MBA申请中的几大误区(二):排名可信吗?

newboyss

中国的学生特喜欢排名. I want to argue that ranking is not so important, especially for schools who are not in the top.

1.  any ranking is subjective and is designed by some one else. You want to know whether the ranking provided by me or by other newpapers coincides with your own preference.  You have to know what are the basis for these rankings and how the data is calculated.

2. Are these data reliable? If there are large errors, how would that affect the ranking. Would large errors in the data provided by schools make these ranking totally meaningless.

3. There are many information that may be important to you and is not considered in the ranking. For example, the strength of alumni network in the area of the most interest to you, reputation in the industry, culture of the school and so on

4. How different are these schools? Who is make the judgements? are the scores very close? for example, according to one particular method, we have the following score on three schools:

A: 4.80001

B: 4.80000

C:4.79999

According to this score we say A>B>C. However if the score has an average error of 0.5. This kind of ranking is totally meaningless because basically we cannot tell them apart

These are the reasons that makes ranking of little use. What you should do is to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why do I want to go to business school? What I can get out from this experience? What is my plan for my career? What are the attributes from a business school that I am seeking?

2. Using web, phone, personal communication, campus vists, info sessions to get as much knowledge about the attributes that you care. Make sure to correct any biases due to subjective representation, misleading information, misrepresentation, incomplete data and so on

3. Based on your first hand information, form your own judgement. You are an adult now. You should be able to form your own judgement using thse information

4. focus on the important attributes, like placement, curriculum strength, alumni network and for the most part ignore the minor issues such as tuition

[此贴子已经被作者于2007-3-14 11:38:26编辑过]