Every year on our facebook group GMAT Avengers consulting, I hear multiple unfortunate stories of candidates, who paid some well-intentioned MBA admissions consultants a butt load of money during admissions cycle and still got rejected from everywhere.
“I had a GMAT score of 650, and my MBA admissions consultant believed in my potential for top MBA programs like ISB. Despite his confidence and his impressive 92% success rate, I unfortunately did not receive interview invitations from the five schools I applied to.”
This post on the GMAT Avengers Consulting Group last year made me think hard on the issues MBA candidates face with their MBA consultants and I realized that it is mainly because of 3 reasons-
- Consultants sometime blatantly overstate a semi-hopeless candidate’s chances of admission, just to increase the likelihood that the candidate will purchase MBA consulting services.
- They tend to take on a lot more clients than they can actually handle at a point.
- Candidate’s applications get over-managed by consultants leading to dull lifeless essays which the candidate fails to connect to.
My point here isn’t to criticize any particular MBA admissions consulting firm and I have absolutely zero interest in damaging their business. But I’ve seen a lot of companies commit exactly the same sin for trapping candidates: blatantly overstating a candidate’s chances of admission to earn that extra penny.
There is no denying the fact that acceptance rates at the world’s best business schools remain stubbornly low. They range from just 7% at Stanford and 11% at Harvard Business School to 32% at the University of Michigan’s Ross School. ISB’s acceptance rate is just 10%. No matter how you slice it, when it comes to applying to the prestigious business schools, the odds are set firmly against you.
So how is it possible that an MBA admissions firm is claiming an astonishing 100% success rate for clients who last year applied to at least four top MBA programs? These companies sometimes blow up their success rates as well and in order to keep up to the stated numbers they enroll more candidates than they can manage and it directly leads to shabby consultation and compromised outputs for the candidates.
Big firms have their set rules to function and it is difficult for them to shift from those set rules and guidelines, otherwise how will they produce applications in assembly line? The outcome again is the candidate’s misery with no personalized assistance, untailored essays and not enough hours dedicated to each aspect of their application.
Selecting a good MBA Admissions consultant is a difficult task. It’s not an easy task in a market filled 100’s of consultant all promising the moon and above 90% conversion rate.
So we have decided to put our money where our mouth is. We will work with only 10 candidates for ISB R2 for free but will charge the amount only if you get an interview call. Risk is ours but success yours.
