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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: 2019–2020 MBA Essay Analysis: INSEAD, UCLA Anderson, UVA Darden


How can you write essays that grab the attention of MBA admissions committees? With these thorough essay analyses, our friends at mbaMission help you conceptualize your essay ideas and understand how to execute, so that your experiences truly stand out.

This week, we round up essay analyses for INSEAD, the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and the University of Virginia’s Darden School.

INSEAD ESSAY ANALYSIS
2019-2020
We noted no adjustments in INSEAD’s MBA application essay prompts this year. This season’s candidates must respond to four short career-focused queries and provide three motivation essays that together total 1,200 words. Applicants are also tasked with completing a video component for which they answer four questions as four separate video recordings. Given the sheer number of prompts, tasks, and questions involved, some candidates may find INSEAD’s essay gauntlet a bit intimidating, if not outright punishing. Read on for our full analysis of the school’s prompts, which we hope will make the process a little easier to manage.

UCLA ANDERSON ESSAY ANALYSIS
2019-2020
The UCLA Anderson School of Management appears to be embracing a kind of “less is more” approach with its application essay prompts this year, having cut its total word count for its essays from 800—which we already considered rather sparse—to just 550. What was previously its first required essay (500 words) about applicants’ short- and long-term professional aspirations and why Anderson is the right school for them has been broken down into two mini-essays (150 words each) that cover essentially the same information but now in a more succinct and direct way. Meanwhile, its 300-word “short answer” question from last year about candidates’ passions has been replaced with a 250-word submission on a characteristic applicants share with Anderson’s student community. Even the school’s reapplicants must contend with a stricter limit on what they can share with the admissions committee, now that that essay has been cut from 750 words to 500. All this minimization might tempt more candidates to consider taking advantage of the school’s optional essay, but Anderson specifies that this submission is for “extenuating circumstances” only, so applicants need to be prudent about doing so. Read on for our full analysis of the school’s essay questions for 2019–2020.

UVA DARDEN ESSAY ANALYSIS
2019-2020
After completely reworking its MBA application essay questions last season, the admissions committee at the University of Virginia’s Darden School has done just a little fine-tuning this year. Candidates must still respond to five prompts and do so within a 700-word limit, but a new query has been added, while two previous ones have been combined into a single question. As a whole, the prompts again cover applicants’ personal, educational, and career objectives while touching on aspects of Darden’s particular character and ethos—notably, its learning teams, vast international reach, and (now) diversity. In this analysis, we offer our best essay advice for all of the school’s 2019–2020 questions.

Download: Before you apply, be sure to check out the following free resources from mbaMission…

Insider’s Guides:
For a thorough exploration of each business school’s academic program, unique offerings, social life, and other key characteristics and resources, we recommend downloading a complimentary copy of our school-specific Insider’s Guides. Informed by firsthand insight from students, alumni, program representatives, and admissions officers, our Insider’s Guides offer a detailed look at each business school’s most defining characteristics. According to Poets & Quants, “A more thorough analysis of a school will not be found elsewhere on the web.”

Interview Guides:
Take the next step towards mastering your business school interview by downloading mbaMission’s free Interview Guides.  Many MBA candidates find admissions interviews stressful and intimidating, but mastering this important element of the application process is definitely possible—the key is informed preparation. And, on your way to this high level of preparation, we offer ourfree Interview Primers to spur you along.


mbaMission is the leader in MBA admissions consulting with a full-time and comprehensively trained staff of consultants, all with profound communications and MBA experience. mbaMission has helped thousands of candidates fulfill their dream of attending prominent MBA programs around the world. Take your first step toward a more successful MBA application experience with a free 30-minute consultation with one of mbaMission’s senior consultants. Click here to sign up today.

The post 2019–2020 MBA Essay Analysis: INSEAD, UCLA Anderson, UVA Darden appeared first on GMAT.
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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: 2019–2020 MBA Essay Analysis: Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Emory


How can you write essays that grab the attention of MBA admissions committees? With these thorough essay analyses, our friends at mbaMission help you conceptualize your essay ideas and understand how to execute, so that your experiences truly stand out.

This week, we round up essay analyses for Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

CARNEGIE MELLON TEPPER ESSAY ANALYSIS
2019-2020 
After switching up its application essay approach last year and offering candidates three prompts from which to choose, Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business has reverted back this season to posing just a single essay question that all its applicants must respond to. Candidates have up to 500 words with which to answer the school’s query, up from just 350 before, and must explain what they will bring to the Tepper community that will allow them to make an impact on it. Applicants who feel that this somewhat brief essay is not sufficient to fully convey their candidacy to the admissions committee can take advantage of the optional essay, which is sufficiently broad to accommodate discussions about more than just problem areas in one’s profile (if executed effectively). Here’s our full analysis of Tepper’s essay prompts for 2019–2020.

CORNELL JOHNSON ESSAY ANALYSIS
2019-2020
This MBA application season, the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University is tightening up the parameters within which its candidates can share their story with the admissions committee. Although the school has expanded the word limit for its goal statement mini-essay from 250 to 350, it has cut back the allowances for all its other submissions. Each of the written essays (including the optional/reapplicant essay) has been shortened from 500 words to 350, and the video option truncated from five minutes to three. Also, the admissions committee is now requesting just one representative story for its “back of the resume” essay, rather than allowing applicants the leeway to include as many as they wish (or could reasonably fit) in that piece. Clearly, Johnson has little interest in lengthy, highly detailed discussions of its applicants’ candidacies and wants to get right to the heart of the issues it considers most valuable in its evaluations. So if you are ready to deliver the information Johnson is seeking, read on for our full essay analysis of the program’s latest prompts.

Download: Before you apply to Cornell Johnson, be sure to check out the following free resources from mbaMission…

For a thorough exploration of Johnson’s academic offerings, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, community/environment, and other key facets of the program, please download your free copy of the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to Samuel Curtis Johnson School of Management.

EMORY GOIZUETA ESSAY ANALYSIS
2019-2020
Although the content covered in the essay questions for Emory University’s Goizueta Business School has not changed much this season, the school has switched things up a bit by making one of its required submissions a video essay. Thankfully for its applicants, Goizueta not only provides the question(s) for the video in advance but also gives candidates three options from which to select. In their written essays, applicants must discuss their short-term career goals and a past leadership experience, and in the video, they are expected to address either a personal passion, some valuable counsel they once received, or a value they have in common with the school. Candidates may use the Additional Information option to provide clarification or explanation about elements of their candidacy, if necessary, but must do so very succinctly, given the 100-word limitation. On the whole, Goizueta’s essay prompts focus more heavily on applicants’ professional sides, though perhaps the combination of a personal question and the video component is enough to sufficiently round out each candidate’s profile for the admissions committee. Click here for our complete analysis of the program’s 2019–2020 essay questions.

mbaMission is the leader in MBA admissions consulting with a full-time and comprehensively trained staff of consultants, all with profound communications and MBA experience. mbaMission has helped thousands of candidates fulfill their dream of attending prominent MBA programs around the world. Take your first step toward a more successful MBA application experience with a free 30-minute consultation with one of mbaMission’s senior consultants.



>> Click here to sign up today


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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: Analyzing Your GMAT Enhanced Score Report (Part 1)


After you take your official GMAT, you can order an Enhanced Score Report (ESR) that provides more detailed data about your test performance. If you’re planning to retake the GMAT, the ESR can provide you with a good sense of what you need to improve in order to earn a higher score next time. And you can order the ESR even if you cancel your score—a really helpful feature.

First, have you already bought an ESR? If so, go grab it right now. If it has been a while since you downloaded it, go and download a new version from the official website. GMAC periodically releases new features and they’re retroactive—when you download the report again, you’ll get the new features, even if they weren’t available when you first bought the report.

If you aren’t sure yet whether you want to buy your Enhanced Score Report, GMAC offers a sample of a full report so that you can see what’s included. (Note: If you are planning to take the exam again and are at all unsure about what you need to improve, I would consider investing in the ESR. It won’t tell you everything you need to improve, but it will provide important information. As of this writing, it costs $30.)

What does the GMAT Enhanced Score Report contain?
This series will show you how to analyze every data point contained in the report. Let’s start with a quick summary. There are 5 sections in the report; I’ve split the data in each section into two groups: really useful and less useful. (Note: If certain data is repeated—for example, a score—I only mention it the first time the data point appears in the report.)

Grab your ESR or GMAC’s sample ESR and scan the report as you look through the below. (Note: The links will take you to the specific section of this three-part article that covers that area in detail.)

1) Overall GMAT Exam Performance
Really Useful: 

  • All of your scores: Total, Quant, Verbal, Integrated Reasoning, and Essay
Less Useful:

  • Your average time spent per problem for the three multiple-choice sections.
  • The percentile rankings of your scores.
2) Integrated Reasoning
Really Useful: 

  • Average time spent on correct vs. incorrect problems
Less Useful:

  • Percentage of questions answered correctly
  • Average time spent on all problems in section
3) Verbal
Really Useful: 

  • Percentile rankings for each of the three verbal question types
  • Average time spent on each of the three verbal question types
  • The “quadrant” information—percent correct, average difficulty, and average time by quadrant or quarter of the test 
Less Useful:

  • Performance by fundamental skills
4) Quant
Really Useful: 

  • Percentile rankings by question type (PS, DS) and broad content area
  • Average time spent by question type (PS, DS) and broad content area
  • Performance by fundamental skills
  • The “quadrant” information—percent correct, average difficulty, and average time by quadrant or quarter of the test 
Less Useful:

  • All of the quant stuff is pretty useful 
5) Essay
Really Useful: 

  • If your score is below 4, all of it
Less Useful:

  • If your score is 4+, none of it
Part 1 of the series (aka the part you’re reading right now) will cover the Overall section as well as Integrated Reasoning and Essay. Part 2 will cover Verbal and part 3 will cover Quant.

GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Overall GMAT Exam Performance
The very first data point is your Total score—the score everyone means when they say “What did you get on the GMAT?” The Total score is a 3-digit score on the scale 200 to 800. You’ll also see a percentile number—that’s the number that has a th right after it. For instance, if you see 90th, then you scored in the 90th percentile. A percentile is a ranking; if you scored in the 90th percentile, then you scored better than 90% of the people who have taken the exam over the past 3 years.

After your Total score, you’ll see your section scores and percentile rankings for each of the four sections (IR, Verbal, Quant, and Essay). Your Quant and Verbal scores combine to give you your Total score; the IR and Essay scores are completely independent of everything else.

Here’s the scoring info from an exam I took in 2015:



Aside: Yes, I “only” scored a 710 even though my top score is 780! We are often testing out various hypotheses when taking the official exam. On this one, I took IR normally. On Verbal, I wanted to see whether I could gauge the kinds of questions that someone capable of scoring a 40 would likely get right or wrong—and, yay, I succeeded in scoring a 40 (I didn’t the first time I tried this). On Quant, I wanted to see what would happen if I bailed immediately every single time I saw a topic I hated (no limits in terms of the number of times I did this). I guessed (B) immediately on 8 questions (this was back when there were 36 questions in the Quant section).

Back to our analysis. Most schools care most about your Total score, then Quant and Verbal, then IR, and finally Essay. Here’s how to interpret your scores:

  • As a general rule, top-10 schools are looking for Total scores in the 700+ range, which roughly corresponds to the 90th percentile or higher.
  • The highest Quant score you can earn is a 51; top-10 schools usually consider a 48+ a strong Quant score, though 45+ is typically good enough.
  • The highest Verbal score you can technically earn is a 51, but a score of 45 is the 99th percentile; it’s quite rare to score higher than 45 on Verbal, so I consider a 45 the practical upper limit. A 40+ is generally considered strong even for top-10 schools, though a 35+ is usually good enough.
  • The highest IR score is an 8; most schools consider a 5 or higher good enough.
  • Finally, the highest Essay score is a 6; this one uses half-point increments (that is, you can score 6.0, 5.5, 5.0, …). Schools generally consider 4.5+ fine and even a 4.0 is usually good enough. Interestingly, a score of 4.0 is around the 20th percentile—so the vast majority of test takers (approximately 80%) receive a “good enough” score of 4.0 or higher.
  • If you’re curious, here is GMAC’s full listing of scores and percentiles for all sections of the exam.
Note: Q45 and V35 will get you to a Total score of about 650. If you want a 700+, you’ll have to do significantly better than good enough on at least one of Q and V.)

