MBA app: Exaggerations

Yesterday, one of my very close friends, told me that a person he knew got waitlisted at University of North Carolina, Kenan Flagler Business School(UNC). Now UNC is a top class school. Great strength across concentrations, great brand name, solid faculty, alumni network, placement, the works. So what is special about this particular chap who got waitlisted? Well, he had made up most of his resume, by his own admission. My friend had shown this other person's CV to me once. There was a line about: Volunteered during flood in Kolkata. Now Kolkata has never ever been flooded. Not just in my lifetime but ever. Now agreed, even a small amount of rains cause waterlogging in the city due to an outdated drainage system (thats a topic for another post altogether), but that's not a flood and the only volunteering people do during during such a time, is to turn up in office. In fact almost all of his "social work" was made up, by this person's own admission. The fact that he has a good chance at an admission at a US top 20 school certainly throws up some questions for all applicants.

People bloating CVs is nothing new. Though most of the schools are very strict about ethics and many schools actually have a separate essay to identify ethics in applicants, applicants have resorted to under handed tactics over and over again. A few years ago, Harvard rejected 119 applicants for hacking into their application site. Recently Fuqua expelled several students for cheating during exams. After Enron and worldcom, most business schools have tried hard to focus on and instill ethics into their students. But what can you do about a basic human urge to do one better than your peers? Many of us faced the competitive pressure during school exams that everyone cheated, so unless you also follow suit, your marks will suffer. The same analogy exists in today's business/political spheres. Unless you are corrupt like others, you will be left high and dry. For the purpose of this post, however, I shall focus on MBA applications only.

From a business school adcom perspective, it is almost impossible to verify every bullet point in the resume of applicants. I know Emory performs background checks of admitted applicants (and charges about $70 for the same as well). But by that time, the harm has already been done. Some worthy applicants have already been rejected. Off course, the adcoms can call up the immediate supervisors etc to verify the work credentials, but it's is not feasible all the times (say for a work history spanning several years). Moreover, how can you authenticate whether a personal story listed in an essay is true? So the fact is, some people will seep through the system, no matter what.

However, I firmly believe that such a tactics on the part of an individual is counterproductive in the long run. Say this person made it to UNC. Most of the other applicants would have been selected on the basis of their actual experiences and talent. So in class performance and during eventual placements, the difference is bound to surface. Most likely, such a person would not be able to cope with the MBA program rigour and/or reap its true benefits. Hard work, or the lack of it, does eventually show up. It's not a perfect world but things do average out over the years.