Question

Westmore MBA Program The MBA program at Westmore University has undergone several dramatic changes over the past five years. During this time, the goal of the business school was to recruit as many students as possible into the MBA program in order to build up their student base and credit hour production. A massive campaign was launched five years ago in order to attract more applicants to the program. Special brochures containing information about the program were printed and mailed to prospective students as well as to other colleges and universities that were likely to have undergraduate students who might be interested in coming to Westmore. Mailings were also sent to students who indicated an interest in Westmore on their GMAT exam. (The GMAT exam is a national standardized test used by most business schools in making admissions decisions for applicants to their graduate programs.) Representatives from the Westmore School of Business began attending regional “MBA fairs,” where MBA program representatives meet with prospective MBA students and share information. In the beginning, the number of students applying to the Westmore MBA program was small, but eventually the advertising campaign began to work and the number of qualified applicants each year increased to the target value of 150 initially set by the dean of the business school and the director of the MBA program. The yield— the percentage of admitted applicants who actually enroll and attend Westmore—is typically around 70%. Admitted students who do not enroll either attend other MBA programs or accept job offers. The accompanying table shows the admissions and enrollment figures for the five years of the plan to build the MBA student base at Westmore. Wayne McDonald, the director of the program, is currently putting the second phase of the plan into action. He knows that in order for the MBA program at Westmore to attain national recognition, administrators must become more selective in the admissions process. The number of applicants is now large enough to do this without falling below a critical mass of 60 enrolled students each year. The major issue facing Wayne and the MBA program is how to go about selecting the best students for the program. Wayne McDonald’s assistant gathered the data for the past two years of experience with the Westmore MBA program and the information is stored in the WESTMORE data file. The Data Description section provides a partial listing of the data along with definitions of the variables. Using this data set and other information given in the case, help Wayne McDonald and the MBA Admissions Committee in their quest to develop better admissions guidelines for the Westmore MBA program. The committee wishes to use first-year MBA grade point average in measuring the quality of applicants to its program. Use important details from your analysis to support your recommendations.

1) Write an Introduction: A description of the problem and the relevant statistical background and an overview of your approach. (max 2 pages)

Answer 1

Introduction:

Westmore University had launched an MBA program five years to ensure that the students count enrolling into the MBA program increase from their current set of students. The main motive to launch this program was to promote Westmore University and create awareness amongst the prospective students to enrol into the Westmore University MBA Program. They started by launching a huge campaign where prospective students were mailed and there were handouts also that were distributed at various events to prospective students. In order to gather maximum student's attention these activities were done.

There were representatives from the Westmore University who started attending regional MBA fairs where they would get the chance to meet students who would be interested in enrolling into a well qualified MBA program. Initially the campaign was a bit slow to catch up but later there were more and more students who started to show interest in taking up the MBA program at Westmore.

Now, since they were successful in reaching their first milestone of attracting more and more students, they now shifted their attention towards building the quality of students. In order to ensure quality, Westmore University personnel wanted to put in place a proper measure to shortlist quality candidates which would further help them succeed in their endeavour and the Westmore University would attain national recognition. There were several information and data that were collected in this process.

Problem:

The problem that Westmore University has is that they have a large number of students that have enrolled and they are under a dilemma to choose the best procedure to select quality students. The data of the past 2 years has been collected to assess the kind of students who have actually managed to do well during their MBA course of study. Below are few measures that Westmore University can take in this process:

a. Analyse the trend of students with respect to their overall educational qualification i.e. in terms of percentage they have achieved in their high school and compare that to their MBA program performance. By doing this, they would be able to find the best possible options to qualify students who can actually do well in their MBA program as well.

b. Westmore University can set up their own aptitude test in order to gain better understanding on the student's IQ and their knowledge levels. This would help them understand students who can actually have a better aptitude and also would help them in shortlisting the most potential candidates. They can shortlist candidates by including a cut off percentage of marks that needs to be scored in the aptitude test.