<p>If you are doing the UChicago to finance / consulting to top business school route, the GPA demands are significantly less in all regards. </p>
<p>First, the number of spaces across the full time and non-executive part time programs at the top 15 or so MBA programs is huge. Above a 3.25, presuming your work experience is remotely reputable, i.e. any type of white collar, fortune 500 gig, after 2-5 years with an acceptable GMAT score you will get into one of them. Obviously, the higher you go up the prestige chain, the more demanding its gets. Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton require more like a 3.5 from Chicago and sexier WE. But at the end of the day, the whole process is nowhere near as competitive as law or medical school. It is doubly nice that Chicago loves to pick up its own undergraduates for spots at Booth (a school that legitimately lays claim - with a handful of others - to being the very best in the field), offering one of the few early admission programs for undergraduates that is well worth it professionally. </p>
<p>Second, for pre-MBA recruiting pretty much any organization worth its salt in consulting and finance comes to UChicago. Further, most come with recruiting quotas, and given that so many students in graduating classes are NOT looking to enter these fields, any clean cut, kiss a$$, motivated candidate gets a definite leg up. The sometimes unreasonable GPA expectations tend to get quickly tempered by the need of recruiters not to come back empty handed to their bosses (although recruiters are often Chicago alumni, so this makes things easier). One way CAPS makes sure they are up to speed on this is by giving them a resume book to review in advance of interviews (students submit through an online system), where any employer who thinks they can cherry pick only the 3.8+ crowd quickly realizes that is not going to happen unless they are Google or Goldman Sachs. On the whole, I would say most bulge bracket banking entities, i.e. well known, front page of the WSJ firms, are going to walk away with an analyst class from Chicago that on average has about a 3.3+, one or more extracurricular activities of note, and at least one internship <em>relevant</em> to the job they are seeking. This is not terribly hard to achieve if you are moderately motivated. And besides, if you cannot meet these requirements, you are just not going to thrive it in a detailed oriented but ultimately quick turnaround, 60-80 hour a week environment anyways. </p>
<p>In short, I would say Chicago does extremely well in placing students who actually want these roles – a point lost on those that only examine raw analyst class numbers (e.g. ZOMG – so many people from teh Dartmouth get bankingz!?!)</p>