At Tuck, all students agree to abide by an Academic Honor Principle that emphasizes honesty and integrity both inside and outside the classroom. Closed-book mid-term and final exams are often unproctored or given as take-home tests, and students are trusted to comply with any restrictions on time or resources. The honor code is governed by a student judicial board; faculty and administrators intervene only when students are unable to resolve a matter of academic integrity.

Meanwhile, the Yale SOM upholds a formal honor code that guides the conduct of students, faculty and staff. While its implications extend into the social realm, it is most explicit about students’ conduct in academics and recruiting. In the academic realm, professors are expected to provide clear guidelines regarding assignment requirements and appropriate collaboration, and in turn, students must work fairly within groups and seek clarification from their professor if in doubt about the instructions. With respect to recruiting, students must adhere to the Career Development Office’s standards when attending interviews and responding to offers, as well as uphold a high level of professional behavior in all recruiting activities.

Yale students report that the Honor Code is heavily emphasized during pre-term, and that it permeates campus life thereafter. In routine academic life, students check themselves, both when working individually and in groups, to ensure that they are following the Honor Code, and many report that they enjoy having a high community standard to live up to and uphold. The administration takes the rare occurrences of academic or professional violations very seriously; alleged offenders must answer to a faculty and student committee that decides whether to excuse the accused party or recommend probation, suspension or even expulsion.

At Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, students operate under both Duke University’s expectation of high standards of scholarship and conduct and the Honor Code of the Fuqua School of Business. Violations of the Honor Code include lying, cheating, stealing, or failing to report one of the previously mentioned offenses, and disciplinary action may include suspension or expulsion. The Fuqua Honor Code became front-page news at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year when over 30 first-year students were found guilty of violating the Honor Code by improperly collaborating on a take-home test and nine of these students were recommended for expulsion. Although the story generated a great deal of public commentary on the questionable ethics of business school students, Fuqua’s administration and many of its students see the case as a sign of the school’s commitment to upholding high ethical standards within the community, regardless of the publicity generated.

For more information on schools’ honor codes, be sure to check out the Academics section of the Clear Admit School Guides!

Results from GMAC’s semi-annual Alumni Perspectives Survey, released last week, showed that three-quarters of survey respondents who graduated from full-time MBA programs in 2009 had a job by September 2009, when the survey was conducted. Meanwhile, a whopping 96 percent of survey participants who completed part-time MBA programs in 2009 reported having jobs by September, and 85 percent of survey respondents who received other types of graduate management degrees in 2009 were employed by survey time. 

Overall, 3,966 graduates representing every business school class since 2000 responded to this year’s alumni survey. Of those, 1,208 received a graduate management degree in 2009.

According to David Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC, business school students have an edge in the job market thanks to the knowledge, skills and contacts they develop as part of MBA and other graduate management programs. “The remarkable success individuals with graduate management degrees continue to have when looking for employment – even in a down economy – is further evidence of the high value employers place on management education,” he said in a statement announcing the survey results.

Survey respondents themselves seemed to echo Wilson’s sentiments. Seventy-eight percent of respondents who graduated in 2009 felt that their degree was essential to landing their jobs, and 47 percent said they thought their employer placed particular value on their degree when hiring them.

Happy to land jobs relatively quickly, many survey respondents nonetheless found that the starting salaries they were offered were slightly lower than those offered to graduates from previous years. The median salary reported by survey participants from the class of 2009 was $79,271, compared to an $80,000 median starting salary for the class of 2008.

If slightly lower, the salaries offered were still satisfactory to the majority of survey respondents. Fifty-two percent said their pay met their expectations, while 14 percent said it exceeded what they’d anticipated receiving. Perhaps not surprisingly, respondents who said their compensation was less than they expected were among those reporting lower salaries than those who were happy with their pay.

To view the report in its entirety, click here.

With the notification dates for a number of second round schools coming up in a manner of weeks, we wanted to offer some tips to students who have been waitlisted at such programs while there’s still some time to tip the balance in their favor.

It’s clear that you should take advantage of this chance to add to your file, so the first real step is determining what you want – and need – to communicate in your waitlist correspondence. We suggest that you begin by revisiting your application with a critical eye. Being waitlisted is ultimately a positive sign of the strength of your candidacy, so it’s likely you’ve put together a very solid set of materials; you do, however, want to consider what you might have done to make your application even better. For instance, if your comments in your essays focused primarily on your work experience, you might want to convey some information about your outside interests and activities in your waitlist letter.

