<p>I haven't taken the GMAT yet, but I scored a 1600 on the SAT and a 180 on the LSAT. I am interested in pursuing a JD/MBA, and will be an entering 1L at Chicago in the fall. I had a decent but not outstanding GPA at a top undergrad school (Brown Penn Cornell Duke). </p>
<p>I have no work experience, and feel I have the right motivation for getting both degrees, its not just because I don't know what I want to do yet. </p>
<p>Basically, if I ace the GMAT, which I don't think should be too hard as standardized tests come very easy to me, do I have a shot at Chicago's Booth Business School? I noticed no one in their most recent entering class had above a 760. Anyone have any insight? I browsed through the stickied "work experience thread" but it was mostly people just yelling at each other.</p>
<p>Hello, Ryan. Well, the first thing I can tell you, is that while confidence is good, don’t count the GMAT the same as the SAT; it’s very different and catches a lot of good students by surprise. </p>
<p>In terms of the GMAT, you will want to prepare with simulation software and should read at least one of the major guides <a href=“GMAT800%20and%20Princeton%20Review,%20for%20example”>i</a>*, is my advice. I took a 730 on mine in 2006, just as a reference. Anything from 760 up is 99th percentile</p>
<p>and a lot of smart students take the GMAT. Anything above 700 is really good, and anything above 740 is going to get noticed. You don’t need the 800 to wow the school. </p>
<p>As for the school, you will need more than the score. Grades help and a good undergrad school is a help, but you should try to get some kind of relevant work experience, even if it’s just a summer job, so you can get a letter of recommendation and be able to say you have some real-world cred. Your stats seem good for Chicago, but it may be a good idea to find someone from the school who can tell you what rings their bell. You also should think about what you want to do; while no one expects you to say which company you want to work for just yet, you will have an essay to do and the board will be looking for your focus.</p>
<p>800 GMAT is a heck of a lot harder than a 1600 SAT. That being said, a 180 LSAT is stratospheric. If you have the math skills (better than those needed for a 800 math SAT score) to match your obvious verbal ability, then it sounds like you might be able to pull it off.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for you, grades and GMATs are only about half of the application process, (being 1L may help some) but you should really have something going on re work exp. For ex: I have a friend who is a interviewer for Booth, and according to him the few kids who get in straight from UG are the GPA/GMAT stars who also have unusual work exp (like starting a cleaning business with 1m in revenues while still a Harvard undergrad [real example]).</p>
<p>IMO a JD/MBA is a great combo for some people (I’ve thought about it myself).</p>
<p>Probably not. Have you considered deferring and working for a couple of years? You could probably get away with 2 years if it’s good experience. You other problem not having the work experience is you won’t be nearly as attractive to employers for summer jobs and when you graduate.</p>
<p>lol reptil. From what I’ve read there is some dispute whether or not it makes a big difference if you have both degrees, I’m just curious what the op specifically plans on doing. </p>
<p>RyanHoward, if you’ve got a 180 LSAT have you considered just trying to transfer to Yale for 2L?</p>
<p>Thanks for the information guys, it was very useful. Consensus seems to be that I’d need 2 years of work experience even with a perfect GMAT.</p>
<p>GordonGekko, I haven’t thought about transferring to Yale, but that actually seems like its plausible for me if I do all right at Chicago. Do you think its worth it to forgo Law Review opportunities, adjustments etc to go to the best law school in the country? Thanks, any input is appreciated.</p>
<p>Perfect scores on the GMAT, from what I have read, are significantly more rare than on the LSAT.</p>
<p>About 25 in every 125,000 score a 180 LSAT, the numbers for the GMAT I have seen are about 12 per 300,000.</p>
<p>Additionally, to get a perfect GMAT score, you need to answer every question correctly. This is not true for the LSAT. </p>
<p>That being said, I think the GMAT verbal is probably easier than the LSAT. But again, you can’t make a single error on one of the 41 questions if you want a perfect score. Some of the way the grammar/passage reading questions are written can make it difficult to do this. </p>
<p>I myself had a perfect verbal SAT score (haven’t taken the LSAT) and finished with a 48 on the GMAT verbal - I suspect I answered one rather ambiguous sentence correction question incorrectly. On the practice tests I would routinely answer 1-2 incorrectly and this usually led to a score around 47.</p>
