Wharton scrapped required MBA application essay

Wharton the leading management institute has removed the number of required essays to get into its MBA programs, making it the latest major business school to join the lean application movement. The new Wharton questions reduced the total maximum word count by nearly 30 percent to 1,000 words from 1,400 last year. Now, there are just two essays, which were three earlier. The first asks, “What do you hope to achieve, personally and professionally, through the Wharton MBA?” The second: “Engagement is an important element of the Wharton MBA experience. How do you see yourself contributing to our learning community?” Each question has a 500-word limit.

The questions, for the class entering in 2014 and graduating two years later are very different from last year’s questions. The first question is how a Wharton MBA will help the applicant to achieve his/her professional objectives. Application could then choose two additional questions from three supplied. One question asked applicant to select a Wharton course or extracurricular activity and describe how it connects with their interests. Another asked applicants what they would do with three “work-free” hours. The third asked applicants to describe a time when they “put knowledge into action.”

Ankur Kumar, the admission director at Wharton, says the decision to remove the choice of questions was based on feedback from applicants who said they preferred to have specific required questions. The second questions is an attempt to learn something about the applicant’s “intellectual curiosity and academic engagement,” qualities that do not get discussed anywhere else in the application. “Essays are a way for us to learn more about our applicants from their point of view,” she says. “What we’re really looking for is who they are and how they think.”

A number of top business schools have already scaled back on MBA essay questions for entering class of 2014, which include Harvard Business School, Columbia Business Schools, NYU’s Stern School of Business and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Another top school, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, announced new essay question but did not reduce them in number or size. Each of the questions has a 500-word limit. The first asks applicants to describe how they would contribute towards advancing Sloan’s mission-developing “principled, innovate leaders who improve the world and generate ideas that advance management practice”-while the second question ask them to describe a time when they pushed themselves beyond their “comfort zone.”