Another important aim is to cover new developments and recent improvements in your candidacy. For instance, have you made any progress toward your stated career goals? Visited the school? Taken on additional responsibility at work or in an extracurricular? Sharing impressive information about your work will help to underscore the idea that you are on an upward trajectory, while writing about additional steps you’ve taken to familiarize yourself with the program will emphasize your interest in attending.

In addition to considering content, presentation is also important. Rather than jotting off a few quick sentences to the adcom or the waitlist manager, you should treat any written contact as a formal element of your application, much like your essays, resume and data forms. This affords you a great chance to underscore your communication skills and ability to market yourself.

For more information on navigating waitlists, see this posting from the Clear Admit archives. Waitlisted applicants can also contact Clear Admit directly to learn more about our feedback reports and waitlist strategy sessions.

In addition, for valuable guidance about being on the waitlist, check out the Clear Admit Waitlist Guide.  This guide will teach you to understand the ground rules of a program’s waitlist policy, formulate a plan to address weaknesses in your candidacy, craft effective communications to the admissions committee and explore every opportunity to boost your chances of acceptance.  This 26-page PDF file, which includes school-specific waitlist policies and sample communication materials, is available for immediate download.

This week, we’re going to discuss how to analyze and master a particular GMATPrep® Critical Reasoning problem.

First, set your timer for 2 minutes and try this GMATPrep® problem:

“Because no employee wants to be associated with bad news in the eyes of a superior, information about serious problems at lower levels is progressively softened and distorted as it goes up each step in the management hierarchy. The chief executive is, therefore, less well informed about problems at lower levels than are his or her subordinates at those levels.

“The conclusion drawn above is based on the assumption that

“(A) problems should be solved at the level in the management hierarchy at which they occur

“(B) employees should be rewarded for accurately reporting problems to their superiors

“(C) problem-solving ability is more important at higher levels than it is at lower levels of the management hierarchy

“(D) chief executives obtain information about problems at lower levels from no source other than their subordinates

“(E) some employees are more concerned about truth than about the way they are perceived by their superiors”

After trying the problem, checking the answer, and reading and understanding the solution (if available), I try to answer these questions:

1. Did I know WHAT they were trying to test?

- Was I able to CATEGORIZE this question by topic and subtopic? By process / technique? If I had to look something up in my books, would I know exactly where to go?

→The question is a “Find the Assumption” CR question because the word “assumption” appears in the question stem. If I don’t remember how to do “Find the Assumption” questions, I’d go look in my book right now. If I had previously studied wrong answer choice types for Assumption questions, I’d also note which wrong answer choice types (if any) I recognized in this problem.

- Did I COMPREHEND the symbols, text, questions, statements, and answer choices? Can I comprehend it all now, when I have lots of time to think about it? What do I need to do to make sure that I do comprehend everything here? How am I going to remember whatever I’ve just learned for future?

→The first sentence of the argument is a premise – it’s designed to support what the author wants to claim. The second sentence is the conclusion – what the author is actually claiming. The author didn’t give any opposing information in this argument.

- Did I understand the actual CONTENT (facts, knowledge) being tested?

→CR questions don’t test particular facts, but they do test my knowledge of what I’m supposed to do on this type of CR question. On “Find the Assumption” questions, I need to find the answer that the author believes to be true, and that answer must also be something that is necessary in order for the author to draw his conclusion. If the author doesn’t have to believe the answer, then that answer isn’t necessary in order for the author to draw the conclusion.

2. How well did I HANDLE what they were trying to test?

- Did I choose the best APPROACH? Or is there a better way to do the problem? (There’s almost always a better way!) What is that better way? How am I going to remember this better approach the next time I see a similar problem?

→I forgot to read the question first, as I should have done – I read the argument first and only then read the question. Reading the question first allows me to categorize the argument immediately and have a better idea of what is important as I read through the argument. In some cases, reading the question first also tells me what the conclusion is (though not in this case). I need to make a note to read the question first every time and practice till it becomes a habit. Also, I don’t think I diagrammed (took notes) in the best way that I could have (see “careless mistakes” below).

- Did I have the SKILLS to follow through? Or did I fall short on anything?

→I didn’t actually remember that the correct answer would have to be necessary in order for the author to draw his conclusion. Because of that, I think I fell into a trap. I should also spend a bit more time studying the characteristics of wrong answers (see below).

- Did I make any careless mistakes? If so, WHY did I make each mistake? What habits could I make or break to minimize the chances of repeating that careless mistake in future?

→I didn’t immediately note that the first sentence gave a cause-and-effect scenario. That messed me up later because I didn’t note that the sequence of the argument was X → Y → Z, not just “a bunch of stuff leads to Z.” The word “because” at the beginning of the argument should have been my clue that even the premise was cause and effect. First, I’m going to re-write the notes the way they should have been done, then I’m going to make a list of all of the words that I can think of that signal cause-and-effect, and then I’m going to scan through some old CRs I’ve already done to try to spot cause-effect premises. (And, of course, I will keep an eye on this issue when I do future problems.)

