Yeah both of these were my first thoughts too. Lol at having a runner. That seems more like a world’s dumbest criminals approach. How fast could we pool our resources here and get a working setup that is virtually undetectable and results in almost guaranteed perfect scores? I’m guessing the answer is not long at all.
Confirming that a very, very large subset of international students will cheat on literally everything they can on.
Also confirming here. Every summer I teach incoming grad students from China and cheating is pretty much the norm for them. I catch at least one per year but Chinese students are such a moneymaker that the amount they cheat really doesn’t matter. They’re getting in regardless of their English level.
So here’s a common situation. I get an email from a foreign country - Ghana, Iran, Saudi Arabia are all examples I’ve received in the last year. The student wants to apply to our doctoral program, but wants to not provide a GRE or GMAT score. This is a reasonable desire - apparently the GRE fee is roughly 100 times the daily minimum wage in some of these countries.
It would be very kind to tell the student, “No need for you to bear that financial burden”. But then what I’m left with is an applicant who has graduated from a school I’ve never heard of, with work experience I’m not familiar with, and letters of recommendation from people I’ve never heard of. This does not give me strong confidence to offer admission to someone! This isn’t a big program where we can admit lots of people and then dismiss the ones who aren’t performing well. Our students are fully-funded and receive stipends; we admit 3 or fewer a year, and we expect all of our admitted students to complete the program.
So I think I’m completely fair and justified in telling this person, “I’m sorry, but we can’t consider your application without a standardized test score.” But I still feel like a dick doing it.
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I’ll buy Iran and Ghana, but college-educated Saudi who can’t afford the GRE or GMAT seems like a unicorn.
Tough crowd. I just searched my email for “Saudi”, and it turns out the person from Saudi Arabia who wanted to waive the GMAT requirement didn’t actually specify why they couldn’t take the test - just that they wouldn’t be able to do so in time for the application deadline.
Well, at least you can feel like less of a dick for saying no to that guy!
Is it unreasonable to think this just isn’t a great candidate regardless of test scores?
I checked GMAC and there are zero in-person dates available in Riyadh, for instance, prior to your application deadline. Of course, that says nothing of the online GMAT which appears to be available in Saudi Arabia.
Fun fact: Some of the Saudi test centers allow mixed testing, but there are also M/F-only ones.
The problem I have with these tests is not only do they have little predictive power, they’ve simultaneously become a huge racket. The way GMAT works now, if you’re gunning for a top score or program, you need to budget for multiple takes and prep materials. There’s also the hidden cost of study time, but let’s look at the measurable costs for a reasonable test-taking plan. This is what I’d consider to be a “standard” course of action that’s commonly recommended online:
Exam fees ($275 facility / $250 online) x2
Official Practice Exams (~$100)
Official Guide (~$30)
TTP Quant (~$99/mo)
Taking the arg_min() of that returns a set of options that comes out to $729 before tax. Private tutoring would push the cost into multiple thousands. Also, multiple retakes seem to be standard among people posting on GMAT forums. GMAC eventually figured out that letting people cancel their scores after they’re revealed was a great way to make more money, because now we have 700+ scores getting canceled. I mean, the 100% correct play is to cancel any subsequent attempt that isn’t higher (and then fire another bullet until your eight attempts or bankroll run out).
Not at all familiar with business doctoral programs, but is there no tendency to seek out potential advisers in advance of applying?
This is so dumb:
More than one in four people who took the GMAT exam this year [2016] cancelled their scores after learning the results, preventing business schools from ever seeing the scores…
In the 2016 testing year ended June 30, 27.2% of all GMAT test takers cancelled their scores, up from 19.2% a year earlier and only 1.6% in 2014.
Not surprisingly, far more test takers who failed to score 650 or above tossed away their scores. The Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the test, said that roughly a third of all candidates with a total score lower than 650 cancelled their exam scores. The canceled score rate for these test takers this year was 32.9%, up from 23.8% in 2015, and a mere 1.9% in 2014.