This first page of the report also contains a graphic showing average time spent per problem for each of the three multiple-choice sections (IR, V, Q). I find this data too broad to be very useful, but the timing data later in the report is very valuable.

GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Integrated Reasoning Performance
Of the data given in this section, I find the timing data the most useful. The percentage correct isn’t all that useful because your score already tells you whether you did well enough or whether you want to do better—and the IR section isn’t adaptive, so doing better on IR really does mean answering more questions correctly next time.

One thing to add on scoring: If you want to go into management consulting or banking for “name” firms, aim for a higher IR score. These companies all ask for your test scores when recruiting for internships or post-school jobs. A Bain spokesperson went on record a few years back, saying that they were checking IR scores as well, since that section of the GMAT best mimics the kinds of skills they want their consultants to have. They didn’t say what kind of score they want to see, but I would consider 6 the minimum and I’d be trying to get a 7 or 8.

Take a look at this:



Notice anything in that timing data?

Wow, did I spend way longer getting stuff wrong than right. Of course, I’m more likely to spend more time on hard problems and I’m also more likely to get hard problems wrong. But I apparently didn’t do a very good job of deciding when to bail on this section. I should have had at least a couple of bail-fast / not-worth-my-time problems helping to bring down my average incorrect time.

So that’s a lesson learned for next time. (Yes, I still scored an 8 on this section and the percentage correct data indicates that I probably got just one question wrong. But I see this pattern a lot for people who are scoring 4 or 5 and want to pick up a point or two. One of the easiest ways is to stop spending precious time and brain energy on stuff you’re getting wrong anyway. Let it go!)

Unfortunately, that’s all we get for IR—there are too few problems given in the section for the report to show any statistically significant data in terms of problem type or content area.

GMAT Enhanced Score Report: AWA Section Performance
AWA stands for Analytical Writing Assessment—the Essay. As I mentioned earlier, approximately 80% of all test-takers earn a good-enough score on the essay; you only need to worry about this section if you score lower than a 4.

If that does occur, then take a look at the sub-section rankings (Analyze, Relevancy, Organization, and Communication). If one or two categories are a lot lower than the others, then you know you need to work on that area. Below the graph, the report gives you a short description of your performance in each category.

If you have the main Official Guide book, grab that to gain more insight. Flip to the AWA chapter and find the Scoring Guide. It describes the qualities associated with essays scored 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0. Find the score you received and read the description. (If you received a half-point score, such as 3.5, then read the descriptions for the scores on either side—3 and 4, in this example.)

As you read the OG description, pay special attention to anything that sounds like the areas that were ranked lower in your ESR. For example, let’s say that I scored a 3 on the essay and my Relevancy category was the lowest in the ESR. In the report, Relevancy is discussed in terms of how well you supported the main points of your critique. In the OG, one of the bullets for a score of 3 has this to say: “offers support of little relevance and value for points of the critique.” So either I didn’t provide enough support at all or the support I did provide was not relevant or appropriate for whatever point I was trying to make.

That’s part 1 of our series! Join us next time, when we’ll dive into the Verbal part of the report.

Don’t forget that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free. We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.



Stacey Koprince is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California. Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT  for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests. Check out Stacey’s upcoming GMAT courses here.

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: Analyzing Your GMAT Enhanced Score Report (Part 2)


Last time, we talked about how to analyze the overall exam data of your Enhanced Score Report, as well as the data for the IR and Essay sections. Now, it’s time to dive into the Verbal section data.

First, the report will tell you your Sub-Section Rankings—your percentile rankings by question type (Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, Sentence Correction). This is extremely useful because you can tell whether you are significantly stronger in certain areas.

If the rankings are within about 10-15 percentile points, I’d consider that statistical “noise.” For example, if CR is 60th percentile and RC is 50th percentile, I don’t think there’s a hugely significant difference in your performance on those two question types. Why? There are too many other variables that go into this data. Standardized tests are not perfectly precise; they have standard deviations for a reason.

For example, the test is adapting to you as you go, so you may happen to get harder RCs than CRs, on average. If so, you’re likely to get more RCs wrong—and that may pull down your percentile ranking (depending on how the rankings are calculated for this report). Alternatively, you may happen to get a higher proportion of questions in your areas of weakness for one question type; that would also pull down your percentile ranking for that type.

Here’s the beginning of the Verbal data for my 710 exam:



The Score text in blue is something that I added to the image—I looked these up on the mba.com page that shows all the GMAT percentile rankings for scores.

I need to marry that data with my timing data in order to interpret this. In the report, just after the above rankings chart, another chart shows that I averaged 1:25 on CR, 1:14 on RC, and 1:39 on SC.

How do you think I should interpret the percentile and timing information together?

No really, think about it before you keep reading.

La la la. Don’t look below yet.

Okay, here’s what I think. I spent extra time on SC (we’re supposed to average about 1:20), so that matches up with me doing so well on those. And I was going faster than average on CR, as well (1:25 vs. the standard average of 2:00). So this reinforces the idea that I’m probably about equal in SC and CR.

But I was going really fast on RC. That 1:14 includes my reading time! It looks like I was rushing RC, and rushing usually leads to careless mistakes—so maybe my RC isn’t as bad as it looks from the percentile ranking. I might do better if I stop rushing things.

If both CR and SC had been longer than average, or if one had been much longer than average, then I’d need to figure out what trade-offs are worth my time. It may be the case that I want to do exactly what I did and I’m willing to sacrifice RC—maybe I already know that RC is the worst question type for me.

But if I’m doing this unconsciously, then there’s a good chance that I’m sacrificing something that would be easier to get right. (On quant, in particular, I see this pattern all the time: People spend more time on Problem Solving and sacrifice Data Sufficiency as a result—when they could actually do better on DS than PS if they spent normal time on DS.)

GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Verbal Performance by Fundamental Skills
This section shows your percentage correct for each question type across two sub-categories for that type:

  • CR: Analysis / Critique and Construction / Plan
  • RC: Identify Inferred Idea and Identify Stated Idea
  • SC: Grammar and Communication
I don’t find this section super useful on verbal. The two buckets are so broad that I don’t quite know what to do with them unless someone scores 100% in one and 0% in the other. (And, even there, I’m only sure what to do on RC and somewhat in SC.)

The ESR has a FAQ section explaining each category (click on the FAQ tab at that link). For RC, the distinction seems pretty clear: inference vs. stuff that was explicitly stated in the passage.

For SC, I’m pretty sure that the two categories are, broadly speaking, grammar and meaning. That’s a good split—but it’s also true that sometimes the line is fuzzy (you can call the same thing a grammar issue or meaning issue). Since I don’t know exactly where they draw the line, I’m not 100% sure how to act on this data.

For CR, the descriptions are a little too general—I feel like I’m doing what they describe on every CR problem. So I just ignore that one entirely and move to the next set of (very useful!) data points.

GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Performance Progression
Before I tell you what I think, examine the data below and figure out what you think. There are three charts: Percent Correct, Average Difficulty, and Time Management, each by quadrant (or quarter) of the section.



Thoughts?

(You might have noticed that this isn’t from my test. My data wasn’t very useful for this particular analysis because I wasn’t taking the test normally.)

First, I have to give a caveat: Each chart shows four data points, representing approximately one quarter of the test, but the exam is question-adaptive (that is, it adapts after every question you answer), so it’s a challenge to interpret this data. I understand why GMAC doesn’t give us more granular data (it would give away too much information about how the algorithm works)—but we do have to be careful with how we analyze this.

Second, both for that reason and because this is an adaptive test, it’s crucial to analyze this data all together. Any one chart in isolation doesn’t tell you that much.

Finally, let’s call this test-taker Zee.

The test starts you somewhere in the medium range. Since Zee scored a 37 on Verbal, the test started at a lower level than Zee’s level—so for the first quadrant of the test, Zee’s score went up. You can see that by combining the first two charts—Zee had a good percentage correct and the average difficulty increased from quadrant 1 to 2. Zee even accomplished this while staying just under the average time. Most of the time, my student’s ESRs will show extra time spent during one or more of the earlier quadrants (remember that for later).

The percent correct for the second quadrant was still on the higher side, but the average difficulty dipped in the third quadrant. So it’s likely that somewhere in the second quadrant (probably later in the quadrant), Zee started struggling more (as everyone does on this test, since it’s adaptive). This is where the limitation of having only 4 data points comes in…we have to guess when stuff happened.

And then Zee hit a wall in the third quadrant. And look at the time management pie for the third quadrant—on average Zee was spending a lot more time on the incorrect problems. So basically, Zee started getting really hard problems and tossing a lot of time at them. Not surprisingly, Zee got these really hard problems wrong anyway—and then had to rush on others to get back on time. (If Zee were my student, I’d be recommending our Yellow Pad time management technique right about now.)

Sometimes Zee got some of those really-fast problems right, but there may have been some careless mistakes in there as well contributing to that 57% incorrect in quadrant 3. It looks like Zee might have dropped down even further than Zee is really capable of scoring, because that fourth quadrant was really good—almost everything right and the difficulty increased again. I wonder whether Zee could have lifted even further but just ran out of problems / room to improve (because the section ended).

So there’s an opportunity here for Zee to learn how to identify really hard problems and let them go faster. Zee can then use that time on other problems that Zee has a better chance to answer correctly. If so, then Zee’s score won’t drop as much in the third quadrant, and Zee will be able to lift the score even further by the end of the section.

Speaking of the end of the section: The GMAT is a Where You End Is What You Get test—so if you tank the fourth quadrant because you’re running out of time (or for any reason!), your score is going to drop and then…that’s it. That’s your score.

Remember when I said that I’ll usually see a similar trajectory to Zee’s at the start, but with a higher average time for the first quadrant or two? When that happens, the test-taker has to make up that time somewhere else—and that somewhere else is usually the fourth quadrant. The ESR will show a really fast average time and a really low percent correct for quadrant 4—basically, your score is tanking in the fourth quadrant because you’re running out of time. And Where You End Is What You Get.

If you analyze these three charts together, you can get a sense of your scoring trajectory through the section—and this is super valuable for your retake. If you haven’t (yet!) gotten the score you wanted, then it’s almost certainly the case that you need to get better at how you take the test. That includes decisions that you make about when and how to spend your time and mental energy in order to put yourself in the best position to finish the section strongly.

One more thing: When people hear that the GMAT is a Where You End Is What You Get test, they ask whether they should purposely just guess really quickly for the first third of the exam and then spend all of their time on the final two-thirds. You don’t want to do that either—that’s the equivalent of having the test start you at 0 instead of halfway up the difficulty axis, so now you have a lot further to lift (and you only have two-thirds of the questions left to help you lift).

What you really want is a steady trajectory across the whole section. If you’re doing well, you will earn really hard questions—ones that are too hard for you. You want that to happen! And then you want to recognize that they’re too hard and let go—that is, you want to maximize your ROI on this exam.

Join us next time, when we’ll talk about how to analyze the Quant data from your ESR.

Don’t forget that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free. We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.



Stacey Koprince is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California. Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT  for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests. Check out Stacey’s upcoming GMAT courses here.

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: 2019–2020 MBA Essay Analysis: Georgetown, London Business School, Oxford


How can you write essays that grab the attention of MBA admissions committees? With these thorough essay analyses, our friends at mbaMission help you conceptualize your essay ideas and understand how to execute, so that your experiences truly stand out.

