Built by the people who used to read the essays.

Elena spent eight cycles on the HBS admissions committee, where she read first-round files for every industry pool and chaired the leadership-impact calibration sessions every fall. Before HBS she was a McKinsey engagement manager working with healthcare clients, which gave her a near-religious dislike of essays that sound like consulting deck bullets dressed up in prose.

What she looked for, in plain terms: a decision the candidate made where they could have done the comfortable thing and chose not to, and a clear sense of what they learned about themselves in the room afterward. Everything else — title, comp, deal size — was context the committee already had from the resume.

On the MBA Essay Critic rubric, Elena owns the HBS scoring model and the leadership-impact dimension across every school. The two questions she trained the rubric to ask of every essay are 'what was the judgment?' and 'who is different because of it?'

Marcus joined Stanford GSB admissions after six years at Bain, where he helped launch the firm's veterans recruiting initiative — a role that put him face-to-face with hundreds of mid-career candidates trying to translate experience into narrative. At GSB he led the round-one reading committee for tech and operations pools, and he ran the workshop every August where new readers learned how to score 'What matters most to you, and why' without rewarding the loudest answer.

His read on Stanford essays: the worst ones are an argument for why the candidate is exceptional. The best ones are a quiet observation about the candidate's own values, written by someone who has clearly done the work of asking themselves the question before sitting down to type. The rubric reflects that — authenticity and self-awareness are weighted more heavily than any single achievement.

Marcus owns the GSB rubric, the self-awareness dimension across all schools, and the calibration process that keeps the model from rewarding polish over substance.

Priya ran Wharton's MBA admissions reading committee for the international and finance pools, and was the staff lead on the Wharton Lauder dual-degree review. Before admissions she spent nine years at JPMorgan in their leveraged finance group — the kind of background that lets her smell a generic 'career switcher' goals essay from the first paragraph.

Her standard for a Wharton essay is unsentimental: the application has to make the case that the candidate will be a generous community member, not just a high-performing one. That means specific clubs, specific second-years they've spoken with, specific contributions they'll make on day one. The rubric grades 'specificity of fit' as hard as it grades clarity of goals, because in Priya's experience those were the essays that survived round-two committee.

Priya owns the Wharton rubric, the community-citizenship dimension, and the goals-clarity scoring used across the M7 models.

James is the only member of the team who's worked admissions at two schools in a single career. He started at Booth on the marketing and consulting pools, then moved to Kellogg in 2020 to help redesign their reader training after the program transitioned to its current essay set. That dual lens is exactly what the rubric uses: a Booth read prizes analytical aptitude and intellectual honesty, a Kellogg read prizes collaboration and the candidate's effect on a team — and both are graded explicitly rather than blended into a generic 'leadership' score.

Before admissions, James was a strategy associate at Deloitte and an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His pet peeve: essays that explain what the candidate would 'bring to the classroom' without any evidence the candidate has ever changed their mind in a classroom.

James owns the Booth and Kellogg rubrics, the analytical-aptitude dimension, and the cross-school calibration that prevents the model from grading two very different essays on the same yardstick.