How important are senior year grades..

After getting job offers, I’m starting to feel senioritis. How important are senior yr grades in terms of business school applications? For those working, how did you guys perform senior yr?

Grades are only a small piece of the B-school app, but still important. B-schools will look at your grades and which courses you took. Don’t you want to have the best / strongest credentials possible? I busted my *** senior year to raise my GPA and finish a double major and went on to a top 5 bschool.

The other cool thing is that by last semester of senior year, you ought to be pretty good at college. In my last semester, I signed up for a sophomore-level “Number Theory” class and a freshman “Comparative Politics” class. It wasn’t fair, but those grades went into my GPA same as if I had taken them when I was a freshman or sophomore. Easy GPA boost.

Joey, how did you like comparative politics? That was actually my concentration in grad school (along with minors in social science methodology and political philosophy). At the undergraduate level, people test comparative politics mostly by seeing if you can use the terminology accurately and whether you can use the analytical frameworks to describe historical or current events. Really good undergrads will get to the point where you start testing the theories against each other and figure out which ones work better. At the graduate level, it gets a little more interesting, because you start to construct theories and try to figure out what are sensible, doable, ethical tests of whether they work - and to what extent they are even testable.