This week, we round up essay analyses for Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, London Business School, and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.

GEORGETOWN MCDONOUGH ESSAY ANALYSIS  2019-2020
Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business has made some substantial changes to its application essay questions this year, broadening candidates’ opportunity to present their strongest qualities to the admissions committee for evaluation. Applicants must still provide one 500-word written essay but now get to choose from three question options. Rather than being strictly required to discuss a single defining moment, they can write about leading outside of their comfort zone, a failure-as-learning-opportunity situation, or their personal connection with the brand of someone they admire. The school’s video essay remains unchanged and allows candidates to creatively showcase their individuality and personality. Finally, although the school offers only one optional essay this season, rather than two, the prompt gives candidates the leeway to discuss anything they feel is necessary, so it should be sufficient to meet everyone’s needs.

Our full essay analysis offers ideas and advice for addressing all the school’s prompts.

LONDON BUSINESS SCHOOL ESSAY ANALYSIS  2019-2020 
Once again, London Business School (LBS) appears to be satisfied with the scope and presentation of its application essay questions, having made no modifications to them this season. Although the program strictly requires only one essay—one that largely constitutes a traditional personal statement—some applicants may want to seriously consider submitting the optional essay as well if they feel that doing so will facilitate a fairer or more thorough evaluation of their candidacy.

In our analysis, we offer our advice on crafting your approach, whether you ultimately write just one essay for LBS or two.

Download: Before you apply to London Business School, be sure to check out the following free resources from mbaMission…

For a thorough exploration of London Business School’s academic offerings, defining characteristics, and other key facets of the program, please download your free copy of the mbaMission London Business School Program Guide.

Take the next step towards mastering your London Business School interview by downloading mbaMission’s free London Business School Interview Guide. Many MBA candidates find admissions interviews stressful and intimidating, but mastering this important element of the application process is definitely possible—the key is informed preparation.

And, on your way to this high level of preparation, we offer our free Interview Primers to spur you along.

OXFORD SAÏD ANALYSIS  2019-2020 
Over the years, we have seen the top business schools slowly scaling back the length—and in some cases, the scope—of their required application essays, but the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford may be setting a new record of sorts with its minimalist approach this season. The program is now requiring applicants to provide just a single essay with their application materials rather than two, as it did last year, and one of only 250 words, at that. On the plus side, perhaps, the prompt gives candidates the leeway to share whatever additional information they believe the admissions committee should have in evaluating them, so they are not restricted by a specific topic.

Click here for our guidance on approaching Oxford Saïd’s single essay question for 2019–2020, as well as its essays for 1+1 MBA candidates and reapplicants.

Download: Before you apply to Oxford Saïd, be sure to check out the following free resource from mbaMission…

For a thorough exploration of Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford’s academic offerings, defining characteristics, and other key facets of the program, please download your free copy of the mbaMission Saïd Business School Program Guide.



mbaMission is the leader in MBA admissions consulting with a full-time and comprehensively trained staff of consultants, all with profound communications and MBA experience. mbaMission has helped thousands of candidates fulfill their dream of attending prominent MBA programs around the world. Take your first step toward a more successful MBA application experience with a free 30-minute consultation with one of mbaMission’s senior consultants.



>> Click here to sign up today

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: Analyzing Your GMAT Enhanced Score Report (Part 3)


Welcome to part 3! In the first installment, we talked about the overall Enhanced Score Report, how to interpret your scores, and how to analyze the data from the IR and Essay sections. In the second installment, we talked about how to analyze your Verbal data. Now, it’s time for Quant!

Here’s the first page of the Quant section of a GMAT Enhanced Score Report (as with Verbal, not my own report because my data was atypical):



What jumps out at you as worth analyzing?

This test-taker did much better at Data Sufficiency than at Problem Solving, even though the average time for DS was lower than for PS. What does that mean?

First, it means that the test-taker should be quicker to bail on some PS problems. They’re costing more time but not actually providing a better return—it’s wiser to spend extra time on DS, not PS, given the data.

Second, the fact that the test-taker is better at DS than PS tells me that she understands math rules and concepts pretty well but is struggling more with actual calculations and solving to the end (which is what we have to do on PS but not DS). So she needs to practice more “math on paper” but she also probably needs to practice alternative strategies that let her avoid that kind of computation, such as estimation and logicking it out. (We have an entire chapter called Logic It Out in our All the Quant guide. If you told me I couldn’t logic stuff out or estimate any longer on the GMAT, I’d refuse to take it again! )

The student was much better at Algebra / Geometry than at Arithmetic. Likewise, the student will want to be faster to bail on pure Arithmetic questions that she finds too complicated—she might as well reallocate that time to Alg / Geo, since she’s better at those areas.

Speaking of “those areas,” wouldn’t it be nice if they gave us more detail on our content strengths and weaknesses?

GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Quant Performance by Fundamental Skills
They do! Take a look:



Geometry is awesome! But ouch, Counting / Sets / Series is…not. The FAQ section of the ESR tells you what falls in each of these areas. Here’s what it says about Counting, Sets, and Series (indented material copyright GMAC):

Counting (Combinatorics)
Problems whose primary focus involves basic combinatorial ideas, such as permutations, combinations, counting paths in a grid, etc.

Estimation
Problems whose primary focus involves one or more numerical estimations.

Series And Sequences
Problems whose primary focus involves a numerical sequence (a finite or infinite list of numbers) or a numerical series (the sum of a numerical series), such as arithmetic sequences, geometric sequences, sequences defined by recursion, etc.

Sets
Problems whose primary focus involves the understanding of, and application of basic ideas about sets, such as their union and their intersection. Problems that appear to be best solved by the use of a venn diagram are considered sets problems.”

Okay, we have some good material to work with here. Check it out! Estimation is on this list. That confirms our earlier hypothesis that the student needs to work on this. (I promise I hadn’t already seen this when I made that hypothesis! I’ve literally been writing all of this as I examine the score reports.)

Next, the other three areas are pretty annoying quant areas. There are ways for the test writers to ask easier questions in these areas, and so we do want to know how to handle those. But these can also get quite hard. Since this test-taker now knows these areas are weaker, she can just put “harder combinatorics, series / sequences, and sets” on her “bail fast” list. (How do you know which problems are officially rated harder while taking the exam? You don’t. “Harder” means “harder for me.” If it looks annoying and it’s your area of weakness, bail.)

It looks like this test taker also needs some work on Value / Order / Factors (and that goes along with the data that she’s struggling more with Arithmetic, by the way). So she would also read the description for these areas and now she’s got a good idea of what she can do to try to improve her score for next time. (Of course, you’ll want to review all topics, even your strengths, before you take the test again.)

GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Performance By Quadrant
Next up, we’ve got the quadrant data. What do you spot here?





As with the Verbal report, analyze all of this data collectively. The quadrant 4 percent correct stat is an immediately obvious one—0% right. Before that, this student was doing really well. What happened?

Take a look at the timing data. Yes, the student did very well in the first three quadrants, but she had to burn through a lot of extra time to maintain that performance. Then she had to rush a lot in the fourth quadrant, so it’s no surprise that her performance dropped so much.

The great news? She still scored a 45 in this section despite dropping so much in the last quadrant. The GMAT is a Where You End Is What You Get test: Your scoring level at the end of the section is your final score. So if she can make some better decisions earlier in the section—which will definitely involve using our Yellow Pad time management technique and choosing a small number of problems on which to bail fast—then she won’t miss a bunch of questions and have her score drop at the end. And that means she’s got a really good chance to score in the high 40s (if not higher!) on her next official test.

Remember our earlier takeaway about finding other quicker, dirtier ways to do math, including estimation? Getting better at that will also help her to manage her time on the test. All in all, this student has quite a bit of opportunity to lift her score.

One last thing. It’s sometimes the case that certain data points don’t seem to be as useful (for example, if your percent correct was about the same for all content areas) but even “low-contrast” data points tell you something (for example, that you have a solid foundation across all content areas—a good thing to know!). If you’re planning to take the test again and you don’t think that you already know what you need to improve, then the ESR can be a valuable tool, even with its $30 price tag.

That’s it! We’ve analyzed the entire Enhanced Score Report. Happy studying!

Don’t forget that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free. We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.





Stacey Koprince is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California. Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT  for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests. Check out Stacey’s upcoming GMAT courses here.

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: How to Get a (Nearly) Perfect Score on the GMAT
Reports vary about how many perfect 800’s are achieved each year, but out of 200,000 people taking the GMAT each year, we think there are somewhere between zero and 30 perfect scores. You have a better chance of being hit by lightning as you’re winning a Powerball lottery!  (That’s not true, but calculating the probability of getting hit by lightning as you’re winning the Powerball does sound like an 800-level GMAT probability problem). There were ZERO scores of 800 in last year’s crop of students admitted to Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc.

Keep reading for why it’s (nearly) impossible to get a perfect score on the GMAT and for strategies for getting a score in the 99th percentile.

What is a perfect score on the GMAT?
800. Two other scores come with a GMAT, besides the 200-800 score: Essay (0 – 6) and Integrated Reasoning (1 – 8).

So if you’re looking for full-on “I pitched a perfect game / I summited Everest without oxygen tanks”, it would look like 800, 6 on Essay, 8 on Integrated Reasoning. I’m not sure if anyone has actually achieved this clean sheet, but anyone who has the capacity to get an 800 should be able to bang out a top Essay and IR score, as getting 6’s and 8’s, respectively, is very common.

How do you get a perfect score on the GMAT?
GMAT scores are on a scale from 200 to 800. This score is derived by combining a Quant and a Verbal subscore, each on a scale from 6-51. The Quant and Verbal sections each involve a little over 30 questions in a little over 60 minutes. To get an 800, you would need a perfect 51 on Quant and Verbal. The specific math by which your Quant and Verbal subscores are translated into your overall 200-800 GMAT score is a proprietary GMAC secret, kept in a secure bunker deep in the Earth’s mantle, along with the formula for Coca-Cola Classic and Colonel Sanders’ secret blend of herbs and spices for KFC chicken.

How much do business schools care about whether you get a perfect score on the GMAT?
Not at all. No b-school admissions office is expecting to see any perfect scores slide across their desks. As mentioned earlier, there were no scores of 800 in last year’s crop of students admitted to top schools. It is also suspected that the vast majority of people who do get 800’s are just sad, overly familiar “students” like me, who teach GMAT.

Can GMAT teachers easily get a perfect score on the GMAT?
Not at all. In fact, our company pays teachers way more than other companies do for the sole purpose of attracting the best and brightest talent. Despite all that, I know of only one teacher in our company history who had an 800. He also had a brain-altering injury as an adolescent that gave him some cool savant mental powers. (That is true).

The 99th percentile, our minimum cutoff for teachers, starts at 760. The difference between 760, 770, 780, 790, and 800 is basically splitting hairs. It would represent one or two guesses on really tricky Verbal questions landing the right or wrong way. We are pretty capable of getting 51’s on Quant, but getting 51’s on Verbal is almost unheard of.

I first took the GMAT ten years ago; I barely studied for it, because I was already teaching SAT and LSAT, and got a 780. Last year, I took the GMAT again. In my arrogant heart of hearts, I thought I was probably contending for one of those mythical 800’s. After all, I’ve been teaching GMAT for a decade now. I have an encyclopedia of problems in my head. This test lives in my gut like a tapeworm.

How did I do?  (Drumroll, please:  …………………!)  770.

What the heck?  Ten years of becoming a master of GMAT’s content had made me 10 points worse? Of course not. It’s just very volatile as you approach the extremes of the scoring range. As I said before, a couple unlucky vs. lucky guesses can affect your score by 20-40 points.

