Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63444
Technology Online Database Puts Students on the Right Path After two years of study and pilot testing, the Graduate Management Admissions Council recently unveiled MBA Pathfinder, an online database for prospective business school stu- dents. The database, which provides comprehensive information on hun- users to select the criteria that are most important to them." In 2000, GMAC built a test interface for MBA Pathfinder and invited 12 schools to participate in the pilot program. With the feed- back it received from its pilot pro- gram, it refined the type of data collected, as well as the manner in which that data would be collected and input into the system. "Data submission is were chosen through a consensus among participating institutions. Although each school owns its own data, emphasizes Atkinson, the data will be sub ject to audits to ensure that students are receiving data that is comparable, consistent, and of high quality. "We plan to begin the auditing dreds of business school programs worldwide, enables students to con- duct customized searches based on their educational preferences. Information overload has become submit button, the window closes and the data is part of the database," says Atkinson. The type of data gathered for the especially daunting to prospective business students searching for the right business schools. However, the same technology that has created the overload also can be used to control it, says Daphne Atkinson, GMAC's vice president of informa- tion services. "Part of the reason prospective students rely so heavily on rankings, at least to start their research, is that they have lacked comprehensive set of data and a focused search tool," says Atkinson. "That's not to say that rankings still don't have influ- ence, but rankings cannot take into account a particular student's pref- erences and the priority of those preferences. MBA Pathfinder allows 56 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2002 database ranges from program cost and length to class size to average GMAT scores. The categories, which are constant for each school, The Ultimate ID Card In the wake of global terrorism, Hong Kong will dis- tribute mandatory "smart cards," a new identifica- tion system for its citizens, reports CNN. This high- tech initiative will take seven years and cost the government $400 billion to implement. The cards will be encoded with a range of personal informa- tion, from name, date of birth, and address to the owner's thumbprint. A similar smart card, called the MyKad, already is in use as part of a two-year pilot program in Malaysia. handled by individual schools and is strictly elec- tronic," Atkinson explains. "This puts the ownership of the data integrity with the institutions. It's their data." School representa- tives can refine their data in a password-protected area of MBA Pathfinder for as long as they wish, but "once they hit the component in 2003 of data submit- ted in 2002," says Atkinson. "Audits will be done by a quality assurance firm. During the course of a five-year audit, we expect that every institu- tion included in the database will be audited. Currently, GMAC is provid- ing mock audits free of charge to schools so that their program person- nel will be familiar with the process. So far, we've had about two dozen schools volun- teer for mock audits." Schools can D ATA B I T submit data for as many of their internal pro- grams as they wish, from dis- tance education programs to MBA programs to executive edu- cation programs. So far, the database comprises 500 separate programs from 146 institu- tions around the world. It's a good start, Atkinson notes. However, GMAC looks forward to Path - finder's growth, and to making it even more comprehensive for users. "In the last two weeks, Pathfinder has averaged 1,200 advanced search- es," she says. "Path finder is meant to be a great research tool for prospective students who want to find the right schools. This is only the beginning." In January, Amazon.com announced it had made a profit for the first time since it was founded in 1995. Its losses over its years in operation have added up to $2.8 billion. This year, however, the company claims it is finally in the black by $5 million.