While the ability of a test taker to cancel an exam is not new, before June of 2014 candidates were unable to see their results before making the decision to cancel a score. GMAC made the policy change after losing marketshare to its chief test rival, the Educational Testing Service and it’s Graduate Record Exam (GRE) […].
Basing it off this
261,248 * 0.272 = 71,059
I’m almost positive the exam was $250 then, so that’s $17,764,750 lit on fire by applicants trying to break into graduate B-school. Over a quarter of their exam revenue came from people who could have obtained the same result by placing that money directly into an incinerator or booking the Browns to cover.
Holy shit, that’s actually real? Are there any other standardized tests for which you can do this?
When I took the GMAT over a decade ago this wasn’t possible but the change was made in 2015 I guess as the article points out. You take the test and receive your score, then it asks if you’d like to cancel. If you cancel at the testing center, there’s no additional charge. If, for some reason, you change your mind after leaving the test center, you can cancel for a $25 fee. If you’d like to then reinstate that canceled score, you can do that for an extra $50 fee. These are USA#1 prices for in-person test centers:
Yes. That test is called the GRE. Again, this wasn’t true when I took it in 2004. The grift is slightly different though:
The reinstatement fee is “only” $27. You can take the GRE up to five times in a year with no lifetime cap compared to the GMAT’s lifetime cap of eight. So combine these policies with the fact that international applicants exploded in the last two decades and we now have tons of people across the planet dice rolling these exams until they find that one amazing take to submit. It’s super standard now to see people asking if they should try again with 97th percentile scores.
I think this person (based on the limited information they sent) is extremely unlikely to be a good candidate. But it feels super shitty to say, “Don’t even bother sending a complete application - I can already tell we wouldn’t accept you.”
Prospective students sometimes contact random faculty to say, “Hey, are you [personally, not the department] taking on doctoral students?” And the faculty just forwards those emails to the PhD director (me).
In my experience at a couple of places now, applicants might signal that they’re interested in the research areas of particular faculty members, but those signals don’t really mean anything.** We just bring a group of students in, and those students migrate to faculty advisors over the course of the first two years as they develop their research interests and figure out whose personalities match well. It’s not like (my understanding of) science labs, where there are individual faculty members who run teams of graduate students, and those individual members’ capacity to take on students is really important. Nor is it a problem if a student wanted to change advisors during the program.
**For some reason, there seems to be a belief that there’s some advantage to naming a specific faculty member that applicants want to work with. What’s hilarious is that applicants are obviously just grabbing names from the faculty list without having any idea of what those people do. There have been countless statements I’ve read that say something like, “I would love to work in particular with Dr. X and Dr. Y, as I am extremely interested in their research.” But Dr. X and Dr. Y haven’t done any research in years and haven’t even interacted with PhD students in decades.
What kind of score would change your mind?
Probably none, given the transcript they sent. It’s like a 3.0 undergrad with no evidence of the stats/econ/math classes that would be semi-required for the classes they’d take in our program. Most likely outcome is a score in line with that transcript, which would fall far below what we normally look for. But if the test was off the charts good, I’d probably be skeptical that it was legit. So I’m basically putting this person in a no-win situation.
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One thing I have wondered about is how is it that you don’t have to have a degree in econ to get a PhD in economics. For example a friend of mine is college did his undergrad in chemistry and then went to grad school in economics. I know someone else who went from electrical engineering to economics. Both got PhDs and teach at universities (tenure track last I heard). Are these guys outliars or is this not that uncommon.
Why don’t other standardized tests respond to the same incentives? SAT? LSAT? MCAT? They would rake in the $$ if they allowed one to see score first and then cancel.
It depends. For example, one that’s a complete mismatch is finance. You’d be much better off with a quantitative STEM degree, whereas an undergrad finance degree is probably a red flag. Econ is similar in that any quant background is probably good, but an econ undergrad isn’t disqualifying. Not sure how chemistry fits in.
Dunno, but one of the aspects that the Poets and Quants article alludes to is that GMAT and GRE are directly competing for market share, at least to some degree. So the point they made is that GMAT made the switch after GRE, which was the same order events for offering the online versions. Not sure why the GRE made the change initially (ok it was money obviously).