How come (almost) nobody gets a perfect score on the GMAT?
The GMAT is not a test that requires or even really allows for perfection. It is an adaptive test, deciding on our next question based on a calculation of our performance up to that point on the test. So, when we get a question correct, the next question is usually harder. When we get a question incorrect, the next question is usually easier. This essentially guarantees that no one can ace the GMAT. Since the adaptive algorithm can continually increase the difficulty level, it can always outpace what we are able to figure out and correctly solve within our allotted average of two mins per question.

The reason for making a test of this sort is because what GMAC really wants to measure is not our proficiency at 6th – 10th grade math concepts. It wants to measure our ability to manage ourselves, to make decisions based on priorities, and to invest our scarce resources wisely. We call this “Executive Reasoning”.

If we had enough time to fully think through all the problems on a GMAT, then it would only be a test of whether we know the content on the test. Since they really want to test the intangibles, they need a test that guarantees people do not have enough time to think fully through each problem. This forces us into the mindset of an investor. Investors don’t have infinite resources; they can’t fully invest in every opportunity. On the GMAT, since you don’t have enough time to do all the problems in a section (and you can never go back to revisit a problem), then you have to make best guesses in real-time about what is a worthwhile high percentage investment of time versus what would be too much of a longshot. This also forces us to be coldly judicious about bailing from a problem when our initial investment of time isn’t panning out. GMAC wants to punish stubbornness, to enact some penalty for foolishly throwing “good money after bad”. They want to reward humility, realism, and an investing disposition that thinks, “Welp – can’t win ‘em all. That one seemed like a good idea at the time, but I should cut my losses and move on to greener pastures.”

We have to stay budget-conscious, so we follow pacing plans as we take Quant and Verbal sections. The test assesses bigger penalties for missing easier questions than for harder questions. And there is a huge penalty for failing to finish all the questions in a section. Most people’s initial trials at a GMAT test involve overspending time on early questions and therefore missing a bunch of doable questions on the backend of the section because they’ve run out of time.

So, what should I be shooting for, if it’s not possible for me to get a perfect score on the GMAT?
If you’re targeting top 15 schools, you would love to have at least a 720. Being lower than that does not disqualify you, but it puts more of a burden on your work experience and life history to carry your app through. Luckily for us, business school admissions are relatively holistic. Having a less than sparkly GMAT score can be offset by having other attractive features.

Sparkly GMAT scores are often needed to compensate for a lack somewhere else in your application. For example, if you are applying to a rigorous finance program, but your undergrad was in Political Science and you’ve been working in marketing ever since, then you need to be able to convince the admissions board that you handle top shelf math. A great GMAT score, with a good 45+ quant subscore, will do just that.

How long do I need to study in order to (nearly) get a perfect score on the GMAT?

This answer would vary a lot, depending on the person, but I find it hard to believe anyone could score in the 99th percentile without at least 2 months of studying (unless you already teach SAT and LSAT). I think it’s much more realistic that you would need closer to 6 months of studying.  Let’s break down some of the challenges:

  • Automaticity when it comes to the basic rules, principles, and mechanics of 6th – 10th grade math: fractions, decimals, percents, ratios, exponents, radicals, linear algebra, quadratic algebra (don’t need quadratic formula), rates, overlapping sets, sequences, functions, factors, multiples, divisibility, remainder, median, average, triangles, circles, cylinders, quadrilaterals, coordinate plane, probability, combinatorics, and a few other things. It’s not enough to just know how to deal with these things correctly. We need to get to a point where the mechanics, formulas, and vocabulary involved are completely second nature. The brain doesn’t have a ton of working memory available, and we need as much of those resources as possible for the higher-level thinking of logic traps / confusing question wording / overall pacing. So there is a good bit of repetition needed in order to get the basic math content to feel as natural as reciting your phone number.
  • When it comes to Verbal, we’ll need to develop automaticity when it comes to citing and applying a dozen or so grammar rules, and when it comes to Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension, we’ll need to be automatic at identifying the type of question and whatever associated strategies/tendencies that type of question has.
  • Comfort with Alternative Strategies / Guessing Heuristics – as I said before, I got my 780 before I actually knew the ins and outs of GMAT. I was just super adept at hacky ways of doing problems, such as backsolving, making up numbers, estimating, and just avoiding un-savvy answer choices. Many students will be starting more from the ground up with these skills, and they are often initially distrustful of these techniques since high school and college did not teach us to improve at these skills. However, these techniques can often be our saving grace on harder problems, allowing us to “steal” a few per section.
  • Experience with avoiding pacing problems or working our way out of pacing problems – it’s wise to try to take at least four practice exams before you take a real GMAT (many people probably take 6-8 of them). There’s a sweet spot to pacing:  if we go too quickly we make careless mistakes or we too-aggressively give up on problems just because we didn’t understand what they were saying on a first read. However, if we get one minute in, do some ‘exploratory drilling’, and still feel pretty foggy, we need the discipline to cut ourselves off and bail. By taking multiple timed practice tests, you’ll invariably make some regrettable pacing decisions, which are a crucial way of learning what not to do next time.
  • Exposure to a vast number of GMAT problems – re-learning the basic facts of math and grammar only gets you to around the 550 level. For Quant, in particular, there are so many special logic traps, funky moves, or obscure properties that show up on the GMAT that we have never seen before. We need to expose ourselves to lots of GMAT problems (at a minimum, try all 900 problems in the Official Guide you have) so that we can become aware of some of these “games”. But be warned – you can’t really learn a problem by doing it and reviewing it once. You must implement a system of spiraling back to problems a 2nd and 3rd time. If we auditioned all 900 problems in the Official Guide to find which ones gave us at least some struggle, we would probably find that about 1/3 of them were so easy that we don’t need to learn anything else. For the remaining 2/3 (ignoring the hardest 20-40 questions in the book which aren’t worth worrying about), we need to try them a 2nd time, at least five days after the first time. For around half of those, we’ll need a 3rd time as well. That means that you’d have to do about 1800 problems (900 once, 600 a second time, 300 a third time).

    If you did 10 problems a day, that would take 180 days, or 6 months. If you do 15 a day, it’s 120 days, or 4 months.
And with that sobering prescription, I’ll wrap things up. A perfect score on the GMAT is an impossible windmill to chase. A fantastic score on the GMAT is doable, but there are no shortcuts there. You will need a lot of persistence and disposable time to develop mastery within GMAC’s broad but finite universe. The good news is that these problems feel a little bit like tiny puzzles, so if you approach them with a spirit of curiosity and appreciation, the journey and the work can be rewarding.

Don’t forget that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free. We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Patrick Tyrrell is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Los Angeles, California. He has a B.A. in philosophy, a 780 on the GMAT, and relentless enthusiasm for his work. In addition to teaching test prep since 2006, he’s also an avid songwriter/musician. Check out Patrick’s upcoming GMAT courses here!



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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: How to Review a GMAT Critical Reasoning Problem


Are you keeping an error log for your GMAT Verbal practice? If your goal is to get a certain overall score on the GMAT (say, a 700), don’t underestimate the value of Verbal. That’s true even if you’re scoring at a higher percentile in Verbal than you are in Quant.

At first, you may find that tough Verbal problems—especially Critical Reasoning and Reading Compseem arbitrary and subjective. But, they’re less subjective than they seem. GMAT Verbal problems all go through an experimental stage, where they aren’t counted towards your score. A problem is only used on the real GMAT if, during that experimental stage, high scorers consistently get it right and low scorers consistently get it wrong.

That tells us that there’s a method to the madness. High scorers are people who have figured out what makes a right answer right. And the way you get there is by reviewing Verbal just as carefully as you review Quant.

Reviewing Critical Reasoning
You should review most of the Critical Reasoning problems you do, even if you get them right. That’s because Critical Reasoning arguments use the same structures over and over, even though the content changes. The wrong answers also use the same traps repeatedly. If you get a problem right, analyze the wrong answers anyways. You might see very similar ones in a harder problem on test day.

The only problems you shouldn’t review (yet) are the ones that were unrealistically hard. Feel free to set those aside for later in your studies. Your time is best spent on the problems that will pay off most quickly.

Redoing a Critical Reasoning Problem
The first step of reviewing a CR problem is redoing it. Do this shortly after finishing a problem set, or during your next study session.

When you redo a CR problem, you don’t need to use a timer. You’re also welcome to look back at the notes you took (if any) when you first did the problem. When you try the problem a second time, with a clear head, three things can happen:

  • You convince yourself that your original answer was right.
  • You convince yourself that your original answer was wrong.
  • You’re still not sure. 
In the first two scenarios, go ahead and check out the explanation and then start taking notes on the problem. But, if you get stuck, don’t read the explanation immediately.

Instead, just check what the right answer was. Try to come up with your own theories for why that answer was right, and for why the other answers were wrong. Then, you can read the explanation—to prove or disprove your own theories, or to add to them.

If you can’t get anywhere at all with a CR problem unless you read the explanation, the problem might just be too hard to do at the moment. Or, you might need to review how to approach that type of CR problem (for instance, by using GMAT Interact) before doing more practice questions.

Breaking down a Critical Reasoning problem
Let’s assume that you’ve tried the problem twice, and you now know what the right answer is and why it was right. You’re ready to learn.

Before you keep reading, do this CR problem from GMATPrep. Use a 2-minute timer. Then, take a break for a couple of minutes, and try it again.

Correctly measuring the productivity of service workers is complex. Consider, for example, postal workers: they are often said to be more productive if more letters are delivered per postal worker. But is this really true? What if more letters are lost or delayed per worker at the same time that more are delivered?

The objection implied above to the productivity measure described is based on doubts about the truth of which of the following statements?

  • (A) Postal workers are representative of service workers in general.
  • (B) The delivery of letters is the primary activity of the postal service.
  • (C) Productivity should be ascribed to categories of workers, not to individuals.
  • (D) The quality of services rendered can appropriately be ignored in computing productivity.
  • (E) The number of letters delivered is relevant to measuring the productivity of postal workers.
Then, check out this article by Stacey Koprince for the explanation. (But, try to figure out as much as you can about the problem on your own before you read the article! The right answer is (D)—if that’s not what you picked, return to the problem and come up with a theory for why (D) was right.)

Here’s what your review process will look like for a CR problem. There are four pieces of a CR problem, and you can take notes on any of them, depending on what was interesting about the problem.

  • The question
  • The argument
  • The right answer
  • The four wrong answers
The problem above had a really unusual question, so you might choose to jot down some notes about it. Ideally, look for a big takeaway or two: lessons that could apply not just to this problem, but to the whole problem type, to all CR problems, or even to the GMAT in general. Here are some examples of students’ notes:

Student A: based on = assumption

Student B: if the question is complicated, focus on one piece at a time. “The objection to the measure” = letters might be delayed, so more letters doesn’t = more productivity. “Based on” = assumption required for this to be true. “Doubt about…” = the right answer will be negative, something that the person objecting DOESN’T believe.

Your notes might look like either example, or, if nothing about the question confused or surprised you, you might take no notes at all.

If you struggled to understand the argument, or if you picked the wrong answer because you misunderstood the argument, spend some time breaking it down carefully in your notes. You can also think about what answers you could have predicted, based on the argument itself. If you notice any patterns in the argument—for example, if the argument looked like a “tell me why” argument—you could note that as well.

The most important part of reviewing a CR problem, however, is understanding the answer choices.

Reviewing Critical Reasoning answer choices
A lot of the time, two or three of the answer choices in a CR problem will be easier to eliminate than the others. If your CR problem is like this, take a moment to make sure you do understand why those answer choices were wrong.

The ones to really dive into, though, are the answer choices that weren’t obvious. If you got the CR question right, make sure you can answer these questions:

  • What made the right answer right?
  • If any of the wrong answers were difficult, confusing, or tempting, what ultimately made them wrong? 
If you got the question wrong, answer these questions instead:

  • What made the right answer right?
  • What made the answer I picked wrong? 
  • Why did I eliminate (or not choose) the right answer?
  • Why did I choose the answer I picked? 
The point of this exercise isn’t to beat yourself up for missing the problem! The point is to gather data about your own problem-solving process, and identify patterns or areas to review.

