So you have taken the GMAT and exceeded even your highest expectations, scoring at the very top of the scale. Congratulations! But please, do not assume that earning a score that high means you can relax with respect to the other components of your application. Every year, applicants who have scored 750 or even higher are rejected from their target business schools—even when their GMAT score falls within the top 10% of the schools’ range. And many of these candidates were rejected because of a fatal, but ultimately avoidable, mistake: they got overconfident and assumed their GMAT score alone would get them in.

“I joke sometimes that I relish nothing more than rejecting people that have a 780 on the GMAT, because they come with the 780 GMAT and think they’re golden, and they don’t have to worry about anything else on the application. Well, you do. There are all these other pieces of information that we ask for, and you have to make sure that you are strong across the board.” So said Jonathan Fuller, senior associate director of admissions at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, in a recent online chat. Ross—as well as every other business school—wants to learn a lot more about you than your GMAT score alone can convey. The MBA programs are interested in hearing about your ambitions, accomplishments, leadership skills, teamwork experience, perseverance, motivation, integrity, compassion … and the list goes on. Fundamentally, admissions committees need to be able to determine whether you will be a vital and contributing member of their community, and your GMAT score tells them only that you can do the work.

Heed our advice—even (or especially!) those of you with a 780—and commit yourself to the rest of your application with the same enthusiasm with which you approached the GMAT!

As of late, a strange trend seems to have manifested: candidates have been calling mbaMission to ask whether submitting an application in Round 2 is worth the effort or whether the opportunity has passed at that point. Unfortunately, when one is being compared against a group of unknown competitors, being concerned about every perceived difference or deficiency is only natural. Some candidates grow concerned if they are a year older than the average at their target school, while others fret if they are a year younger. Many applicants worry if their GMAT score is ten points below a school’s average. And, of course, some worry if they submit their application in Round 2. However, the overall strength of your candidacy, which is a measure of many factors, is far more important than where you fit in relation to any single statistic—not to mention whether you apply in Round 1 or 2.

So, we too would encourage candidates to apply early, if they are ready, but we do not believe anyone should give up on their MBA dreams for a year if applying in Round 1 is just not practical. You may be surprised to discover that admissions committees encourage early applications but also concede that the difference in selectivity between the first and the second rounds is very small. To back up this statement, we offer a small selection of quotes from mbaMission’s exclusive interviews with admissions officers:

“People ask, generally, is it better to apply in the first round or the second round or third round? We definitely advise people to avoid the third round if possible, because space can become an issue by the time the third round rolls around. But we do view the first two rounds as roughly equivalent.” – Bruce DelMonico, Admissions Director, Yale School of Management

“[We] get about a third of our applications in Round 1, about 55% in Round 2, and the remainder in Round 3 … We encourage people to submit their application when they feel that they offer their best possible applications. … So, if you can get everything lined up and completed and you feel really good about it …, then I would encourage you to apply in Round 1. But if it takes you a bit longer, and you want to take the time to look at your application again and maybe have somebody else look at it, then Round 2 is fine, too.” – Soojin Kwon Koh, Admissions Director, Michigan–Ross

“We look at statistics over the years—how many applications we got, how many we admitted and how many we yielded—and we try to even it out so we’re not being too generous in one round at the expense of another round.” – Dawna Clarke, Admissions Director, Dartmouth–Tuck

Most Round 1 deadlines are in October, and even though often applicants may receive a kind of “progress report” in the form of an interview invitation in November, this is no guarantee of eventual acceptance. Ultimately, then, applicants will not know for sure whether they have won a spot at any of their target schools until mid- to late December. So let’s imagine the worst-case scenario: You submit all your applications in Round 1 but are not accepted at any of your target schools. Now, feeling discouraged and unsure of your application strategy—not to mention dealing with the hustle and bustle of the holidays—you must quickly research and select new schools, rethink your approach and crank out still more applications in the space of just a few weeks to be able to submit in Round 2—to schools that you may not even be that enthusiastic about. And don’t forget that you will also need to pressure your recommenders during this busy time of year to produce more documents on your behalf on a very tight deadline!

Are you rethinking your strategy yet?

We recommend that instead, you change your mindset from “If I don’t get into schools in R1, I will apply in R2″ to “I am applying to some schools in R1 and some in R2, and hopefully I won’t have to finish my R2 applications.” With luck, you will not need to complete the applications you have slated for Round 2, but if you plan ahead, don’t overload yourself with too many applications in the first round and work steadily on your applications over several months, you will be in a much better place both mentally and with your required workload if you should have to move ahead with your Round 2 submissions. And if, in the end, you get accepted early or receive multiple offers of admissions from your first-round applications, you will have lost nothing more than a little time!

