Profile evaluation - please help

Free advice from the world's top MBA consultants
This topic has expert replies
User avatar
Newbie | Next Rank: 10 Posts
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Dec 19, 2010 10:19 am

Profile evaluation - please help

by windycityatty » Wed Dec 22, 2010 7:55 am
Took the GMAT last Saturday and I'm not sure what to make of my results vis-a-vis the schools I'm applying to (Chicago Booth and Michigan). Here are the results (official and in remarkably quick time):

Quant: 43 (65 percentile)
Verbal: 42 (95 percentile)
Total: 710 (92 percentile)
AWA: 6.0 (91 percentile)

Undergrad GPA 3.30, but in my major (which I switched into junior year from chemical engineering), it's more like 3.8.
Grad school GPA (M.A.): 3.22
Law school GPA (top 25 school): 3.67

Thirteen years experience as an attorney in private practice, including five as a firm partner.

I'm not happy with the quant, but considering that I haven't been professionally called upon to do math for close to twenty years, I'm not surprised by the result. (I actually started panicking about time with about 7 questions out of 37 left to go, so those 7 were answered more or less by random guessing - I had no time to read the problems.)

Am I totally out of the running? Thanks!
Source: — Ask an MBA Admissions Consultant |

User avatar
Legendary Member
Posts: 1255
Joined: Fri Nov 07, 2008 2:08 pm
Location: St. Louis
Thanked: 312 times
Followed by:90 members

by Tani » Wed Dec 22, 2010 8:30 am
Out of the running? With a 710, killer law school GPA and 13 years' experience as an attorney? Are you kidding?

Chicago Booth's middle 80% starts at 660; Michigan's at 650. You are only 5 points below Chicago's average and right on Michigan's. Also, schools tend to weight GMAT scores less heavily for people who have been out of school for a while.


Your challenge will be to explain why you are looking for an MBA. Are you going to keep practicing law or switch completely? Do you want the MBA so you can manage the business end of a law firm? Are you looking to go full- or part-time? Your essays will have to be persuasive in explaining your decision to go back to school more than 15 years after undergrad. You may want to consider using an admissions consultant to ensure that your essays do the best possible job of explaining your decision and extolling your strengths.

Given your unusual profile, you may want to contact the admissions departments at your schools directly and ask them which program would suit you best. They may feel that you belong in an EMBA program rather than the standard MBA.

Good luck,
Tani Wolff