In an October email to alumni, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania shared that it would soon begin implementing a behavior-based interview as part of its MBA admissions process. “This behavior-based interview will have several significant differences from the traditional interview,” read the email.
As Round 1 applicants have gone through the interview process and shared field notes on their experiences in places like the Clear Admit Wiki and BusinessWeek’s Business School Forums, details about this new behavior-based interview have become more widely available to the applicant community.
Then, earlier this week, after accessing an online training presentation for Wharton alumni conducting student interviews, Poets&Quants published the six new behavior-based interview questions that now comprise the Wharton interview. Obviously, this information is of interest to current and prospective applicants to Wharton as they prepare to approach the interview portion of the admissions process.
As reported by P&Q, Wharton alumni conducting student interviews have been instructed to ask three of six provided questions relating to team building, facilitative leadership and persuasive communication, competencies identified by students, alumni, recruiters and faculty as key to a prospective applicant’s success at Wharton.
The questions related to each competency are as follows:
Team Building:
1. “Describe a time when you have been working toward the completion of an important task, when it has been necessary to consider the opinions and feelings of others.”
2. “Describe a time when you have worked as part of a team working towards an important goal, when you have addressed conflict between two or more team members.”
Facilitative Leadership:
1. “Describe a time when you have worked with others to complete an important task, when there was no formally appointed group leader.”
2. “Describe a time when you have ensured an important task has been completed, when you felt others were less focused than you on completing the important task.”
Persuasive Communication:
1. “Describe a time when you have had to persuade others to your way of thinking, when at first they did not buy into your idea.”
2. “Describe a time when your ideas have been challenged by others, requiring you to defend your opinions.”
As reported by P&Q , the Wharton presentation, led by Director of Admissions Ankur Kumar, also recommends follow-up questions alumni should ask under each competency category. For example, in follow up to the questions about team building, alumni are encouraged to ask: “What exactly did you do?” “Describe specifically how you did that?” “Talk me through what you did?” And under “facilitative leadership,” the suggested follow-ups are: “How did it work out?” “What was the outcome?” “How did you measure the success of what you did?”
Why the shift toward behavior-based interviews? As part of the 25-minute presentation to alumni interviewers, Kumar offered that “traditional interviews can be subjective and often end up assessing the candidate’s interviewing capability, rather than their suitability for the MBA program.” Rather than duplicating the findings of the written application a candidate has already submitted – as traditional interviews often do – the hope is that these new behavior-based interviews will provide new, substantive information about an applicant’s approach to situations relevant to the MBA.
P&Q reports that it gained access to Kumar’s presentation through a simple website link without a password. In addition to providing the specific interview questions and suggested follow-up questions, the presentation also included instructions for alumni interviewers on how to grade candidates’ responses to each question on a scale of 1 to 4, P&Q reports.
While the intention may not have been for the actual questions to be so readily accessible to prospective applicants, Wharton officials report that the school is not terribly concerned that they are now public knowledge.
“Our admissions team is quite confident in the interview process,” Malini Doddamani, a Wharton spokesperson, wrote in an email response to P&Q, adding that it anticipated that details about the new interview structure would quickly become available to prospective applicants through a variety of means. Even with advance knowledge of the questions, applicants’ answers will be varied enough to allow the admissions team to make better judgments, Doddamani added. “The key to success is in the manner of answering and the ability to navigate through the turns of the interaction. Questions just serve as a ‘starter.’”
Read the full article: U Penn’s Wharton School Shifts to a Behavior-Based Interview Format