The Financial Times ran an article on Monday about the creative route to an MBA which described the many changes to the admissions process taken by several top schools this year. This year, many MBA programs are reducing the number of essays required for admissions while some are allowing candidates to submit Powerpoint presentations or even video essays. The FT writer thinks that “essay writing it seems is now considered an anachronistic and often irrelevant skill for the 25 or 27-year olds applying to business school.”
To me, some of these changes are old hat. The Cambridge MBA has already introduced some of the changes described. Two years ago, we reduced the number of essay questions to the current three questions and also slashed the maximum word limits. These changes were not made to make it easier for applicants or to respond to the twitterification of society where everything has to fit onto a mobile screen. Instead, it was driven by us asking the question, what do we need to know about our applicants and what is the best combination of ways to ascertain candidate qualities.
As Head of MBA admissions, I have to make sense of the information gleaned from a candidate’s academic record, GMAT, essays, work references and the interview to determine if this candidate is the right fit for the Cambridge MBA. The academic record and GMAT give an idea of a candidate’s academic ability, which is important given the intense pace of the programme. Although not perfect, work references do give an idea of a candidate’s ability to work effectively in groups. And the combination of application essays and interview give a better idea of a candidate’s motivations and whether the Cambridge MBA is the right platform for the candidate at this point in time.
Each of our essays serves a specific purpose. The essay on career goals should give us a better idea of the reasons behind the choices that a candidate has made in his or her life up to this point. The essay on greatest failure gives us a better idea of a candidate’s resilience or grit. And from this year, we have replaced the previous essay on industry changes (which led to many similar sounding essays, some of which read like a cut and paste job from articles in the Economist) with a new question on changes that you would like to make in your organisation. Our interviews, which are conducted by members of faculty, corroborate the information in the essays and also give more layers to our understanding of a candidate’s intellectual ability and communication skills.
I am unconvinced by the effectiveness of some of the forms of assessment described in the FT article compared to our more traditional combination of essays and interviews. Asking a candidate to make a powerpoint presentation sounds like a good test of presentation and communication skills but from my experience, an interview can ascertain the same qualities and much more. And I have always found it easy to spot the creative person through their essays, work history, references and interview performance.
My last point is a personal reflection on the comment by the MBA director at IE Business School that “communications skills and presentation skills are going to be a lot more important than written communications in the future.” I disagree. The confidence to speak to an audience is important but the things that stick in people’s minds are words and powerful images, not pretty powerpoint presentations. In fact, I will be contrarian and say that technological changes will make the written word an even more important part of our communications toolkit. While, twitter and other micro-blogging sites will force us to distill arguments into shorter points, the premium on good writing will increase. I have paid subscriptions to the Economist, the Financial Times and the New York Times not because they have great powerpoint presentations, but because they are able to convey good ideas with great writing. And while the application process is not an essay-writing competition, business schools should not denigrate the important role that written communications plays in the modern world.
