What Happens When M.B.A. Students Don’t Tell Recruiters Their Grades? For one thing, they are less likely to stay at their first job out of school for longer than a year, a new study finds
The article amazingly sticks with the schtick that MBA programmes are about academics nearly all the way through to the end. As if!
If students in top-tier M.B.A. programs don’t have to show recruiters their grades, will they still try to get good grades?
That was one of the questions three professors sought to answer in a new paper that looks at so-called grade-nondisclosure policies at some of the nation’s top business schools and how those policies affect student behavior.
In a trend the authors say dates back at least to the mid-1990s, students in M.B.A. programs at certain schools, including Wharton and Columbia, collectively agree not to tell recruiters what their grades are until after they are hired. Such policies don’t originate from school administrators but rather are voted on by students, who agree not to show their grades even if recruiters ask for them.
Proponents of grade-nondisclosure policies say it reduces competitiveness among peers, encourages collaboration and allows students to pursue extracurricular activities, harder classes and courses that aren’t in their area of expertise but that might make them more well-rounded. Critics counter that such policies encourage students to spend less time on their coursework and deprive employers of a valuable tool to assess candidates.
The paper, written by Eric Floyd, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of California San Diego, Daniel Lee, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Delaware, and Sorabh Tomar, assistant professor of accounting at Southern Methodist University, found evidence to support both arguments.
Students at grade-nondisclosure schools spent 4.9% less time on courses than their peers at the same school who took classes part-time and didn’t adopt a grade-nondisclosure policy, the study found. But because the grade-nondisclosure students also took harder classes, the researchers said the time they spent on academics overall wasn’t statistically different from their peers. They also were 7.6% more likely to report having engaged in extracurricular activities, the researchers said.
At the same time, the study found that grade-nondisclosure students were 7.7% less likely to stay at their first job out of school for longer than a year and 12.8% less likely to stay longer than two years.
The authors didn’t study whether any of these findings were good or bad for employers or employees.
Dr. Tomar says it is possible that grade nondisclosure hurts the employee/employer matching progress, but it is also possible that spending more time on social and extracurricular activities improves students’ career networks, making them privy to more job opportunities.
The authors also note that it is much harder to measure the soft skills that can develop through extracurricular activities to the extent that grades signal a student’s hard skills.
“Between the extracurriculars and the difficult classes, what we say isn’t all time spent away from academics is lost time,” Dr. Lee says. “But we can’t really comment on the good or bad effects.”
Dr. Tomar notes that the paper arrives at a time when grade policies, broadly, are getting re-evaluated. Some colleges and universities have recently dropped their standardized test requirements. This, he says, is another form of grade nondisclosure, with schools more or less in the employer roles. High-school students likely will behave differently when they know their standardized test scores won’t be seen by universities during the admissions process (if they take the tests at all), he says, just like M.B.A. students behave differently when they know their grades won’t be seen during their recruiting process.
Mr. Kornelis is a writer in Bremerton, Wash. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.