B school admission is an objective process

Since I started applying to B schools, I always used to think this whole process can not be so subjective. Considering schools get ~ 6000 applications and in case of Wharton, Harvard which select ~900 students, there must be a objective way to select or reject a student. Moreover as there are people with 800 score in GMAT not getting admission further makes me think that there must be a objective way. What do I mean by objective way. I mean there must be a set of rules which will define what a good or bad candidate is and that is what I believe will help one to introspect and gauge oneself as a good or bad or average case. I know everywhere people say there is no one unique formulae to get into an MBA, but from my experience I am trying to make the process more objective rather than subjective. I am thinking of getting into an top MBA school as a complex engineering problem and its solution as a implementable engineering solution. Now what top MBA is ? So for me a top MBA is a combination of:

1. Ranking. No matter what several people say, everyone ( all I know of) have definitely had rankings affect their decision. Esp. if one is looking for traditional post MBA careers as consultant/ investment banking, I believe rankings does a pretty good job of telling you what a top school is. No doubt rankings differ in criteria for rankings so I believe one should look for all the different rankings available.

2. Strength of recruitment in your area of choice.

I am stopping this discussion here only as this is not what I intend to do.

So moving ahead to the initial problem, converting “admission to a top B school” into an equation.

Let Y = admission to a top B school.

And the various factors affecting the result Y be x1, x2, x3 and so on.
Lets define some of the x. This is in no way the comprehensive list and can be different for different schools. Use your best judgement to develop this list.
For the sake of this argument lets say this list has:

x1: GMAT
x2: Academics
x3: Recommendations
x4: Interview
x5: Data Forms filled with the applications.
x6:
x7: Essays

Therefore:

Y = a1*x1 + a2*x2 + a3*x3 + a4*x4 + a5*x5 + a6*x6 + …….. equation 1.

Where a1, a2, a3………are the coefficients or in a simpler jargon how important x1, x2 …..x6 are.

For eg if we define that all a1, a2….will vary between 1 to 10 (10 highest), then if all a’s are 10 there is highest probability of getting an admission to a top B school. If all a’s are 1 there is least probability of getting an admission into a top B school. And now I think this is the place some subjectivity crops in ( though I am still thinking of how to eliminate even this subjectivity). How to differentiate between a value of 3 to 4 among values of a’s.

Now assuming all x’s are known. A prospective applicant can increase his/her probability of getting an admission to a top school by making all of his/her a’s to be maximum possible.

In my opinion x1, x2, x5 are pretty straightforward. What needs most attention are x3, x4, x7 ( that doesn’t mean x1, x2, x5 doesn’t deserve respect). And among these I would say x3, x4 are relatively straightforward compared to x7, reason being for x7 its only you who will decide what is value of a ( 1 or 10) whereas in x3 and x4 there are others also who would participate in deciding the value of a. For x3 other person is your recommender and for x4 other person is your interviewer.

I believe if you will score a value of a for x’s more than some threshold, lets define it at say 5, then you will for sure get an interview call. Again, I believe there may be cases where this argument doesn’t hold true but I believe this can be a reasonable enough generalization.

In subsequent posts I will be writing what I think needs to be done to score high value of “a” for each “x”.