I would like to invite all 2009 MBA applicants to sign up for the second 2009 MBA Admissions Telethon on Tuesday, May 13th between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM PT (1:30 PM ET - 3:30 PM ET; 6:00 PM GMT - 8:00 PM GMT). What is the MBA Admissions Telethon?

Two hours when 6 MBA admissions experts will be available to answer your individual questions via telephone. Prior to calling in, you will receive a brief, 6-question questionnaire and submit it along with your resume to a designated email address. (No essays, please.) When you call in, your consultant will review the information you provide, and you will have 15 minutes to discuss with him or her your most pressing MBA admissions questions.

Oh, by the way, the 2009 MBA Admission Telethon is free.

You can learn more details and sign up at 2009 MBA Admissions Telethon.

The trend toward accepting GRE scores in lieu of GMAT scores is continuing to gather force. Motivated by a desire to expand the applicant pool beyond the traditional MBA feeder professions, Stanford University began accepting GRE scores in June 2006.

As Stanford's MBA admissions director Derrick Bolton candidly put it in a Marketwire article released last month: "The GRE test takers are more likely to be women, and more likely to be undergraduates or just a year out, while the GMAT is more popular with those who have been out a few years. ... If we are able to fish in both of those pools, how can that hurt us? [There are] definitely some people who would not have applied to the MBA program had we put an additional barrier of requiring the GMAT." Other U.S. B-schools have followed suit, including Georgetown's McDonough School, MIT's Sloan School, University of Michigan's Ross School, and Johns Hopkins University's Carey Business School.

The days of the GMAT's hegemony appear to numbered in Europe as well. Helsinki School of Economics, Barcelona School of Economics, and ESADE Business School, among others, are also accepting GRE scores. In February, the GMAT suffered another defection when Madrid's Instituto de Empresa (IE) Business School announced it too will accept GRE scores. David Bach, Empresa's Associate Dean of MBA Programs, argues that "Accepting the GRE supports our efforts to attract high-quality participants from very diverse backgrounds, including students who may not have previously contemplated an MBA," according to the March 25 Marketwire story.

The trend is not as shocking as it may appear. According to ETS, the developers of both the GMAT and GRE, neither test is a specialized business skills test, both test math ability at an equivalent level, and 70 percent of the data interpretation questions in the GRE's Quantitative Reasoning section are presented in a "business context."

Source: /www.marketwire.com, March 25, 2008.

A potpourri :

• London Business School Chat on Monday, April 7 at 10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM ET/5:00 PM GMT when Zoë McLoughlin, MBA Marketing Events Manager & Peter Johnson, Admissions Officer - Masters in Finance, will be available to answer your questions. This will be a combined chat for those interested in both the Full-time MBA Program as well as the Masters in Finance.
  
• Senior Editor Paul Bodine’s book, Great Application Essays for Business School , continues to jump off the bookshelves. It has been ranked no. 2 in Amazon.com’s Business Reference books category for some time. A new Chinese-language edition has been published by McGraw-Hill Taiwan and a Korean edition will be published soon. Finally, McGraw-Hill India is providing Indian readers with a way to order the book in India rather than from the U.S.:  contact McGraw-Hill Education India Pvt Ltd. at UK_Prasad@mcgraw-hill.com or Phone: 091- 044 – 24769557 – 62 (6 Lines), Mobile: 99400 64903.
• Waitlist Chat transcripts. We have hosted several waitlist chats with different program over the last several months. You can review waitlist policies at different schools in the following transcripts:
• Michigan Ross Waitlist Chat with Soojin Kwon Koh
• INSEAD Waitlist with Virginie Fougea
• USC Marshall Waitlist with Kellee Scott
• Cornell Waitlist with Randall Sawyer
• MIT Sloan Waitlist with Jen Burke Barba

Wharton's waitlist chat transcript from today's chat should be posted next week.

• Yale SOM has posted an excellent article on its waitlist policies.
  
• BusinessWeek has published a special report on European programs.

The US News released its 2008 Grad School Rankings today. I'm going to list the top ten for business school, law school, and medical school and provide links to the ranking methodology for each category. For other graduate specialties, please visit the US News site.

Business School Rankings and methodology 
1. Harvard
1. Stanford
3. Wharton
4.  MIT Sloan
4. Northwestern Kellogg
4. Univ. of Chicago
7. Dartmouth Tuck
7. UC Berkeley Haas
9. Columbia
10. NYU Stern

Law School Rankings
1. Yale
2. Harvard
2. Stanford
4. Columbia
5. NYU
6. UC Berkeley
7. Univ. of Chicago
7. Penn
9. Northwestern
9. Univ. of Michigan
9. Univ. of Virginia

( I am not including a link to the law school methodology because as I am writing the link provided is a bad link.)

Medical School Rankings (Research)  and Methodology
1. Harvard
2. Johns Hopkins
3. Washington U (St. Louis)
4. Penn
5. UCSF
6. Duke
6. Univ. of Washington
8. Stanford
9. UCLA
9. Yale

A few caveats: My strong recommendation is to use the rankings as a library of raw data  conveniently compiled in one location and not as a tried and true guide of educational quality. They are not the latter. They are the former. To the extent you are going to use the rankings as a guide to school reputation and brand value, you must understand the methodology behind them and what they are measuring. Be cognizant of the differences between what is important to you and what is important to the rankings.

A few observations on the rankings themselves:

1. There are many ties in the rankings, which implies that the differences in reputation are almost imperceptible when talking about closely ranked programs. For example the difference between being "in the top ten" and out of the the top ten (i.e. #11) for MBA programs is 1 point,  for the top law schools is 2 points, and for the top medical schools is 1 point. Don't get hung up on these differences.
2. The "top ten" changes little from year to year. In most cases, if you compare these rankings to the 2007 version, it looks as if US News just reshuffled the deck a little.

For more on rankings, please see:

• Rankings: Controversy and Magazine Sales
• Thoughtful Dean Looks at Rankings
• Law School Admissions: Study Says Rankings Influence Decision Makers

Yesterday I met with a LAMP client who is shrewdly starting now to prepare for his fall application. We went over his profile, and I made several suggestions as to what he can do between now and this fall to improve his chances of acceptance next year. He found the session very valuable. And again, I commend him for starting early to work on his application. I want to be able to commend and mentor and help prepare more of you.

For years I have encouraged MBA applicants to lay the foundation for their MBA application in the months before applications come out. That's why I wrote Best Practices for MBA Admissions, a featured ebook this month. That's why Accepted has hosted MBA Admissions Telethons and teleseminars. And that's why Accepted is introducing a new subscription form of MBA Admissions Consulting: Start Smart ™.

With Start Smart, you can meet up to one hour per month with your adviser, an experienced Accepted consultant and editor who for years has seen what works and what doesn't. Our experienced staff shares my frustration when talented but flawed clients come to us in September wanting to apply in Round 1 and hoping that a magic wand will make them competitive. We don't have that wand. We do have decades of collective experience that we would like to share with you on an individual basis through Start Smart.

With Start Smart, you can have a mentor guide you in:

• Identifying the core stories for your application.
• Focusing on specific schools.
  
• Strengthening your application and ameliorating weaknesses.
• Choosing recommenders.

We can even help you work out an application time table.

In addition, Start Smart is something that rewards your early-bird-gets-the-worm approach to your applications:

• You will pay less per month when you sign up for more months.
• Your credit card is billed on a monthly basis for the exact number of months you want. You do not pay for the entire service up front so it is more affordable.