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Joern Meissner, a professor of Decision Sciences at Lancaster University Management School, agrees, "Lancaster does well in several rankings, but not others. All rankings are of limited value because the factor weightings are applied by one decision maker - the ranker - and don't necessarily reflect the needs of the majority of applicants."

Kim Keating, Director of Public Relations at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, maintains that rankings have an important role to play. "Business school rankings are still a valid tool for prospective students, recruiters, and others interested in business education. The best way to approach the six major rankings is to look at them as a whole and study the different aspects and attributes that each one is surveying." She believes that the imperfections of rankings should be tolerated.

TopMBA has responded to these pressures from candidates and academics, by producing a system - TopMBa.com/Scorecard - which allows candidates to formulate their own rankings, based on audited data. Our qualification for the role is that we have been producing QS World MBA Tour/Topmba.com research of recruiters and business schools since 1990 - seven years before the first FT ranking. The results are well-respected and the recruiter feedback provides a credible, independent basis for ranking schools. As Helle Jensen from INSEAD says, "I like the methodology adopted by TopMBA.com's Recruiter Research. It is a credible and sensible approach to evaluating business schools."

What should applicants make of rankings produced by Financial Times, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal - or the research conducted by TopMBA.com? First, do not rely on the final ranking to create your own order of preference for schools. Look at the numbers behind the rankings and decide if the criteria are important for you. If you compare the top schools in each survey, they are remarkably consistent. Schools move up and down from year to year, and from ranking to ranking, because there is no single, objective, ranking of the best MBAs.

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Nunzio Quacquarelli
Website: www.topmba.com