People who follow the movies more closely than I do seemed genuinely stunned when “Crash” and not “Brokeback Mountain” won the Academy Award for Best Picture last month.

I don’t have an opinion on which movie deserved the Oscar more, or why one got the award and not the other.

I do, however, have some ideas about what might have gone on behind the scenes – and some advice on how business school applicants can avoid being tripped up by similar upset victories.

How Admissions Decisions Are Made

Admissions decisions, like Academy Awards, reflect a collective judgment. Oscars go to films that gain the most support from members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. MBA admissions offers go to candidates who gain the most support from the admissions committee.

There are a couple of reasons why these collective judgments often differ from wider opinion.

One is that the voters’ decisions can be (and in the case of b-school admissions, typically are) influenced by discussion with fellow voters. That doesn’t mean horse-trading. It means discussion – dialogue, debate, give-and-take, appeals and persuasion. The discussion that goes on inside a group is often quite different from the discussion that goes on among the wider public.

That brings us to the second reason for the unpredictability of such votes, which is that these decisions reflect the views of experts. There are plenty of urban legends about the admissions process that ignore this fact. More often than not, applicants who put their faith in these rumors are left not only bitterly disappointed in their admissions outcomes but also one year behind where they want to be in their career development.

Committees May Not Share Conventional Wisdom

An admissions committee's assessment of a b-school applicant may be completely different from what people outside of the process think.

For example, let's take two hypothetical b-school applicants. A has an undergrad degree from Harvard and pulls in more sales for his or her company than anyone else. B went to the state university and has a dull back-office job. Everyone in the company agrees that A is a shoo-in for b-school and B is not.

But the admissions committees take a rather unique and holistic view of their applicants. Upon a closer inspection, they might recognize that B has a track record of taking on challenges and untangling complex problems, whereas A is pretty much a one-note wonder who’s done the same thing for three years. In this situation, the business schools will favor B over A.

At the end of all these processes, of course, it’s the voters’ opinion, and not the wider public’s, that counts. The only way that anyone can reliably predict an admissions outcome is if they have enough admissions experience to guess what’s going on inside the committee. An editor can give you excellent feedback on how well-written your admissions essays are, and a GMAT instructor can give you a sound estimate of what percentile of test-takers your scores put you in. But unless they’ve worked in admissions themselves, they can’t tell you what impact your essays and GMAT score will have on a committee’s decision.

And, in all honesty, even people with admissions committee experience are sometimes stumped by admissions outcomes. Several years ago we worked with two clients who had nearly identical profiles. Both of them applied to Harvard and to Stanford. Their profiles were so similar that we wound up employing very similar story themes and wow factors for both of them. One client was accepted by Harvard but rejected by Stanford. The other was accepted by Stanford but rejected by Harvard. To this day I’m not sure why the decisions came out the way they did. The only two things I am sure of are that we did a good job in helping both clients maximize their admissions chances at their top-choice schools – and that b-school admissions can be so competitive that sometimes final decisions turn on a bit of luck.

Be Prepared for Surprises

 B-school applicants can take some useful lessons from all of this:

1) Never forget that the admissions committee is the party that decides your admissions outcomes. Keep that audience in mind as you prepare your applications. Try to understand the picture that an admissions committee member will get of you from your entire application package.

2) Consider the source of any piece of advice you hear on b-school admissions. Who exactly is advising b-school applicants to do this thing? Are they in position to know what they claim to know? Could they be sincere but mistaken? Could they be lying?

3) Remember that there are no absolute certainties in b-school admissions. Even knowledgeable people are sometimes surprised by an admissions vote. Unless you’re absolutely, one hundred per cent determined to attend a particular school (and willing to put off matriculation by a year or two if you have to in order to achieve that goal), you should plan on applying to several different schools. As a general rule, the more important it is to you to start your MBA program in a particular year, the more schools you should apply to.

Keep these three pieces of advice in mind as you explore your business school options and start working on your applications. That way you’ll increase your chances of getting an admissions outcome you’re happy with – and, unlike some of the “Brokeback Mountain” fans I mentioned earlier, avoid feeling bewildered as well as disappointed if things don’t turn out as you hoped they would.

This article was provided by Admissions Consultants