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Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.

You have taken a course, studied hard and finally “nailed” the GMAT. However, you soon learn that your score on the Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA), the essay portion of the GMAT, is low. Should you panic?

In short, the answer is … no! Although we have always encouraged candidates to do the best they can on the AWA, the truth of the matter is that we have never been told by an admissions officer—nor, as far as we know, has a candidate ever been told in a feedback session—that the AWA score was a factor in a school’s admit/reject decision. Generally, the AWA is not used to evaluate candidates, but to detect fraud.

If, hypothetically, you had tremendous difficulty expressing yourself via the AWA essays, but wrote like a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer in your application essays, the school would get suspicious and begin to compare the two. Not to worry—the schools are not punitive and are not acting as fraud squads. Your AWA essays are expected to be unpolished, so no one will seek out your file if you did your best in both areas. However, if an enormous discrepancy arises between the two, the AWA serves a purpose.

So, if you did well on the GMAT and have a low AWA score, that is a shame, but it is not going to be the difference in the school’s decision about your candidacy. Rest easy….as long as you wrote both!

Many essay writers use medium-length sentences (like this one) in their essays. Few use short sentences (like this one.) Likewise, few use long sentences in their essays, even though long sentences (like this one) can often play a useful role in an essay’s structure and story.

Confused? Consider the following example:

“At XYZ Inc., I was the manager in charge of leading a team of 12 staff members. Included in my team were four engineers, four marketing professionals and four market analysts. Our goal was to develop a new thingamajig within six months. We worked really hard over the six months and succeeded. The new thingamajig is now on the market and is selling well. As a result of my efforts, I was promoted to vice-president.”

All of these sentences have approximately the same number of words—and the same rhythm/cadence as well. Thus, as a group, they are fairly boring to read. Nothing changes. The structure just repeats itself over and over again, as medium-length sentence follows medium-length sentence.

Now consider this example:*

“At XYZ Inc., I was the manager in charge of leading a thingamajig development team consisting of 12 staff members, four of whom were engineers, four were marketing professionals and four were market analysts. We had just six months to launch our new product. The team worked really hard over the six months and succeeded, and the new thingamajig is now on the market, where it is selling well. As a result of my efforts, I was promoted to vice-president.”

The sentences in this paragraph are varied—the first is quite long, the second is very short, the third is medium-long and the fourth medium-short. Sentence variety makes for a much more interesting read, and one very short sentence in the middle of some longer ones can provide precisely the kind of contrast and drama that MBA application essays so often need.

*This is a simplified example for illustration purposes. If this were an actual essay, we would encourage the applicant to offer greater insight into his/her experience launching the product.

Which MBA program is right for me? How can I find the best fit? Jessica Shklar, a senior consultant with mbaMission, will help prospective MBAs understand the differences between top MBA programs. Jessica will elaborate on areas that will profoundly affect your academic and social lives in business school, including the flexibility of a program’s curriculum, the breadth of a school’s core courses, different methods of instruction, varying sizes of the cohorts and more. Start preparing now so you can be sure to make an educated decision when you apply!

A Q&A session will follow the presentation, after which Jessica will remain online to respond to your additional inquiries.

Date: Tuesday, February 22, 1011
Time: 8:30-10:00 p.m. EST
Location: Online
Price: Free!

To register for this event, please click here.

The Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth—aka Tuck—is located in the quaint town of Hanover, New Hampshire. Hanover has a population of only approximately 20,000 and is thus considered a small college town, but “Tuckies,” as the school’s students are known, have no shortage of access to global learning opportunities. Students gain hands-on international experience through the “Tuck Global Consultancy” course, which gives second-year students the chance to put their education into practice worldwide. Since 1997, students in this course have consulted with more than 90 global organizations on more than 135 projects in more than 45 countries. On-site consulting projects are led by small teams of students working under the supervision of Tuck professors with extensive consulting backgrounds. A high percentage of the second-year class participates in this elective, and at the end of the program, students present their findings to their clients from around the globe.

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.

Many applicants have expressed profound concern about the impact of being laid off. Will the admissions committee view a layoff as a sign of failure?

The key here is that many candidates share this worry—thousands of MBA candidates worldwide, in fact. For the admissions committees to dismiss all such applicants outright is simply not practical. In addition, the MBA admissions committees know that the global financial crisis and the subsequent recession are at the root of the problem, not necessarily the individual candidate’s performance. Indeed, layoffs and firings are not the same thing, so admissions committees will examine your application with that in mind, seeking your broader story of success.

If you have been caught up in this unfortunate mess, what is important is that you can show that you have made good use of your time since the layoff—studying, volunteering, seeking work, enhancing your skills, etc. Each candidate will react differently, of course, but you need to have a story to tell (whether you are applying in the late rounds or even for next year) of how you made the most of a difficult situation.