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In this GMAT experience talk show, we talk to Tavishi, a young MBA aspirant from India who recently scored 725 in her latest GMAT Focus exam. It’s a 99.9 percentile score on the new GMAT Focus edition and she achieved this feat in her first GMAT attempt.
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mbaMission Admissions Consultant
Joined: 25 Apr 2013
Posts: 4409
Given Kudos: 1
Why Personalized Recommendations Matter, but Details Sometimes Do Not
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21 Jul 2017, 09:00
21 Jul 2017, 09:00
Expert Reply
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Why Personalized Recommendations Matter, but Details Sometimes Do Not |
|
If your supervisor is writing your business school recommendation and you are having trouble ensuring that he/she is putting the proper thought and effort into your letter, you are not alone. Because of this asymmetry of power, a junior employee can only do so much to compel his/her supervisor to commit the necessary time and write thoughtfully. So, before you designate your supervisor as a recommender, you must first perceive how committed this person really is to helping you with your business school candidacy. In particular, your recommender needs to understand that using a single template to create identical letters for multiple business schools is not okay. Each letter must be personalized, and each MBA program’s questions must be answered using specific examples. If your recommender intends to simply write a single letter and force it to “fit” the school’s questions or to attach a standard letter to the end of the school’s recommendation form (for example, including it in the question “Is there anything else that you think the committee should know about the candidate?”), then he/she could be doing you a disservice. By neglecting to put the proper time and effort into your letter, your recommender is sending a very clear message to the admissions committee: “I don’t really care about this candidate.” If you cannot convince your recommender to write a personalized letter or to respond to your target school’s individual questions using specific examples, look elsewhere. A well-written personalized letter from an interested party is always far better than a poorly written letter from your supervisor. In addition, although details are important in recommendation letters, remember that sometimes small points are really just that—small points. We often get asked, “Should this be a comma or a semicolon?” and want to respond, “Please trust us that the admissions committee will not say, ‘Oh, I would have accepted this applicant if she had used a comma here, but she chose a semicolon, so DING!’” That said, we are certainly not telling you to ignore the small things. Details matter—the overall impression your application makes will depend in part on your attention to typos, font consistency, and grammar, for example—but we encourage you to make smart and reasonable decisions and move on. You can be confident that your judgment on such topics will likely be sufficient. |
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mbaMission Admissions Consultant
Joined: 25 Apr 2013
Posts: 4409
Given Kudos: 1
MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: I Must Have Done Something Wrong
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22 Jul 2017, 08:00
22 Jul 2017, 08:00
Expert Reply
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: I Must Have Done Something Wrong |
|
You have a 720 GMAT score and a 3.75 GPA. You have made solid career progress and procured glowing recommendations. You have been actively volunteering in your community for years. You worked hard on your application and landed an interview at your target school, where you felt you did well. But… you did not get in. You must have done something terribly wrong in your interview or unwittingly made a mess of your essays, right? Not necessarily. We recently spoke with the admissions director at a top MBA program who explained that his school does not give feedback to rejected candidates because it is simply a waste of the candidate’s and admissions staff’s time. The admissions director told us that the school would need to nitpick in order to give candidates something to work on and to ensure that they filled the time during these hypothetical feedback sessions. He explained that nine times out of ten, the feedback that they offered to weaker candidates would be patently obvious and that countless strong applicants had done nothing wrong at all. In fact, most candidates create their best applications, but space is simply limited in the class. Although this may not be comforting if you were rejected, you may just have been the victim of a competitive process during a competitive year. We suggest that you honestly assess your own candidacy and consider staying the course as you continue applying. Spending significant time revamping your applications may be a waste of time and a losing strategy. Patience may prove beneficial in the long term. |
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mbaMission Admissions Consultant
Joined: 25 Apr 2013
Posts: 4409
Given Kudos: 1
Understanding Number Properties on the GMAT
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23 Jul 2017, 08:00
23 Jul 2017, 08:00
Expert Reply
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Understanding Number Properties on the GMAT |
|
With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense. Is the GMAT topic of number properties driving you crazy? This concept covers things that we often call “basic”—topics that we learned in middle school (or earlier), such as divisibility, factors and multiples, odds and evens, positives and negatives, and so on. I assure you, though, that number properties questions on the GMAT are anything but basic. I strongly urge you to develop a solid grounding in this topic, particularly because the test writers are so good at disguising what these problems are really testing. You will need some kind of book or e-book that covers this topic thoroughly, but I have some resources to help you get started. Start with this article, “Disguising—and Decoding—Quant Problems.” We talk about how the test writers disguise material that you probably do already know, and how we can learn to “decode” the problem or strip away the camouflage. If you feel good about the concepts discussed in that article, and you are at a higher math level, try out this challenging problem next. In the article “Patterns in Divisibility Problems,” we examine two GMATPrep problems that share some interesting characteristics. In this article, we discuss some interesting topics related to prime numbers. Many questions address basic characteristics of numbers, such as whether they are positive or negative, odd or even, integer or fraction/decimal. These can be disguised in various ways; two of the most common are inequalities and absolute values (which we normally associate more with algebra). Here are two that use inequalities as a disguise for number properties concepts, one in this article and another from this article, as well as a third one that plays around with absolute value. All three of these are generally hiding issues that deal with positive and negative properties of numbers. And finally here are two more: a number line problem and one dealing with consecutive integers. The former tests positive and negative properties, as well as some others, and the latter covers a less-commonly-tested but still important number properties category. |
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