“…people with the highest GMAT scores may be the most corrupt, chauvinist, and arrogant.”

So, says Vivek Wadhwa in his provocative post “Is the GMAT the root cause of business evil”. As much as I’d like to rejoice because my GMAT score was nothing to write home about, it seems a little extreme. I would have liked to have a higher score but a month and a half of studying after a 10-year absence from academia pretty much guaranteed my average score.

I do agree that some schools put a lot of stock on the GMAT score; even putting a baseline before they can even start considering an application. I have no proof of this except for a short conversation with someone from the admissions department of a prestigious university. In doing so, then they fail to take other factors into account. As Wadhwa puts it:

“To give us the future business leaders we most need, the GMAT needs to take account of qualities other than raw business power: qualities such as empathy, holistic thinking, and the ability to fall into a mudstorm of problems and emerge clutching visions that are good not just for shareholders but for the planet; visions workable not just for today but for the foreseeable future.”