For verbal, the following two questions can be combined:

- Am I comfortable with OTHER STRATEGIES that would have worked, at least partially? How should I have made an educated guess?

- Do I understand every TRAP & TRICK that the writer built into the question, including wrong answers?

→Answer A is tempting to choose because it seems like a pretty good assumption to make in the real world; Answer A is wrong, though, because how the problems “should” be solved doesn’t tell me anything about how well-informed the chief executive is about those problems.

→Answer B is tempting to choose because it sounds like a good way to resolve the problem described in the argument. Answer B is wrong, though, because we weren’t asked to resolve the problem; we were asked to articulate a belief (an assumption) of the author who is pointing out the problem.

→Answer C is tempting to choose because it sounds like a pretty good assumption to make in the real world. Answer C is wrong, though, because the ability to solve a problem still doesn’t tell me anything about how well-informed the chief executive is about those problems.

→Answer choice D is tempting to eliminate because it sounds like a pretty bad assumption to make in the real world; it’s probably not true that a CEO only gets info from subordinates. Answer D is right, though, because this is exactly the (bad!) assumption that the author makes to draw his conclusion. If CEOs really can’t get info from anyone other than their subordinates, and if those subordinates don’t want to tell them any bad news, then those CEOs are not going to be well-informed about problems.

→Answer choice E is tempting to choose because it is undoubtedly true in the real world –some people will tell their bosses the complete truth about problems. Answer choice E is wrong, though, because it weakens the argument: if some subordinates are speaking up, then the bosses aren’t less well-informed. We were asked to find an assumption, and an assumption is something the author must believe to be true in order to draw that conclusion. If the answer choice actually weakens the conclusion, then that answer can’t be a valid assumption (and now I know that’s true for all future Assumption questions!).

3. How well did I or could I RECOGNIZE what was going on?

- Did I make a CONNECTION to previous experience? If so, what problem(s) did this remind me of and what, precisely, was similar? Or did I have to do it all from scratch? If so, see the next bullet.

→Yes. I recognized that this was an assumption question because I’d studied how assumption questions are typically worded. I should have recognized more though (see below).

- Can I make any CONNECTIONS now, while I’m analyzing the problem? What have I done in the past that is similar to this one? How are they similar? How could that recognition have helped me to do this problem more efficiently or effectively? (This may involve looking up some past problem and making comparisons between the two!)

→I could have done better with recognizing the X → Y → Z setup more quickly so that I could have taken more clear notes. I also fell into a “sounds good in the real world” trap that caused me to pick the wrong answer, as well as a “sounds bad in the real world” trap that caused me to eliminate the right answer. In the future, I will know that how it sounds in the real world is not a good reason to pick or eliminate an answer.

- HOW will I recognize similar problems in the future? What can I do now to maximize the chances that I will remember and be able to use lessons learned from this problem the next time I see a new problem that tests something similar?

→I need to do everything I already described in my notes above. I’m also going to go back and look through some old Assumption problems that I’ve already done. I’ll identify why each answer is tempting (to choose or eliminate, as appropriate) and why it’s actually right or wrong, looking to see if I can recognize the kinds of traps I identified on this problem (especially the “sounds wrong in the real world” right answer!).

And that’s it! Note that, of course, the details above are specific to each individual person – such a write-up would be different for every single one of you, depending upon your particular strengths, weaknesses, and mistakes. Hopefully, though, this gives you a better idea of the way to analyze a problem. This framework also gives you a valuable way to discuss problems with fellow online students or in study groups – this is the kind of discussion that really helps to maximize scores.

* GMATPrep® question courtesy of the Graduate Management Admissions Council. Usage of this question does not imply endorsement by GMAC.

For more information on ManhattanGMAT, download Clear Admit’s independent guide to the leading test preparation companies here.  This FREE guide includes coupons for discounts on test prep services at ten different firms!

Thomas Gilligan, dean of UT’s McCombs School of Business, shared some promising news in a post to the school’s blog earlier this week. As of that writing, 84 companies had registered for the school’s Career Expo, which took place on Wednesday, up from 74 last spring, and the career services director was expecting more to register in the final days before the event. Meanwhile the school’s SuperWeek for investment banking and consulting, held in mid-January, attracted 20 companies seeking MBAs. Finally, MBA Director of Career Services Stacey Rudnick reports that postings for MBA internships are also up this year over last.