Here are some examples of notes from students who missed the problem we worked on earlier:

Student A picked (E):

  • eliminated (D) because I thought “quality of services rendered” was different from letters being delayed. But, that was a trick! It’s okay if the answer choice uses different exact wording in some cases. 
  • picked (E) because it matched my own thoughts when I was reading the argument
  • But, (E) was wrong because it’s too strong: the person doesn’t think that number of letters delivered isn’t relevant, they just think there are other issues that may also be relevant. 
Student B picked (C):

  • Picked (C), guessed randomly 
  • Didn’t pick (D) because I didn’t actually read it fully, got confused by “can appropriately be ignored” and decided not to waste time figuring out what that meant
Student C picked (A)

  • When I read the argument, I thought that you couldn’t go from “service workers” to talking about just postal workers.
  • The “objection” is actually just about postal workers specifically, so that’s okay
  • Focus on what the conclusion says specifically, not on random background statements in the argument!
  • Missed (D) because I didn’t really read the answer choices past (A)
    Read all of the answer choices unless you’re in a huge hurry!
Your notes don’t need to be this detailed, but it’s great if they are. That’s not just because you’ll review them later. It’s also because writing down your thoughts on a problem forces you to slow down and articulate them in a way that makes sense. (And if you’re doing GMAT tutoring, it gives you information to share with your tutor!)

If there are other things you want to remember about a CR problem, edit your error log to include them! For instance, some of my students have used an extra column in their error log to write down how much time they spent on a problem, so they could go back and only redo the problems that took them too much time. Or you may want to take a note whenever you fall for a trap answer, so you avoid falling for the same ones over and over. A “general takeaways” column can also be useful!

Finishing up
Now that you’ve redone the problem, understood the solution, and reflected on your own process, put the problem aside for a week or two. On your GMAT study calendar, schedule a couple of hours every other week to do nothing but redo old problems from your log. It doesn’t even matter whether you remember the right answer when you redo: all you’re doing is reminding your brain of the problem and the lessons you learned from it.

You should also quickly read over your problem log at least once a week, maybe when you have a few minutes of spare time but not enough time for a full study session. There’s no need to redo any problems or take any more notes unless you want to! Just glance at your takeaways to keep them fresh in your mind.

The secret to mastering Critical Reasoning is to get methodical. Understand the rules behind each problem type, and what they look like when they’re used in problems. Doing a lot of practice problems will expose you to these rules, but review is the way to truly understand them.

Don’t forget that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free. We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

[b]Chelsey Cooley
 is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington.
 [/b]Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170Q/170V on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: How to Review a GMAT Reading Comprehension Question
Reviewing a GMAT Reading Comprehension question is similar to reviewing a Critical Reasoning problem. Just as with Critical Reasoning, not all RC problems are equally important to review. The most important problems to add to your ‘review later’ list are the ones that were just a bit too hard. Feel free to set aside the 800-level problems for now, but spend some extra time on the ones you almost got right. That’s where you’ll learn the most right now.

Whenever you finish a set of GMAT Reading Comp practice questions, set them aside for a few minutes (or a day), then look over them again. Ideally, do this before you’ve even checked your answers: not knowing the right answer immediately will force you to deeply consider all of the answer choices.

Start your review by just doing the problem again. Take as much or as little time as you want. If you’re reviewing a tough Detail question, you can also go back and highlight or underline details in the passage. You might end up changing your mind about the answer, or you might end up convincing yourself that your original answer was right. You may also end up unsure about the right answer, even once you spend more time with the problem. In that case, check the right answer first, before you read the explanation. See if you can come up with a theory, before you read the explanation, for why that answer was right.

Once you’ve looked over the question a second time, it’s time to decide what you want to remember. You won’t see that exact problem on the test, but the GMAT uses the same types of passages, questions, right answers, and wrong answers across many problems. Here’s how to take notes in a way that will help you approach similar problems on test day.

Taking Review Notes on a GMAT Reading Comp Question
The majority of GMAT Reading Comp questions can be described as either general or specific. General questions might ask you about the main idea or the purpose of an entire passage, or perhaps about a paragraph or two within the passage. Getting these right relies on doing a few things successfully:

  • Figuring out which parts of the passage are major points, and which parts are supporting details (and how they fit together to make a single broad point)
  • Confidently eliminating wrong answers that somehow don’t match the overall passage
When you review a general question, take another look at the passage or paragraph first. You may want to jot down how long you spent reading the passage; if you read the passage slowly, spend some time thinking about which parts of the passage you could have safely ignored, and why.

The right answer to a general question is right because, according to the GMAT, it correctly summarizes the main points. Once you know the right answer to a question you’re reviewing, locate those main points in the passage, and note how the details in the passage support those points.

Each time you do this, you may learn something new about how to spot the main idea while reading a passage. If anything stands out to you on reviewing the passage, take some quick notes. Here are some examples of what your notes could look like, depending on the passage and the specific problem:

  • The main idea is basically stated verbatim at the end of the first paragraph!
  • First paragraph introduces a surprise, then the other paragraphs each explain in different ways why it isn’t so surprising after all. So, the main idea will hit those two points: there’s an apparent surprise, but it isn’t really a surprise.
  • If something isn’t mentioned until the last paragraph, then it probably isn’t the main idea, even if it feels like a “conclusion.” 
Then, look at the answers. Make sure you can fully explain why each wrong answer is wrong. Some of them may be obvious to you; focus your note-taking on the wrong answers that aren’t obvious, especially if you picked one of them!

Each time you make yourself think (and take notes) about why a wrong answer is wrong, you’re learning to recognize and avoid that type of wrong answer. Even if you didn’t fall for it this time, you’ll still be better prepared on test day.

Here are some common reasons to eliminate an answer while doing a general Reading Comp problem:

  • Too specific: only part of the passage discusses this issue
  • Too general: the passage only discusses one aspect or example of this issue, not the general issue
  • Too judgy: the wrong answer uses a word like argues, disagrees, contrasts, proves, etc., while the passage itself is more neutral. 
Taking Notes on a Specific Detail or Inference Questions
Detail questions on the GMAT all have something in common, whether they ask you to identify something that the passage says, or something that the passage only implies. Either way, the right answer must be a statement you can prove by only using information from the passage. 

In the case of a Detail question, the right answer should be more or less written in the passage somewhere. When reviewing, your first job is to hunt down the “proof” for the right answer. If there’s anything surprising about the proof or how it relates to the right answer, write that in your notes! Did you miss it or misinterpret it? If so, how and why? Knowing what caused you to eliminate a correct answer erroneously will help you refine your own process.

Then, look at the wrong answers. Be able to explain why each one is wrong. If any of them were remarkable or surprising to you, especially if you picked one of those, take some notes. Many Reading Comp questions have wrong answers that are wrong for predictable, consistent reasons. (For instance, it’s very common for there to be a wrong answer that uses language similar to that used in the passage, but that has the opposite meaning from the passage itself.) Jot down anything you learned about why an answer might be wrong.

If you got the question wrong, figure out two things: what drew you to that particular wrong answer, and what kept you from picking the right answer. This might be something as simple as a misreading (or even not reading that answer choice at all!). But, it could also teach you something about the types of mistakes you tend to make. Anything you learn, write it down for later review.

Long-term Reading Comp Review
Now you’ve completed a set of Reading Comp questions and you’ve achieved a full understanding of how to read each passage and answer each question. You have some notes written down about what made the right answers right, what made the wrong answers wrong, and how to avoid mistakes next time. Here’s the next step.

A couple of times per week, simply glance over your whole problem log, containing all of your notes on RC problems you’ve done in the past. Do this when you have a few minutes of spare time. There’s no need to redo the problems when you do this. All you’re doing is re-exposing yourself to the notes you’ve taken and taking note of any patterns that stand out, and maybe thinking about which problems you’d most like to redo next.

Once a week (if you’re focusing heavily on RC), or just occasionally (if RC is less of a priority), go back into your problem log and actually redo the problems you’ve reviewed. Use a timer, and avoid looking at the answer immediately. Did you get them right the second time? That’s strong evidence that you’ve internalized the lessons from those problems. Did you miss them again? That’s data as well: you now know that you should do some more problems of that same type, or revisit the corresponding chapter(s) in the All the Verbal guide.

Want some more GMAT review tips? Check out these posts.
Don’t forget that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free. We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

[b]Chelsey Cooley
 is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington.
 [/b]Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170Q/170V on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.

The post How to Review a GMAT Reading Comprehension Question appeared first on GMAT.
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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: 2019–2020 MBA Essay Analysis: Texas McCombs, Fisher College, UNC Kenan-Flagler
How can you write essays that grab the attention of MBA admissions committees? With these thorough essay analyses, our friends atmbaMission help you conceptualize your essay ideas and understand how to execute so that your experiences truly stand out.

This week, we round up essay analyses for the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

TEXAS MCCOMBS  ESSAY ANALYSIS 2019-2020
Once again, the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has made only slight modifications to its MBA application essay prompts, simply refining the queries without changing the fundamental information on which they focus. The school’s required self-introduction essay (or video, for those who prefer that option) has been in play since at least 2013, and its second essay, for which applicants are asked to imagine themselves at graduation and to reflect on their time at McCombs, now specifies that candidates frame their response within the context of their goals, rather than the broader “post-MBA world.” Anyone with a potential problem area or unclear element in their profile can also submit an optional essay to address the issue(s). As a whole, the Texas McCombs essays give applicants ample opportunity to provide meaningful insight into their characters and strengths. Click here our entire analysis of the program’s essay prompts for 2019–2020.

FISHER COLLEGE ESSAY ANALYSIS 2019-2020
The Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University has expanded its application essay questions this year, giving candidates more of an opportunity to discuss their profiles beyond the statistics and other basic data conveyed in the rest of their application. The school’s first required essay is a rather traditional career goals statement for which the maximum word count has been cut back from 750 to 500. Perhaps this reduction was to allow for the addition of a second required essay without adding too much to the amount applicants need to write. For that new second essay, candidates must share a significant achievement from their past and explain how the experience has equipped them to be an additive member of the Fisher MBA community. If needed, a 250-word supplemental essay is also available for candidates with unusual or unclear elements in their profiles. All aspiring Fisher MBAs must complete a video interview soon after submitting their application, and although this is not technically an essay, we offer some tips for addressing it as well in our complete essay analysis.

UNC KENAN FLAGLER ANALYSIS 2019-2020
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School is offering a mix of old and new essay prompts this season, having maintained its rather traditional career-focused first essay while replacing its second required essay question with a trio of new options. Rather than having to discuss a core value they share with the school, applicants can choose the prompt they feel gives them the best opportunity to convey the nonprofessional side of their candidacy. And although the word count has been slashed in half (from 300 to 150), the school’s optional essay still provides candidates with an outlet for explaining a problematic element of their profile or augmenting their application with potentially key information. Our more in-depth analysis of Kenan-Flagler’s 2019–2020 essay questions is available here.

mbaMission is the leader in MBA admissions consulting with a full-time and comprehensively trained staff of consultants, all with profound communications and MBA experience. mbaMission has helped thousands of candidates fulfill their dream of attending prominent MBA programs around the world. Take your first step toward a more successful MBA application experience with a free 30-minute consultation with one of mbaMission’s senior consultants.



>> Click here to sign up today

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: Is Earning a JD/MBA Degree Right for Me?
[img]https://cdn2.manhattanprep.com/gmat/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2019/11/mprep-blogimages-wave1-26-e1574348483657.png[/img]

Now that you have begun taking steps toward earning your MBA, you may be wondering whether a joint JD/MBA degree could be a good option for you. Or perhaps you have been considering a JD/MBA all along. After two decades of consulting MBA, JD, and joint JD/MBA aspirants, we have learned a few things about this joint degree option, so let us offer some insight into both its utility and some additional factors you may want to consider.

