With the interviewing season in full swing, I thought it would be valuable to share some of the questions that are being reported from among the most competitive programs.

Obviously, you have to be well prepared for the standard questions: Why an MBA? Why this school?

What are your short term/long term career goals? How cool is Ben?
(okay, scratch that last one). You get the idea.

Yes, you’ll be asked the questions above. But, there are scores of others you need to be ready for. These can be lumped roughly into five categories.

1. How much do you know about us.
2. “Tell me about a time when.”
3. How thoughtful/mature/self-aware you are.
4. How smart you are.
5. What are you like outside of work.

Here are some actual recent examples of each:

Category 1

·   What clubs would you be interested in joining here?
·   What are you interested being involved in while here?
·   What do you find appealing about our school?

Category 2

·   Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership.
·   Tell me about a team situation that did not work.
·   Tell me about a time you contributed to someone else’s success.
·   Tell me about a time when your expectations were not met.
·   Tell me about a time you failed at something and what you learned from it.

Category 3

·   Describe your leadership style.
·   What do your colleagues most admire about you?
·   What would your peers say about you?
·   How would the people you work for describe you as a manager?
·   What three words would you use to describe yourself?
·   What are your strengths and weaknesses?
·   What will you do if you don’t get into an MBA program?
·   How do you define success?

Category 4

·   If you were CEO of your company, what would you do?
·   How would you develop a marketing strategy for…?
·   Tell me about a challenge your company faces and how you’d address it.

Category 5

·   Tell me about a book you’ve read and what you learned from it.
·   What is something you’re interested in outside of work?
·   What do you do for fun?
·   If money were not an issue, what would you do with your time?

And finally, many interviewers will ask you what other schools you’re applying to. No need for strategizing here, and certainly no benefit in lying. Simply answer the question in a matter of fact way and move on. Just as I’m doing now.

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the GMAC Test Prep Summit and hearing about the GMAT from GMAC’s VP of Research, himself a senior psychometrician (”psychometrician” = GMAT wizard). Over the course of the day I picked up a lot of invaluable nuggets about how the test is scored, and over the next weeks I’ll share these nuggets with you.

Today’s topic: skipped or omitted questions.

You can’t really “skip” questions on the GMAT, but if you run out of time you may leave some unanswered at the end and those questions are referred to as skipped or omitted questions. A few Key Takeaways:

1.   Skipped questions can hurt your score really badly – even worse than you think.

2.   It’s complex to answer how much a skipped question hurts your score, but given Key Takeaway #1 above, the complexity doesn’t matter much from your perspective.

Skipped questions hurt your score more when you are scoring high. Here is real data, shared by GMAC:

·   If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you skip one question, your score drops to 65th percentile.

·   If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you skip three questions, your score drops to 55th percentile.

The exact science is complex. In fact, these figures were presented as empirical results – implying that these results are not transparent in the scoring algorithm, but that rather, they must be inferred after the fact from test-takers scores.

Forget about that. Instead, meditate on those two bullet points. Five percentile points for one skipped question. Given that the effect is pronounced at higher scores, I’d wager that if you’re dancing near a 700 level performance on one section, around 90th percentile, then omitting one question could drop you a good 7 percentile points. Your weeks, months of GMAT prep that you’ve put in (around 100 hours for those scoring 700+) to raise the ceiling of your performance could be thrown away simply by mismanaging your last few seconds.

Lessons

Don’t omit any questions.

While it’s generally not to your advantage to finish very early, it would be much, much better to finish a whopping 60 seconds early, if that’s what you have to do to make sure you don’t omit any questions.

More nuggets coming up. They are equally earth-shattering, so stay tuned.

Describe your career progress to date and your future short-term and long-term career goals. How do you expect an MBA from Wharton to help you achieve these goals, and why is now the best time for you to join our program?

Here’s the prototypical b-school essay question.  In this case it’s Wharton’s, but you’ll encounter similarly worded questions from many if not most schools.  It’s really four questions in one: 1) career progress 2) goals 3) why an MBA/why Wharton 4) why now?

When you encounter a question like this, be sure to answer completely.  A common mistake is to give inadequate attention to part of the question.  Sometimes this happens when an applicant repurposes a similar essay written for another school, but fails to make the necessary adjustments.  Admissions Officers get annoyed when they encounter an essay they believe was written for another school’s application.  To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you need to start every single essay from scratch, especially given the similarities you’ll face.  Just be careful to make the appropriate edits when warranted.

Regarding the review of your career progress, don’t let it simply be a restatement of your resume.  This common approach is neither insightful nor especially interesting.  Rather, help the reviewer understand the decisions you’ve made, and be sure to highlight where you’ve excelled.

When it comes to articulating your career goals and why an MBA makes sense, it’s important to understand that schools really do want you to have a clear idea of why you’re pursuing an MBA.  I’ve seen otherwise strong candidates rejected when it became apparent that they had no idea what they were planning to do.  Their perspective was that two years at school would be plenty of time to figure it out.  While there’s a certain logic to this approach, rest assured it’s not what admissions officers want to hear.  Schools don’t expect you to have every step of your career mapped out, but they would like to know you’ve given it enough thought to be able to discuss the direction you plan to head.

As to the question of “how will [insert school name] help you achieve your goals?”  schools want to know that you’re not applying simply because of their prestige or rank among MBA programs.  Rather, they expect you to have done your homework and be able to articulate why the school is a match.  Although it’s important to express enthusiasm and genuine interest in the schools you apply to, try to avoid hyperbole such as, “If you don’t admit me to your school, I won’t be able to achieve my goals,” or “Nobody wants to go to your school more than I do.”