“I’m not a Pollyanna, our students still face a tough career environment and it concerns me,” Gilligan wrote. “I’m just pleased we’re aggressively pursuing opportunities, and our recruiting numbers are holding steady with the best of our peer schools,” he added.

Halfway across the country, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is also seeing improved job prospects for its students. According to a Bloomberg News report Thursday, the school has more off-campus job postings this year than last. And more second-year MBA students appear to have accepted full-time job offers than last year, Director of MBA Career Management Michelle Antonio told Bloomberg.

First years were a quiet bunch this week. Kellogg ‘11 Orlando reflected on his choice of blog name and clarified that his blog was just one person’s perspective, not the entire class of 2011. Stanford ‘11 Palo Alto For a While faced tough decisions in her summer job hunt.

Darden ‘10 Oren returned from an Israel trek. Fellow classmate Mechanigal shared a video that helped her see how the movie industry and an MBA are mutually exclusive. Harvard ‘10 Gabrielle also had movies on her mind as she recapped her first day of film-watching at Sundance. While she was still enjoying the experience of studying in Sweden, Darden ‘10 July Dream experienced something that resembled homesickness. McCombs ‘10 Metal spent eight hours preparing his case write-up for his Global Finance class.

And that concludes this week’s round up of the always interesting activities and thoughts of the b-school blogosphere. We hope that good news continues to roll in for aspirants, and that current students find their ‘groove’ for this new semester. Until next week, have a great weekend!

The Assistant Dean of UCLA Anderson MBA Admissions & Financial Aid, Mae Jennifer Shores, has been busy reviewing applicants’ audio essays.  UCLA’s film students took a turn animating submissions from last year, which can be viewed on the school’s site. As Clear Admit covered earlier this week, Rich Lyons, the Dean of the Haas School of Business, officially posted the school’s new strategic plan.    MBA Admissions Coordinator at Judge Business School, James Barker, hosted a slew of prospective applicants on Cambridge’s Open Day.  Jon Fuller, the Senior Associate Director of Admissions at the Ross School of Business, shared some more waitlist tips.

Chicago Booth unveiled its top 10 myths about the admissions process, but it’s true that they have yet to release half of the Round 2 interview invitations.   Back in Boston, MIT Sloan announced a new graduate Sustainability Certificate.  The Wharton School welcomed prospective members of the MBA class of 2012 during Wharton Winter Welcome. For some insight into the admissions process, The Kellogg School of Management linked to the recent BusinessWeek chat with Beth Flye and Carla Edelston.

That concludes Twitter Thursdays this week!  If you’re on Twitter, let us know; e-mail wiki@clearadmit.com with your user name and status as an MBA applicant, student or admissions officer so we can add you to the appropriate Twitter list.  Happy “tweeting” and we’ll see you next week with some more Twitter updates!

Aspen CBE is a division of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering value-based leadership. Its partners in the Oath Project are the Association for Professional Business Managers, MBA Oath and the World Economic Forum for Young Global Leaders. Together, these four organizations have launched a website, TheOathProject.org, to communicate the initiative’s objectives and milestones.

The release from Aspen CBE announcing the new project’s launch noted that the idea of creating a business oath is not a new one. The creation of MBA programs in the United States grew in part out of a desire to “professionalize” the practice of management, and several schools have instituted their own oaths at various times.

Amid the recent economic crisis, management education has come under fire from some critics, and the idea of a global MBA oath has gained new life. Two Harvard professors suggested a draft oath in a November 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review, and World Economic Forum Executive Director Klaus Schwab devoted a special session during the January 2009 forum to begin the process of creating a global business oath.

Then, in May 2009, a grassroots movement led by students at Harvard Business School created the MBA Oath, which was signed by more than half of the HBS graduating class of 2009. According to the Aspen CBE release, 1,000 other business school students from MBA programs around the world also opted to take the oath last spring, and as many as a dozen other groups and individuals took their own modified or translated oath.

The Oath Project is rooted in the idea that for the project to succeed, MBA programs worldwide must come to consensus around a single oath for all to share. “We are currently at the ‘final draft’ stage of this oath, and are seeking feedback before we finalize the oath for 2010,” the Aspen CBE release stated.

To learn more about the Oath Project, click here.

What do you think? Should all MBA students take a common oath pledging to practice business ethically upon graduation? Share your comments here.