A JD/MBA degree can benefit your long-term career by giving you valuable skills and insight that could make you more versatile and effective in your professional role.

[list]
[*][b]If your ultimate goal is to become a corporate lawyer at a leading firm[/b], your primary commitment during your studies needs to be on the law. Law firms generally tend to be rigid and hierarchical, so you cannot expect to simply switch from a traditional business role to become an associate at a notable firm—this kind of shift is exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, also having an MBA offers certain advantages. For example, if you find yourself working on complicated deal structures, your MBA might enable you to better understand the complexities of certain business issues, such as equity and debt issuances. And in the long term, the extensive leadership skills you would gain from the MBA experience will likely make you a more adept manager of employees and clients, and this in turn could facilitate your rise to partner. [/*]

[*][b]If your post-graduate goal is to become a traditional business professional[/b], knowing the law could give you a comparative advantage over your peers and colleagues who do not. For example, if you become a banker or private equity associate and are working on a complex deal, understanding basic employment law or grasping the liabilities that a new entity will take on (or not take on) could help you craft more effective approaches and solutions. Likewise, having a profound legal education could help you add nuance in advising clients.[/*]
[/list]
However, double the degree means that some of the pros and cons of the graduate school experience are likewise doubled. Here are a few primary ones to consider.

[list]
[*][b]A larger and more expansive network[/b]: You are probably already very aware that earning an advanced degree automatically makes you part of a broad network of classmates and alumni from your chosen institution. So, imagine that you are accepted to Harvard Business School, immediately joining a network of your approximately 925 classmates, plus all the graduates who have gone before you. Now imagine you also get into Harvard Law School, which connects you with roughly 580 more classmates as well as that school’s alumni. You will no doubt graduate with plenty of accomplished friends who will go on to become successful professionals in organizations around the world. Networks can be extremely valuable at all stages of your career, and having access to literally thousands of additional individuals who will generally be inclined to respond to a call or email from you is even more advantageous. [/*]

[*][b]A more substantial financial investment[/b]: Taking the time to pursue an advanced degree involves two primary expenditures—the cost of the program (mainly tuition, but also living and other associated expenses) and the [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/is-the-mba-worth-it-go-beyond-roi/]income “lost” during your years out of the workforce[/url] (salary, bonuses, retirement contributions, etc.). By choosing a four-year JD/MBA program over a two-year MBA program, you are essentially doubling the cost of your degree. For example, at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Darden School of Business, you would need to pay approximately $70K tuition for the first year of your MBA. Then you must pay the UVA Law School tuition of approximately $66K per year for two years. And for your fourth year, you pay one semester of tuition for each school (roughly $68K combined). The additional years needed for the joint degree represent a significant financial investment, not only in tuition ($270K versus $140K) but also in those two extra years without income. However, if you are fully committed to pursuing a joint degree, an accelerated three-year program—such as the one offered by Yale—could offer a “break” of sorts because you could return to the workforce one year sooner. We, of course, advise you to examine the student budgets at each program as you decide which path to take. [/*]

[*][b]Double the admissions efforts[/b]: At most institutions with JD/MBA programs, you must apply to—and be accepted by—both the business school and the law school separately. This is the case, for example, at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Michigan, Duke University, UVA, and New York University. Fortunately, some other top institutions, including Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, require only one application. Although such an important educational decision should not be determined by how cumbersome the application process is, applying to graduate school can unquestionably be grueling. Studying for and taking the required entrance exam, writing essays, securing recommendations, interviewing, scheduling class visits—doubling all these efforts may be a necessary evil but will certainly not be a lot of fun. That said, some schools will allow you to apply to their JD/MBA program after your first year of MBA studies, which does not exactly eliminate the additional work required but does minimize it slightly, as well as offering a break between processes. [/*]
[/list]
The decision to pursue any advanced degree is a hefty one, requiring you to consider the potential effect on your long-term career, the entire financial impact, the stress and challenge of the admissions process, and the rigor required to complete the studies. And committing to a JD/MBA program entails additional demands and concerns in all these areas. If you are truly interested in applying to a JD/MBA program, we suggest that you inform yourself thoroughly about this path by speaking to individuals enrolled in such programs as well as the schools’ alumni about every stage of the experience. And of course, if you need any further advice, contact us anytime for a [url=https://www.mbamission.com/consult.php]free consultation[/url].

[url=https://www.mbamission.com/][b]mbaMission[/b][/url][b] is the leader in MBA admissions consulting with a full-time and comprehensively trained staff of consultants[/b], all with profound communications and MBA experience. mbaMission has helped thousands of candidates fulfill their dream of attending prominent MBA programs around the world. Take your first step toward a more successful MBA application experience with a free 30-minute consultation with one of mbaMission’s senior consultants.



The post [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/is-earning-a-jd-mba-degree-right-for-me/]Is Earning a JD/MBA Degree Right for Me?[/url] appeared first on [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat]GMAT[/url].
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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: What the Executive Assessment Really Tests
[url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/about-executive-assessment/][img]https://cdn2.manhattanprep.com/gmat/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2019/11/mprep-blogimages-wave1-25-1-e1574349505628.png[/img][/url]

[url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/about-executive-assessment/]The Executive Assessment (EA)[/url] is not a math test. Nor is it a grammar test. Sure, you have to know something (well, a lot of things!) about these topics in order to get a good score. But the Executive Assessment is really testing your executive reasoning skills.

The term might be unfamiliar, but you already have—and use—these skills every day. Here are some examples:

You are faced with a list of 20 unread emails (or, if your inbox is more like mine, about 80). Which ones do you read first? The oldest ones? The ones from your boss? The ones marked urgent? Are there some that you won’t even click on right now because you know, from the sender’s name or from the subject line, that those emails aren’t very important? (And how did that one spam message get through the filter?)

You have a choice between working on Product X or Project Y. Project Y will result in about 5% more revenue to the company, but Project Y will also take 50% longer. Which do you do?

These decisions aren’t easy ones (and would likely require more information than I gave). This complex decision making is exactly what a good executive needs to be able to do well—and this is what the test writers and business schools actually care about.

The math and grammar are primarily used as tools to allow the exam writers to test you on your decision-making ability.

[b]How does that help me take the Executive Assessment?[/b]
They don’t expect you to get everything right, any more than a CEO expects to clear everything in his or her inbox today. You have to prioritize.

A great decision-maker has both expertise and experience: She’s thought about how to make various kinds of decisions, and she’s actually practiced and refined these decision-making processes. While the clock is ticking, she doesn’t hesitate to make a decision and move forward, knowing that she’s going to be leaving some opportunities behind.

In order to do that successfully in the business world, you need to know the company’s goals and objectives, and you have to have a good idea of the kind of impact that various tasks or activities will have on the company. You also have to have a lot of practice in making these decisions and observing the outcomes.

The same is true for the EA: If you know how it works, and you know what kinds of trade-offs to think about when deciding how to spend your time, then you can learn how to make the best decisions to maximize your score.

Your goal, then, is to develop a business mindset for this test. You’re not going “back to school” when you study for the EA. Rather, approach the exam as an extension of your current work—this is a test of your business ability and decision-making skills.

The test does include some school subjects in the details of the questions, so you will have to re-learn some actual facts and formulas, but the focus will be on your decision-making skills above all else.

[b]How do I develop a business mindset?[/b]
At every step of the way, remind yourself that the EA is primarily a decision-making test. Use this knowledge to help you make appropriate business decisions along the way, during both your studies and the test itself.

For example, don’t try to learn everything that could possibly be tested. Rather, prepare yourself to get a good-enough score. Learn the material that is most likely to be tested, with some extra emphasis on your strengths and your “medium weaknesses”—i.e., the ones that you have a better chance to turn around. On the flip side, de-prioritize your biggest weaknesses—literally get those kinds of problems wrong faster and spend your precious study and test time elsewhere.

Happy studying!

[b]For information about our Executive Assessment Complete Course [/b][url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/executive-assessment/][b]click here[/b][/url][b].[/b]

[url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/instructors/stacey-koprince/?utm_source=manhattanprep.com%2Fgmat%2Fblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=KoprinceBioLinkGMATBlog&utm_campaign=GMAT%20Blog][img]https://cdn2.manhattanprep.com/gmat/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2015/06/stacey-koprince-150x150.png[/img][/url]



[b][url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/instructors/stacey-koprince/?utm_source=manhattanprep.com%2Fgmat%2Fblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=KoprinceBioLinkGMATBlog&utm_campaign=GMAT%20Blog]Stacey Koprince[/url] is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California.[/b] Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT  for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests. [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/classes/?utm_source=manhattanprep.com%2Fgmat%2Fblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=KoprinceCoursesLinkGMATBlog&utm_campaign=GMAT%20Blog#instructor/86]Check out Stacey’s upcoming GMAT courses here[/url].



The post [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/what-the-executive-assessment-really-tests/]What the Executive Assessment Really Tests[/url] appeared first on [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat]GMAT[/url].
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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: Common Math Errors on the GMAT


Do you ever make mistakes on GMAT math that just don’t make sense when you review? That’s not unusual, and in fact, it’s probably one of the most common reasons to miss easy GMAT math problems. Here’s why:

  • When you’re under pressure, your memory becomes less reliable. 
  • Each person will find some things easier to remember than others. 

A lot of GMAT math errors are based on memorization. Suppose that you want to simplify the following expression:

0.00004 x 10-3

Quick, which of the following rules is correct?

  • To multiply a decimal by ten raised to a negative power, move the decimal place to the right that many times. 
  • To multiply a decimal by ten raised to a negative power, move the decimal place to the left that many times. 
Only one of these rules is right. But look how similar they are! The right one may be obvious to you right now, but the right rule is so close to the wrong rule. Can you really be sure that if you memorize it now, you’ll remember it flawlessly on test day? (By the way, the second rule is the correct one.)

In this article, I’ll list a handful of mistakes that people often make on GMAT math. Then, I’ll share a self-check you can use to avoid each one. Because everyone is different, some of these mistakes may be easy for you to avoid. For others, you might decide to double-check every single time.

1. Decimals and exponents
Let’s go back to the example above.

0.00004 x 10-3

Instead of memorizing which way to move the decimal, think about whether the decimal’s value should become larger or smaller. 

Ten raised to a negative power, like 10-3, is a fraction. In this case, it’s equal to 1/1,000. Multiplying something by a small fraction will definitely make it smaller.

A small decimal has more zeroes in front of it. So, to simplify this expression, you want to add more zeroes in front of the 4.

To remember how many zeroes to add, think about dividing by 10. Each time you divide a decimal by 10, you’d add in one zero. Dividing by 103, which is what we’re doing in this problem, is the same as dividing by 10 three times. So, you need to add three zeroes.

The right answer is 0.00000004.

2. Decimals and percents
When you want to find 0.05% of 13,000, what do you multiply 13,000 by? It’s easy to lose a decimal place or two and end up with an answer that’s off by a factor of 10.

Here’s the solution. The literal meaning of the percent symbol is “/100”. In fact, the percent symbol sort of looks like a division sign with two zeroes, symbolizing a 100. Any time you see a math expression including a percent, write it on your paper as if the percent sign said “/100” instead.

For this question, you’d write the following on your paper:

0.05/100 x 13,000

This simplifies to 0.05 x 130, or 6.5.

You can use this trick even when there are variables involved in the expression. For instance, a question might ask you “If y% of x equals 50, what is x% of y?”

Write this as follows:

(y/100)(x) = 50

(x/100)(y) = ?

In both cases, the left side of the expression simplifies to xy/100. So, they’re equal, and the answer to the question is 50.

