be receiving some hate mail in response, but here goes.

First: As an applicant, purely for admissions purposes, you're likely better off applying with a higher accommodated score than a lower unaccommodated one. (For human development purposes, though, I agree with Paragon to Pieces that accommodations can have a corrupting effect.) Law schools care an inordinate amount about the numbers, no matter what they say publicly. They don’t have to report accommodated scores to the ABA (and by extension to US News), but even so, higher numbers are always better. What an applicant has to worry about is how he stacks up with his higher accommodated number against someone with the same unaccommodated number. Better to be in that particular horse race, though, than to be outside of striking distance because of a lower number.

Second: Plenty of admissions officers are skeptical about accommodations for learning disabilities. They won't say that, but it's true. LSAC might accommodate someone who has trouble “processing information quickly” (or some variation on that theme), and law schools might accommodate such a person in the classroom. The real world won’t, however, and I worry – and plenty of admissions officers worry – about how people who lack skills that are fundamental to practicing law are going to do when they’re outside of the protective cocoon of law school.

Third: Admissions officers generally don’t like to read the reports that explain what the disability is, or what the specific accommodations were. All they look at is the asterisk next to the LSAT score designating it as accommodated. There are universities whose in-house counsel won’t even let admissions officers read the underlying reports. Why? Because knowing what the disability is opens admissions officers up to lawsuits under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Universities prefer to live in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell regime.

Fourth: What all that means for applicants is that if your disability is a physical one (rather than a learning disability), it’s in your interest to write an addendum explaining the nature of the disability. Someone who’s in a wheelchair is still going to have an easier time practicing law than someone who has trouble processing words quickly. If your disability is a learning disability, keep your mouth shut. Do not volunteer any information about the disability; just take the upside of the higher score, and the upside of don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

Fifth: This whole issue is likely to go the way of the dodo. As a result of lawsuits (naturally), neither the GMAT, the GRE, nor the SAT designates scores as accommodated anymore. The days of asterisked LSAT scores have to be numbered. See here, here, and here.

More Ivey Files postings on this issue here and here.

Interesting posting at blog 'Number 2 Pencil' here. (Her "About Me" page is interesting too.)

Article by an attorney who specializes in accommodations issues here.

Article in favor of non-designated scores here.

Sue Shellenbarger's most recent "Work & Family" column in the Wall Street Journal -- "Young Workers With Dyslexia, ADD Find Office Less Accommodating Than School" -- resonated with me. She notes that employers have not kept pace with the recent growth in diagnoses of learning disabilities and the accommodations Gen Y students have grown accustomed to at school.

I have mixed feelings about her call for more accommodations. I would guestimate that at least half of the Gen Y college students and recent grads I work with have been diagnosed with a learning disability, which makes me wonder whether something still counts as a disability when it seems increasingly to be the norm.

I also wonder -- and worry -- about the students who receive such generous accommodations in college (from both their schools and their parents) that they emerge from college convinced they can't handle even basic tasks. I worked with a recent college graduate a few years ago who refused, based on his disability, to assemble a list of graduate schools he was interested in and their deadlines. That's it. School, deadline. School, deadline. Repeat twelve times. I even showed him where to find the deadlines on the grad school websites. He was convinced he couldn't do it and reacted with shock and anger when I told him I wouldn't do it for him. I felt like the first person to say to him, "you must do this yourself."

Perhaps I was. I didn't need to ask him how he'd graduated from college -- a good one
-- with that (perceived) incapacity, because I knew that his parents
and school administrators had basically absolved him of having to do
anything for himself. I did, however, ask him how he would ever hold down a job if he couldn't handle a task as rudimentary as that one. All those accommodations had really set him up for failure. It was depressing. At what point are these accommodations exacerbating learning disabilities, and creating life disabiltities? Consider the accommodations that Shellenbarger recommends employers make available for this influx of learning disabled millennials:

• tape recorders to record or dictate information
• frequent short breaks
• quiet workspace
• specific filing or organizational systems
• varied presentation methods during training

The one that I find most unrealistic is the fourth -- since when is it the boss's job to keep an employee organized? Even the article, which is very pro-accommodations, quotes a Disabilities Act lawyer about employees who "have an undue sense of entitlement":

Attorney Patricia H. Latham of Washington, D.C., tells of a client with ADD who kept arriving to work late. "They're angry with me, and I don't think they should be, because that's part of my problem," the woman said and asked Ms. Latham to write her bosses a letter. Ms. Latham refused, telling the woman, "your employer doesn't have to put up with your being late to work."

There's no question in my mind that colleges and the parents of Gen Y feed that completely bonkers sense of entitlement and incapability. Could there possibly be a worse way to prepare college students for the working world?

The article also made me ponder the number of people who manage to wrangle learning disability diagnoses to secure accommodations on their standardized admissions tests. I know for a fact that some people game the system, and somewhere licensed professionals all sign off on this stuff, which makes it awfully hard to tell applicants, "that's bad -- don't do it." Interestingly, after being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the makers of the GMAT exam no longer indicate on their score reports whether the test taker has been accommodated. LSAT score reports still do, but surely some litigious applicant (or more likely the applicant's parent) is putting a stop to that as I type.