This week Wharton hosted a celebratory open house for the newly renovated building that now houses both the Wharton Leadership Program and Center for Leadership and Change Management.  Jeff Klein, the Director of the Wharton Graduate Leadership Program, states that with both programs located in the same place, there will be increased opportunities for collaboration in programming, staff communication, and teamwork.  The center includes open cubicles, designated group work spaces, and break rooms, all of which are designed to increase the social and academic experience of students and staff.  Students, staff, faculty, and university partners attended the open house and heard speeches from various Wharton leaders, including Mike Useem, who heads the Center for Leadership and Change Management.  With the new facilities, Wharton Dean Thomas S. Robertson stated he is confident in the school’s ability to help students become leaders, not just managers, in both the public and private sectors.

The Wharton Partners Clubs, the organization of Wharton students’ significant others, has renamed itself as “Cohort P” – though obviously not an official “cohort” of the school, this organization offers support to partners of Wharton students who are interested in becoming more integrated into and involved in the Philadelphia social, academic, work, and volunteer scene.  With 167 members, this organization is an important resource for both Wharton partners and Wharton students themselves, and hosts movie nights, happy hours, cooking classes, a monthly book club, and trips around Philadelphia.

Wharton students are also getting ready to submit their photos to the Wharton Yearbook, a tradition almost 20 years old.  Every year the Wharton Yearbook chronicles the student experience, such as cohort and social activities, trips and treks, and other University events.   Students are able to reserve copies so they ensure that they get their hands on this book full of memories and potential future networking material.

Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT prep courses.

At graduate school functions, a common elitist quip from engineers and scientists when talking to MBA students is to ask, “Are you majoring in PowerPoint, or Excel?” (A similarly-popular retort is “I’m majoring in outsourcing your job”) While, obviously, business school curriculum is much more substantive than some graduate counterparts will like to admit, the truth does remain that you will use programs like Microsoft Excel quite often in business school, and you’ll also need to buy a fairly sophisticated financial calculator. So, knowing that, why would the GMAT not allow you to use a calculator or spreadsheet device on its quantitative section?

The reason that the GMAT prohibits calculators is that its primary concern is not to test your ability to “crunch numbers,” but rather to assess your ability to problem solve using numbers. In fact, in many cases, questions are crafted in an attempt to bait you in to an attempt to calculate numbers by hand that will be a sufficient combination of time-consuming and error-prone to cripple your test performance and elicit an incorrect answer.

Knowing that the GMAT isn’t a math skills test, but rather a test of problem solving, efficiency, and other, more business-oriented skills and traits, you should prepare yourself to recognize when problems can be solved in a simpler way. Often times, this can be done by recognizing patterns in the ways that numbers interact. Consider the question:

What is the units digit of 2²⁵ – 6⁷?

In seeing this question, you may well think that, although it may take some time, you can work through the calculations and actually determine the values of the two exponential terms. After all:

2¹ = 2

2² = 4

2³ = 8

2⁴ = 16

2⁵ = 32

4⁶ = 64

And so on. How much more work can it be to get to the 25th power? Well, as the numbers get bigger, you’ll undoubtedly slow down in calculating them — 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, and that only gets us to the 13th power with the real heavy lifting still to come. If you’ve noticed from the question, however, that the question specifically and exclusively asks for the units digit — the last digit before the decimal point — then you can eliminate most of the work. You don’t need to calculate that 2⁵ = 32, as long as you know that 2⁵ yields a units digit of 2. Multiply by 2, and you’ll know that 2⁶ yields a 4, 2⁷ yields an 8, etc.

What’s more, you can also begin to notice that a pattern emerges, as there is a cycle: 2, 4, 8, 6, 2, 4, 8, 6… The cycle repeats every fourth digit, with the fourth unique digit in the sequence being 6. Therefore, the result for each exponent that is a multiple of four is 6, so 2²⁴ will yield a 6. 2²⁵ is the next term in the cycle, so the units digit will be 2.

Sixes are easier : 6¹ = 6; 6² = 36; 6³ = 216… This pattern dictates that multiplying a units digit of 6 by 6 is going to yield a 6, so regardless of the exponent (as long as it’s a positive integer) the units digit will be a 6, and you don’t really have to do any math.

One last twist to this problem: you need to realize that 2²⁵ will be considerably larger than 6⁷, so your subtraction problem will look something like:

XXXXXXXXXXX2
– YYYYYYYY6

The answer, then, is 6, as this problem will take the form of 12-6 (since this multiple of 2 is clearly larger than this multiple of 6), and not of 2-6 (yielding -4), which would be the case if the 2 term were known to be smaller than the 6 term.

Again, the GMAT is testing something a little higher-order than math here — did you consider all of the possibilities, or make a quick, incorrect assumption when you thought you were done?

For more information on Veritas Prep, download Clear Admit’s independent guide to the leading test preparation companies here.  This FREE guide includes coupons for discounts on test prep services at ten different firms!