<p>'ve read numerous articles explaining how GMAT scores above 760 can actually hurt one’s application. Remember b-schools are looking for future CEOs who are well-rounded, not nerds who spend all their time studying for standardized tests.</p>
<p>That is ridiculous. A perfect score will never HURT an application. A perfect score with no personality or leadership potential will not fair well, but that is not due to the score. On the other hand, a perfect score with the traits mentioned above, will certainly be a strong contender.</p>
<p>Saying a score above 760 could actually hurt an application is completely false.</p>
<p>No, and if you are interested in applying for a JD/MBA (in which case, if you’re already starting your 1L year, you need to be taking the GMAT immediately), Yale’s SOM does not carry the same prestige that U of Chicago’s business school does.</p>
<p>Look I’m not saying it should be taken as dogma, but to me, it makes sense. Again, we’re not looking for nerdy rocket scientists, we’re looking for business leaders. And if you know (or have studied) anything about business, you would know that success in business has nothing to do whatsoever with book smarts.</p>
<p>^I think what’s at issue here and is difficult to parse out is that those with 750+ GMAT are more likely to not be as strong in the other criteria for MBA admissions. I think that two candidates with the same GPA at the same school, who then had the same jobs and equal recommendations, the nod would go to the 770 GMAT over the 710 GMAT, but it’s probably rarely such a clear-cut comparison on the other non-GMAT factors to discern how important GMATs are over a certain threshold, which has probably also changed as the scale has become easier.</p>
<p>At the top 5-10 MBA programs, typically 20% of the entering class score in the top 1% on the GMAT. That means the best 1% of test takers are overrepresented by a factor of 20 among the highest-ranked programs.</p>
<p>I understand the good-intention of the author, and he makes a valid and important statement that lack of a super GMAT score should not be a cause for serious anxiety, but to claim it is a negative point on an application or that it could potentially hurt one’s chances of admission is a ridiculous, unsubstantiated, and inconceivable statement.</p>
<p>I think those figures are off by at least a year and possibly two, but nevertheless, they say nothing about the likelihood of acceptance of those with 760+ GMAT. From those stats, it is still quite possible that the combined acceptance rate at the schools you listed for 760+ GMAT scorers is 10% while the acceptance rate for 700-750 GMAT scorers is 20%; what you posted in no way refutes that possibility.</p>
<p>As you know from statistics class, anything is possible when you only have sample data. However it is statistically very, very, very unlikely that what you said is the case considering such a strong level of overrepresentation, and selection bias towards higher ranked institutions. </p>
<p>If 20% of a much larger pool of applicants was accepted (the ~80th-99th percentiles), they would be proportionally significantly more represtented than 10% of a much smaller applicant pool, yet that is obviously not the case since the 80th-99th percentile is 19% of the population and makes up only 60% of the entering class, representing a proportion of ~3x as opposed to the 20x for 99th percentilers.</p>
<p>It is very sketchy to try and refute a statistical argument based on the “possibility” of other options because any time you don’t have access to the true population regression there ALWAYS exists the possibility, but that is what we have confidence intervals for.</p>
<p>I think you have the percentages wrong or didn’t follow what I was trying to say. When I took the GMAT, a 700 was the top 2%. My understanding is that the scale has changed somewhat and now a 700 is the top 7%. So, I was saying that those who scored from the top 2% to the top 7% on the GMAT possibly to probably were accepted at a higher rate than those who scored in the top 1% on the GMAT. At some threshold below this (and most likely higher than the 80th percentile of GMAT scorers), the acceptance rate of applicants falls off precipitously and is probably much lower than top 1% or top 2-7% GMAT scorers.</p>
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<p>If you say the avg GMAT for these schools is 710 and the top 20% is 760, then 30% of the class scored between 710-760 and so they are more represented in the class than the top 1% scorers. However, this 30% of the class is not distributed evenly among the 80th-99th percentiles or normally among the general population of test takers, but disproportionately in the 94th-99th percentiles (assuming a 710 GMAT is the 94th percentile; I don’t know what it is currently).</p>