Many MBA candidates believe that admissions committees have narrowed down their criteria for selecting applicants over the years and that each school has one distinct “type” that it seeks. So, in this world of stereotypes, Harvard Business School (HBS) is looking only for leaders, Kellogg is looking only for marketing students, Chicago Booth is looking only for finance students and, in some extreme cases, people actually believe that MIT is looking only for “eggheads.” Of course, these stereotypes—like most stereotypes—are not accurate. Chicago Booth wants far more than one-dimensional finance students in its classes, and it provides far more than just finance to its MBA students (including, to the surprise of many, an excellent marketing program). HBS is not a school just for “generals”; among the 950 students in each of its classes, HBS has a wide variety of personalities, including some excellent foot soldiers. So, at mbaMission, we constantly strive to educate MBA candidates about these misconceptions in hopes that they will eschew these stereotypes, which can sink applications if applicants pander to them.

By way of example, imagine that you have worked in operations at a widget manufacturer. You have profound experience managing and motivating dozens of different types of people, at different levels, throughout your career, in both good economic times and bad. Even though your exposure to finance has been minimal, you erroneously determine that you need to be a “finance guy” to get into NYU Stern. So you tell your best, but nonetheless weak, finance stories, and now you are competing against elite finance candidates who have far more impressive stories in comparison. What if you had told your unique operations/management stories instead and stood out from the other applicants, rather than trying to compete in the school’s most overrepresented pool?

We think that attempting to defy stereotypes and truly being yourself—to try to stand out from all others and not be easily categorized—is only natural. Of course, if you are still not convinced, you might ask Stanford’s director of MBA admissions, Derrick Bolton, who wrote on his admissions Web site,“Because we want to discover who you are, resist the urge to ‘package’ yourself in order to come across in a way you think Stanford wants. Such attempts simply blur our understanding of who you are and what you can accomplish. We want to hear your genuine voice throughout the essays that you write, and this is the time to think carefully about your values, your passions, your hopes and dreams.”

Kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

“I was running a lab during my Master’s program—is that part of my total number of months of work experience?”

“I ran a small business that ultimately failed—will I get credit for my time as an entrepreneur?”

Business schools have not seriously considered a candidate’s number of months of work experience as a factor in admissions decisions for a long time. In fact, with Harvard Business School and the Stanford GSB increasingly open to younger candidates, work experience on a strictly quantitative level is actually being devalued at some schools. A candidate’s quantity of work experience is just not relevant—quality is, of course, what is important. An “average” employee who has merely fulfilled expectations during a five-year stint at a Fortune 500 company could certainly be said to be at a disadvantage compared with an individual who has made the most of a three-year stint elsewhere and has been promoted ahead of schedule. Think about it—which of the two would you hire? Which of the two would you admit?

So, if you are asked on an application how many months of work experience you will have prior to matriculating, you should simply answer honestly. If you have any gray areas or are unsure about any aspect of your professional experience as it pertains to your application, you can always call the admissions office for guidance. (Far from being punitive, most admissions offices are actually surprisingly helpful with this kind of simple technical question.) Thereafter, stop worrying about the number of months you do or do not have and instead focus on revealing that—and how—you have had an impact in your professional life. Your essays, recommendations, interviews, resume and other application elements will ultimately make a qualitative impact that will outweigh any quantitative data.

Why are we telling you this? Many candidates each year tell us that their bosses, who applied to business school during far different times, have given them “sage” advice about applying and that they feel they should follow it—after all, what worked for their boss in 1966, 1976, 1986 or even 1996 must still be applicable today, right? Wrong.

For a long time, the MBA was actually not all that desirable a degree, so admissions was not really all that competitive. To give you an idea of the relative popularity, Duke University (Fuqua) did not even start its MBA program until 1970, but its law school was founded in 1868. Yale University was founded in 1701, but it did not have an MBA program until 1976. So, the MBA is a relatively new degree that has only recently (in the late 1990s) reached its current level of popularity and prestige.

What does all of this mean with regard to your boss’s advice? Although your supervisor may have gotten into one of your target schools, he or she likely did so years ago and therefore may not have had to contend with the steep competition you now face. Your boss may also not know anything about what the admissions process is like today and could be—however inadvertently—leading you astray. If your supervisor starts any bit of his or her well-intended advice with the phrase “when I applied,” you should view the coming declaration with tremendous caution.

We think that we can destroy this myth with a few simple rhetorical/logical questions: Why would an admissions office encourage you to take a test that it would not take seriously? Why would an admissions committee disenfranchise applicants who take the GRE, when one of the main purposes of permitting the GRE is to expand the applicant pool? Why would admissions officers waste precious time devising such a devious scheme in the first place?