3. Variables in fractions
Simplifying a fraction that only includes numbers is relatively straightforward, although the math might be tedious. But, when the fraction includes variables, the math gets less obvious.

Here’s an example of something you might have on your paper while doing a GMAT math problem:

(x + 7y) / (y²)

You may have memorized a rule that says “you can cancel common terms from the top and bottom of a fraction.” But that rule comes with some fiddly little caveats, like the fact that you aren’t allowed to do this:

(x + 7y) / (y²)

(x + 7) / (y)

Here’s another way to think about it that’s more reliable. Factor out the same value from both the top and the bottom of the fraction. Then, you can “cancel” (divide) both of those terms.

In the example above, you can’t factor a y out of the top of the fraction. So, you aren’t allowed to cancel the y.

But, in this example, you can:

(y³ + 7y) / (y²)

y(y² + 7) / y(y)

(y² + 7) / y

If you’ve made this mistake before, commit yourself to thinking each time: what am I factoring out of the top and bottom of this fraction? If you can’t factor it out, you don’t get to divide by it!

4. Properties of 0
There are two common Number Properties rules in GMAT math that relate to the number 0. Unfortunately, they’re almost identical to each other, and it’s so easy to get them switched around!

  • Zero is NOT positive or negative, it’s neither.
  • Zero is EVEN, not odd. 
Let’s dig into why this is the case.

All even numbers have one thing in common: if you divide them by 2, you don’t end up with a fraction or a remainder. For instance, 2,476 is even, because if you divide it by 2, you get a round number with nothing left over. The same is true of, say, -18. This rule of thumb will always accurately tell you whether a number is even.

What happens when you divide zero by two? You get zero.

0/2 = 0

Sure enough, there’s no fraction or remainder. So, by our rules, zero is definitely even.

Why isn’t zero positive or negative? This is a trickier one, because it depends, in part, on language. In some languages other than English, zero is actually said to be both positive and negative. However, on the GMAT, it’s neither.

On the GMAT, a good general strategy is to visualize a number line. Numbers to the left are smaller than numbers to the right. Anything to the left of zero is negative, and anything to the right of zero is positive. And because zero itself is neither to the left nor to the right of zero, it can’t be positive or negative.

5. Dividing by variables
How do you solve this equation?

3x = x²

The obvious first move is to divide both sides by x, giving you this answer:

3 = x

But, that’s actually a big problem. Why? Because x doesn’t necessarily equal 3. In fact, x could also equal 0. (Plug 0 into the equation 3x = x², and it works out just fine!)

You could memorize a rule: “equations that have the same variable in every term also have 0 as a solution, on top of whatever solution you come up with.” But, here are two alternatives.

  • Solve a quadratic like a quadratic
  • Don’t divide by 0
For the first alternative, notice that 3x = x² is a quadratic equation: it has a squared variable in it. The way to solve a quadratic isn’t to divide out like terms! Instead, you move everything to the same side, and then factor. So, do this:

x² – 3x = 0

x(x – 3) = 0

This gives you two solutions: x = 0, and x = 3.

The other alternative is to be extra careful never to divide anything by zero. That includes variables! If a variable might equal zero, then you still can’t divide by it. After all, you might be dividing by zero without realizing it.

The right approach is the same one as shown above: instead of dividing out an x (don’t do it, since it might equal zero!), focus on factoring it out without dividing. To do that, put both terms on the same side of the equation, then factor out the x that they have in common.

6. Dividing by variables, with a twist
There’s one other situation where it’s dangerous to divide by a variable: when you’re simplifying an inequality. This causes even bigger problems than the ones shown above.

For example, suppose you’re trying to simplify this inequality:

3x

If you just divide by x, you get this:

3

That’s perfect, except that it’s the wrong answer. x definitely doesn’t have to be bigger than 3! For instance, x could be -1:

3(-1) = -3

(-1)2 = 1

-3

You may already know a rule about dividing inequalities: if you divide or multiply an inequality by a negative number, you have to flip the sign. That causes more problems when you’re dividing or multiplying by a variable. You don’t know the value of the variable, so you don’t know whether it’s negative or not! So, maybe you have to flip the sign, or maybe you don’t. There’s no way to tell. That’s the issue.

The solution is to never divide an inequality by a number unless you know for sure whether it’s positive or negative. If you know that x is positive, you can go ahead and do the division above. If you know that x is negative, you can still do the division, you just have to flip the sign! But if you aren’t sure, you can’t divide by x.

What can you do instead? It depends on what the overall GMAT problem looks like. On problems like these, it’s often possible to solve more quickly and easily by testing numbers. Or, you can do something similar to the approach from the previous tip:

3x

0  – 3x

In other words, x² – 3x is positive. Therefore, x(x-3) is positive.

Next, use some Number Properties facts. The product of x and x-3 is only positive if x and x-3 are both positive, or x and x-3 are both negative. That will happen in exactly two situations. If x is greater than 3, then x and x-3 are both positive, so their product is positive. Or, if x is less than 0, then x and x-3 are both negative, so their product is positive.

So, the correct answer is this:

x 3

7. Negative variables
This conversation about positive and negative numbers leads us to our final tip. Quick: is the following number positive or negative?

-x

Especially in Number Properties problems, which often ask you whether a value is positive or negative, this can trip you up. It’s easy to see the negative sign when you’re working fast and assume that you definitely have a negative number. After all, -2 is negative, so why not -x?

However, that’s only true if x itself is positive. If x is negative, then the number above is actually positive. For instance, if x = -5, then -x = 5.

To avoid mistakes, imagine putting individual variables inside of parentheses. -x is really -(x). Therefore, if x = -5, then -x = -(x) = -(-5) = 5. After all, two negatives make a positive.

This can also help you remember what to do when you raise a variable to a power. x² really equals (x)², so if x = -5, then x² = (-5)² = 25. Just don’t accidentally include anything else inside of the parentheses! If you do this, you’ll be able to simplify expressions including negative variables correctly.

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free! We’re not kidding. Check out our upcoming courses here.



[b]
 is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington.
 [/b]Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170Q/170V on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GMAT prep offerings here.

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: Quick GMAT Math Hacks
[img]https://cdn2.manhattanprep.com/gmat/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2019/12/mprep-blogimages-wave1-39-e1575494245444.png[/img]

Here are a few of the most useful quick GMAT math tricks I’ve learned over the years. They won’t show up on every problem, or even on every Quant section. But, if you happen to use one of these GMAT math hacks on test day, it could save you anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.

[b]Number Properties[/b]
[list]
[*]The product of two consecutive integers is always divisible by two, the product of three consecutive integers is always divisible by three, and so on. [/*]
[*]To check whether a complicated expression is even or odd, plug in 0 and 1. For instance, try the expression 2x3 + x2 + x. If you plug in 0, you get 0, which is even. If you plug in 1, you get 4, which is also even. So, this expression is always even. [/*]
[*]If you want to find all of the factors of a number by guessing and testing, you can stop when you reach the square root of that number. For instance, if you’re finding all of the factors of 228, you can stop checking numbers when you hit 15, since that’s approximately the square root of 228. [/*]
[/list]
[b]Geometry[/b]
[list]
[*]If you double the side length of a shape (such as a square or triangle), its area quadruples. If you halve the side length, its area is quartered. [/*]
[*]Learn the [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gre/blog/gre-geometry-three-ways-to-spot-similar-triangles/]three ways to spot similar triangles[/url], so you’ll instantly recognize that two triangles are similar without having to prove it from scratch. [/*]
[*]If a problem tells you a shape is a rectangle, don’t forget that the shape could be a square! In fact, a square is often a good case to test on [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/how-to-review-a-data-sufficiency-question/]Geometry Data Sufficiency[/url] problems. [/*]
[*]If a GMAT math problem asks you whether a point is on a line, plug the coordinates of the point into the equation for the line. If you get a valid result, then the point is on the line. For example, the point (2, 6) is on the line y = 2x + 2.[/*]
[/list]
[b]Word Problems[/b]
[list]
[*]The average of a set of numbers always has to be somewhere in the middle of that set. It can’t be larger than the largest number in the set, or smaller than the smallest number. This is useful for weighted average problems: if you average the weights of 6 cats that each weigh 10 pounds, and 8 dogs that each weigh 30 pounds, the result will be somewhere in the middle in between 10 and 30. The more evenly spread the numbers are, the closer the average will actually be to the middle. [/*]
[*]Only use a Venn diagram for rare “3-group” overlapping set problems. For almost all overlapping sets, the Overlapping Set Matrix is quicker and easier. [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/how-to-handle-3-group-overlapping-sets-on-the-gmat/]Both are described in this article[/url]. [/*]
[*]You’ll sometimes see rates problems that look like this: if it takes four people twelve days to sew eight jackets, how long does it take ten people to sew ten jackets? A quick trick for approaching these is to start with the original statement, and then “scale” it upwards or downwards. Here’s what that might look like: [/*]
[/list]
It takes 4 people 12 days to sew 8 jackets.

1 person will take 4 times as long to do the same amount of work, so it will take 1 person 48 days to sew 8 jackets.

If that 1 person sews ⅛ as many jackets, it will take ⅛ as many days. So, it takes 1 person 6 days to sew 1 jacket.

If a person takes 6 days to sew a jacket, then it will take 10 people 6 days to sew 10 jackets (one per person). The answer is 6.

[b]Fractions, Decimals, and Percents[/b]
[list]
[*]When a fraction has zeroes on the end of both the numerator and the denominator, chop off the same number of zeroes from each (just make sure you count carefully!). 1,000,000 / 5,000 simplifies to 1,000 / 5. [/*]
[*]Likewise, if a fraction has decimals in both the numerator and denominator, you can simplify by moving both decimal places by the same amount and in the same direction. For instance, 0.0007 / 0.14 = 0.007 / 1.4 = 0.07 / 14 = 0.7 / 140 = 7 / 1,400. [/*]
[*]Use [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gre/blog/heres-the-safest-way-to-handle-gre-percentage-problems/]this technique to directly translate percent problems from English into math[/url] without having to convert between decimals and percents. [/*]
[/list]
[b]Working with Numbers[/b]
[list]
[*]You can use a similar ‘scaling’ technique to calculate percents, fractions, or decimals. For instance, if you want to find 0.1% of 50,000, start like this: [/*]
[/list]
10% of 50,000 is 5,000.

So, 1% of 50,000 is a tenth of 5,000, or 500.

So, 0.1% of 50,000 is a tenth of 500, or 50. The answer is 50.

[list]
[*]To quickly divide a number by 5, divide it by 10 first, then multiply by 2. For example, 1,880/5 = 1,880/10 * 2 = 188 * 2 = 376. [/*]
[*]Arithmetic can be easier if you “split up” or rearrange the numbers before you do the math. Suppose that you need to calculate 117 – 98. Rewrite this as 117 – 100 + 2, or 17 + 2, which equals 19. [/*]
[*]Use a similar technique to quickly calculate the square of a number that’s close to an easy value.[/*]
[/list]
79² = (80 – 1)² = 80² – 2(80) + 1 = 6,400 – 160 + 1 = 6241

[list]
[*]To find a good common denominator, think of a value (if there is one) that both numbers are divisible by. Divide [b]one[/b] of the two numbers by that value. Then, multiply that by the other number.
[list]
[*]For example, to find a common denominator between 25 and 15, note that both are divisible by 5. So, divide 25 by 5, which gives you 5, then multiply that by 15, giving you 75. 75 would be a good common denominator.[/*]
[/list]
[/*]
[*]It can be useful to memorize the approximate square roots of 2 and 3: √2≈1.4 and√3≈1.7. To remember this, at least if you’re in the US, think of two dates: Valentine’s Day is on 2/14 and St. Patrick’s Day is on 3/17. [/*]
[*]To estimate other square roots, think of a perfect square that’s as close as possible to the value you’re dealing with. (You have your perfect squares memorized, right…?) Estimate based on that—so, for instance, √79 is a bit smaller than √81, which equals 9. [/*]
[/list]
[b]What Next?[/b]
Math isn’t the most important part of the GMAT math section! [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/what-the-gmat-really-tests/]Strong executive reasoning skills trump math knowledge[/url]. So, while these tips and tricks are useful, if you’re having a tough time with the math section, incorporate some work on [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/everything-know-gmat-time-management-part-3/]timing[/url], [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/which-gmat-problems-should-i-guess-on-part-3-making-great-guesses-on-quant-problems/]guessing[/url], [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/the-4-math-strategies-everyone-must-master-part-1/]problem-solving strategies[/url], and [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/how-to-handle-gmat-stress-without-freaking-out/]stress management[/url]. But keep some pages in your notes for these GMAT math tricks, plus any others you may come across while studying: you never know what may turn out to be useful.

