Since employer-information sessions for second-year MBAs began last week, students and recruiters have converged on cafes and hotels across town to discuss past experience and future opportunities.
But they haven't been talking about grades.
At these sessions, recruiters say, the previous work experience and practical knowledge MBAs bring to the table may be just as important as what is -- or, in the case of grades is not -- on their transcripts.
Wharton MBA students voted to not disclose grades to employers in January of 1994, with the intention of fostering academic exploration and collaboration.
But when the MBA Executive Committee proposed last April to expand the honor roll to the top 25 percent of the class, debate followed over whether the proposal would encroach upon the goals of grade-nondisclosure. Currently, the top tenth of the class makes the honor roll.
From the perspective of some recruiters, the debate over grades, honors and disclosure is secondary to the recruitment and interview process.
For Jennifer Brimley, a global-recruitment manager at the international investment bank HSBC, past work experience, standardized testing and undergraduate grade point averages form the cornerstone of the evaluation process.
While HSBC is new to recruiting at Wharton, Brimley said she is not alarmed by grade-nondisclosure, as it is customary at many of the nation's top business schools.
"I am not going to not look at a student just because of a ranking. I'm not just looking at what somebody's current test scores at Wharton [are]. ... What I'm looking at is why are you doing an MBA," she said.
Often, the name recognition of Wharton and the difficulty of gaining admission is a testament to a student's caliber, she added.
Son Pham, a recruiter for IBM business consulting, said that although IBM requires grades if students are not bound by a nondisclosure policy, grades are only one of many factors considered.
"We recruit for very smart, capable individuals. ... GPA is only one of the skill sets that we take into the full equation," he said, adding that a student's ability to communicate is also important.
Anjani Jain, vice dean of the Wharton graduate division, said that concern for recruiters' ability to evaluate student performance at Wharton has been one of the motivating factors behind the proposal to extend honors to the top 25 percent.
Wharton Graduate Association President Serhan Secmen shares Jain's concern, but he added that extending the honor roll could discourage some students from taking classes outside of their concentration, which may be more challenging for them.
Because of the two-year duration of the MBA program, it has been difficult for WGA members to assess whether there has been a decline in MBA academic performance or whether grade-nondisclosure is responsible. Nevertheless, WGA spokesman Ariel Milo said that if the administration calls for new academic policies, MBAs should heed them, barring a call to completely repeal grade-nondisclosure.
"If [Jain] sees that there is an issue with academics, we should take it seriously," he said.