“The exam itself is less important than your performance on that exam relative to your peers,” says Dan Gonzalez, managing director at Manhattan GRE. “Think less about which exam schools want you to take and more about which exam will give you the best shot at showing off your skills. The GMAT and the GRE are quite different—take some time to learn about these differences before making your decision.”

So if you are considering taking the GRE—because you want to keep your options open for grad school or just because you think the test plays to your strengths—then you should first check to see if your target schools accept the test. Next, if they do, you should study hard and… take the GRE!

Many MBA applicants fret about their lack of alumni connection with their target schools, and the myth abounds that admission to business school is about who you know, not who you are or what you can offer. Of course, these latter qualities are more important, and a standout applicant who knows no graduates at all from the school he/she is targeting is still a standout applicant and should get in—just as a weak applicant who knows a large number of alumni or a particularly well-known graduate is still a weak applicant and should not get in. Clearly, some extreme exceptions exist where influence can be exerted, but the “standard” applicant need not worry that every seat at the top MBA programs has been claimed by someone with good connections, before he/she even applies.

Remember, the admissions committees want to ensure that a diversity of ideas and experiences is represented in the classroom. Every top MBA class includes people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, nationalities, religions, professional backgrounds, ages, etc.  Harvard has 900 students in each incoming class, and the vast majority of these students do not personally know a CEO or the president of a country. And who knows? These days, such connections could even be a liability.

“My company has been under a hiring and promotion freeze for the past three years, but during that time, I have earned pay increases and survived successive rounds of layoffs. Will the admissions committee accept someone who has not been promoted?”

“I have been promoted, but my company changed names. Will the admissions committee think I am going somewhere at a sketchy company?”

Although these questions may seem somewhat silly—the individuals’ strengths are obvious and their “weaknesses” comparatively innocuous—we get asked about scenarios like these every day. In short, we can assure you that your candidacy, even at vaunted schools like HBS and Stanford, is not rendered tenuous by such trivial “shortcomings.” The admissions officers do not consider you guilty until proven innocent, and they are not looking for little reasons to exclude you from contention.

Many candidates have mythologized the “perfect” applicant and fear that any small area of concern means that they do not measure up to this myth—and thus that their candidacy is insufficient. Rather than fixating on small details that in truth are inconsequential, you should think about the big picture with respect to your overall competitiveness.

You can take us at our word on this. Or, if you prefer, heed the words of J.J. Cutler, deputy vice dean of MBA admissions, financial aid, and career management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who explained to mbaMission that “everyone has something, or more than one thing, in their application that they need to overcome,” but added, “We read with an eye toward wanting to find all the good things about an applicant. We look for their strengths. We look for things that make them stand out, that make them unique. We look for their accomplishments. We look for positive parts of the application.”

Not so fast.

Although first applications usually do, in fact, take longer to complete than subsequent ones, this is not because once you have crafted several essays for one or two schools, you can then simply cut and paste them into other applications, adjust the word count a bit, change a few names here and there and be done.

Admissions committees spend a lot of time crafting their application questions, thinking carefully about the required word limit and about each component of the question. Schools pose questions that they believe will draw out specific information that will help them ascertain whether the applicant would be a good fit with their program. If you simply paste an essay you previously wrote for School A into the application for School B because you believe the schools’ questions are largely similar, you will most likely miss a key facet of what School B is really asking about. For example, consider these two questions:

Kellogg 2010: Describe your key leadership experiences and evaluate what leadership areas you hope to develop through your MBA experiences (600-word limit).

Tuck 2010: Discuss your most meaningful leadership experience. What did you learn about your own individual strengths and weaknesses through this experience? (approximately 500 words)

Even though both essay questions ask you to explore leadership experiences, they certainly do not ask the exact same question. Kellogg wants to hear about more than one leadership experience and for you to provide a forward vision of the areas you want to develop (while at Kellogg). Tuck, on the other hand, asks about only one leadership experience—your most meaningful leadership experience, in particular—and wants to know what you learned about yourself as a result.  If you simply paste your 600-word Kellogg essay as your response to the Tuck question and cut 75-100 words, Tuck’s admissions committee will know that you did not answer their question. Similarly, a “mistake” (HBS essay) and a “failure” (Wharton essay) are not necessarily the same thing, and believe us, HBS has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of cases in which applicants clearly submitted their Wharton “failure” essay in response to this question—and vice versa. Understandably, this is not the way to win over the admissions committee. Although you may use the same core story for more than one application essay, take the time to examine that story from the angle proposed by your target school’s question and respond accordingly.

One simple rule will always stand you in good stead: answer the question asked.