ease up

If you score > 700, stop. Buy your mom flowers, go for a long walk, eat an ice cream sundae.

700+ is good enough.

There is more to life than test scores. If you re-take the test, the hours you spend cramming could be put to better use. Every year, people with 800s get rejected from top programs. A great test score means you’re great at taking tests.

If you have an undistinguished academic record (low GPA, obscure school), it may be worth spending the time to ace the GMAT. If your academic record is passable, then a high GMAT does indicate academic promise. Coupled with a low GPA, it indicates a smart slacker.

The adcom sees each applicant as a sum of his or her parts. The GMAT is just one part of a complete portrait of you as an applicant. Re-take the test if you want to communicate that you are the kind of person who obsesses over a few points. In other words, you’re the kind of person who focuses on the wrong things.

For the record, I did ask an admissions director about this when I began my application process. I had a >700 score, though a lousy analytical writing score. (I really should have practiced that). I asked if I should retake the test or not. She told me: "Congratulations, that's a great score. Don't bother taking the test again."

It was a load off my shoulders and removed a potential distraction from the process. It gave me more time to focus on my essays, resume, work experience, recommendations, etc.

“I had that dream again, the one where I forgot to wear clothes to school…”

I have had a few moments where I panicked because I convinced myself that I used the wrong school name in an application. I didn’t have the heart to check every application, but I did check the one I was most worried about. The essay was clean, much to my relief.

This is a relic of the copy and paste method I used to write my essays. Writing essays was a daunting task and the hardest part of the application process. My process for writing my essays was something like this:

- begin 3 months before applications are due

- agonize over the first idea, but tell yourself you’re gestating ideas

- realize you’ve actually been gestating ideas and begin to write

- finish a few

- get lots of feedback from a range of people (ideally in business and outside)

- make sure the reader remembers one thing about me

- copy and paste to finish the rest

I defy you to find anyone who wrote every essay from scratch. In addition to being time-consuming, I don’t think it’s a good idea. As I looked back on the past several years, a few achievements and touchstones stood out. It was important that I paint a true-to-life likeness of myself, and I wanted to do that by talking about the few events which defined my adult life.

An unusual achievement was also an opportunity to showcase leadership skills, as well as the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. All of my major touchstones were multi-dimensional, so I was able to wring several essays out of each with the same high points.

On the plus side, this streamlined my essay writing process through economies of scale. On the minus side, I’m almost certain I wrote ‘Columbia’ when I meant ‘Wharton’.

My advice: give yourself an extra half hour to check all of your essays. Better yet, get someone who hasn’t been staring at them for hours to check for you. Also, don’t trust the ‘Find and Replace’ function in Word. You could have had a typo the first time around.

I'll be blogging on essay writing tips. Stay tuned.