[b]You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free! We’re not kidding. [/b][url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/classes/][b]Check out our upcoming courses here[/b][/url][b].[/b][b]

[/b][b][/b]

[b][b][url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/instructors/chelsey-cooley/?utm_source=manhattanprep.com%2Fgre%2Fblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=CooleyBioGREBlog&utm_campaign=GRE%20Blog][img]https://cdn2.manhattanprep.com/gre/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2015/11/chelsey-cooley-150x150.jpg[/img][/url]
 is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington.[/b] [/b]Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170Q/170V on the GRE. [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/classes/#instructor/336]Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GMAT prep offerings here[/url].

The post [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/quick-gmat-math-hacks/]Quick GMAT Math Hacks[/url] appeared first on [url=https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat]GMAT[/url].
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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: GMAT Rate Problems


If this post is 1500 words long, and you can process 120 words per minute, then how long will it take you to read this whole post? If you could read 20% faster, then what effect would that have on how long it takes you to read the whole thing? If I were adding 80 words per minute to the blog post, then how long (at your original speed) would it take for you to reach the end?

Those questions were a taste of the often daunting world of GMAT Rate problems. Before we get any deeper, we should acknowledge that Rate problems do not seem to be tested as frequently on GMAT Quant nowadays as they once were. So while you’ll see plenty of Rate problems in the Official Guides and on Manhattan Prep’s practice GMATs (take a free one), you might not see many or any of these on your real GMAT.

Nevertheless, Rate problems are one of the most common requests I get from tutoring students. Because these problems usually come in Word Problem format and take on many different flavors, students frequently feel like there is too much density or variety for them to handle. Indeed, there are a variety of moves we might employ, and a variety of formulas/relationships that would be useful to know, depending on the situation. Let’s discuss.

Useful Formulas onto flashcards until they’re 2nd nature.[/*]
[*]The biggest thing that helps me is Making Up My Own Number for Distance or Work, when one isn’t provided.[/*]
[*]To get some harder questions correct, you may find that Scaling Up Ratios or Reciprocal Thinking is the easiest way to arrive at the answer.[/*]
[*]It can pay to develop some chops at Approximating, especially since some of these problems might be good contenders for skipping.[/*]
[/list]

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free! We’re not kidding. Check out our upcoming courses here.

Patrick Tyrrell is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Los Angeles, California. He has a B.A. in philosophy, a 780 on the GMAT, and relentless enthusiasm for his work. In addition to teaching test prep since 2006, he’s also an avid songwriter/musician. Check out Patrick’s upcoming GMAT courses here!



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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: GMAT Data Sufficiency: Get 5 Extra Minutes


What if I told you that you could have five extra minutes on the quantitative section of the GMAT? Would you be interested?

Good, because this is going to get a little technical. I’m also going to assume you’ve had some experience with Data Sufficiency problems on the GMAT Math section. You should also have practiced testing cases to solve these problems: here’s a good introduction to that strategy in case you’re unfamiliar.

Part 1: Practical Application
Now, to save yourself the five minutes I promised, you have to understand something I’m naming the Moliski Theorem. Though I’ve heard it discussed by several people, I’m naming it after my colleague Liz Moliski, who was the first person I saw actually float this idea while teaching a class. The theorem applies to any Data Sufficiency question that has a yes/no answer. For example, the theorem is applicable to this Data Sufficiency question:

Did Rocky the dog eat more dog treats this year than he did last year?

It is not, however, applicable to this question, since the question asks for a specific value:

How many dog treats did Rocky the dog eat this year?

Here’s the Moliski theorem, put simply: Attempt to find one concrete example of the statement where the answer to the question is “no.” If you can find such an example, the statement is not sufficient. If you can’t find such an example, the statement is sufficient.

That’s it! Is your mind blown yet? Cause mine is.

You see, up until I saw Liz teach, I’d always assumed you needed two concrete examples of the statement that got you two different answers to the question in order to show that the statement is not sufficient. Defining those examples was time-consuming. The Moliski theorem not only obviates the need for the second example, it also makes it extremely simple to define the single example you’re looking for. Since I now only need to define and find half the examples than I did before, I have been able to solve Data Sufficiency problems in half the time that it took me previously, going from two minutes (on average) down to one. I have seen at least five yes/no Data Sufficiency questions on each of my practice tests, meaning this idea has bought me at least five full minutes of extra time.

I’m going to show you a Data Sufficiency problem. Try to solve it on your own first. Then we’ll apply the Moliski theorem.

If x and y are integers, is the product xy even?

  • x – y
  • x + y is odd
Remember, the Moliski theorem says we should attempt to find examples where the answer to the question is “no.” In this case, that means we don’t actually want the product xy to be even; we want that product to be odd.

Now let’s find our examples. Can I find an example of statement (1), which says x – y xy is odd? Sure I can: 7 and 5, for example. 7 – 5 is 2, that’s less than 3. The product 7 · 5 is 35, which is odd. Statement (1) is therefore not sufficient.

Moving on to statement (2): I want to find numbers where x + y is odd, and also where the product xy is odd. Well that’s impossible, since if x + y is odd, then one or the other must be even, meaning when I multiply them together, there’s no way I’ll ever get an odd number. Since I couldn’t find my example, statement (2) is sufficient. Now we know that the correct answer is (B).

Are you excited yet? Try this super-tough problem:

Is x > 0?

  • x² 
  • x³ > x
The Moliski theorem tells us we don’t want x to be greater than 0; we want it to be less than 0. In other words, we want x to be negative.

Try to find a negative number x that would make statement (1) true. So, I know that x2 x be negative? Sure, as long as it’s a negative fraction like –12. Statement (1) is not sufficient.

Now try to find a negative number for x that would make statement (2) true. If x3 > x, can x be negative? There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel, let’s just use x = –12 again. If you cube that, it’s greater than what you started with. So statement (2) is also not sufficient.

And oh, by the way, since –12 is an example that satisfies both statements, and gives us the “no” answer we’re looking for, the correct answer to this question is (E).

LET’S GOOOOOOO

Part 2: A Small Caveat and Other Non-Essential Nerdy Stuff That You Can Read If You’re Interested, but I’m Mostly Writing It Because I Don’t Want Liz to Get in Trouble

Occasionally, the Moliski theorem fails. Here’s an example:

Is x > 10?

  • x
  • x² 
Both of these statements are sufficient on their own to answer the question, so the correct answer is (D), but the Moliski theorem would lead you to decide they are not (and would therefore lead you to incorrect answer (E)). These statements are each sufficient because the answer to the question is always “no,” meaning they technically do provide us enough information to answer that question. Liz mentioned this possibility in her class, noting that if you want to be thorough and precise, you should find a “yes” case after you’ve found a “no” case.

Don’t, however, let the rain fall on your parade quite yet. The “always no” situation is exceedingly rare; in my professional experience, it shows up on roughly 1% of all Data Sufficiency questions (probably even fewer, to be honest). So, we are still looking at a strategy that works 99+% of the time and saves you 5+ minutes: personally, I’m willing to accept that risk.

Finally, here’s what I think is the true genius of the Moliski theorem: It sidesteps the single most common error I see my students make when tackling Data Sufficiency problems, which is to misinterpret the question as a rule. By explicitly hunting for a “no” answer, the Moliski theorem forces you to consider that negative possibility right upfront, so that you don’t have to remember to look for it later when you’re already knee-deep in a fog of calculations and algebra.

Epilogue
When I first started teaching the GMAT, I never dreamed I’d see a day when I could get away with testing just one case per Data Sufficiency statement as opposed to two. Now that day is upon us. I hope your life is as changed as mine.

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free! We’re not kidding. Check out our upcoming courses here.

Ryan Jacobs is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in San Francisco, California. He has an MBA from UC San Diego, a 780 on the GMAT, and years of GMAT teaching experience. His other interests include music, photography, and hockey. Check out Ryan’s upcoming GMAT prep offerings here.

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FROM Manhattan GMAT Blog: How to Succeed in Business School


Your business school wants you to have a successful career. There’s one cynical reason and one neutral reason why: the cynical one is that if you do have a successful career, you will tell everyone you know that you went to, say, the Rady School of Management, and then those people will then want to send their application fees, and ultimately their tuition checks, to said institution, and if you have a really successful career, you may even get in touch with your philanthropic side and get a building named after you at your alma mater. The neutral one is that business schools exist to help you grow the national economy, and your success is the school’s (and ultimately the nation’s) success. Whatever your personal outlook is on the matter, your business school does want you to succeed, and knowing that can help you in a few ways.

How to Succeed in Business School: The Application
Let’s start with the application process. One of the best tools business schools have at their disposal for ensuring their students succeed after graduation is the ability to select students whom they believe will succeed. This seems like an obvious point, but it completely explains the Olympic athlete with a GMAT score that’s 100 points lower than yours in the chair next to you when you go to do campus visits. I don’t care if she doesn’t know how many factors 441 has, that young woman can do a gainer with two and a half somersaults like nobody’s business, and more to the point, she had to work for years with single-minded focus towards a goal that very few people ever achieve. I think she’s sufficiently demonstrated the skills to succeed in the workforce; wouldn’t you agree? Now, you may not be an Olympic athlete, but you have certainly persevered through adversity before. You may have gotten a promotion at your job, or even been charged with leading a new team at your company. You have done something in your life that will show an admissions committee that you will be successful in your career; your best bet is to figure out what that is and highlight it.

How to Succeed in Business School: Once You’re In
Once you’re done with your applications, you’ve been accepted, and you arrive on campus, your school will be there to support you. At most schools, you’ll be placed in a study group of around 4 or 5 students, and you’ll turn in all your homework as a group; your school is trying to prepare you to work with diverse teams. You’ll take a core curriculum for a large part of your first year; your school wants you to have a basic understanding of accounting, operations, economics, marketing, finance, and organizational strategy. A criticism I’ve read of business schools is that classes are not as academically rigorous as they would be in other graduate-level programs, but I think that criticism might be somewhat beside the point since business school serves a slightly different purpose: you should go to your classes not necessarily because you want to become an expert in one particular subject, but rather you should go because you will learn the language of business, and you will gain insights that will help you better manage your team or organization down the road. You’ll also have access to school clubs, trips, networking events—you name it. Again, all of this is intended to give you a leg up in your career.

Takeaways
Here’s the point: your school wants you to succeed, and the way to do that is:

  • (a) take advantage of the professional skills and network you currently have, 
  • (b) spend your time in school gaining the skills you weren’t able to gain outside of school and meeting the people you weren’t able to meet outside of school until 
  • (c) you put all of these skills and people together and launch the career you want. 
If you filter the choices you make about how to spend your time through that lens, then you won’t regret missing out on other opportunities, since you’ll know that you’re spending your time wisely.

KEEP READING: Is the MBA Worth It? Go Beyond ROI.

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Ryan Jacobs is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in San Francisco, California. He has an MBA from UC San Diego, a 780 on the GMAT, and years of GMAT teaching experience. His other interests include music, photography, and hockey. Check out Ryan’s upcoming GMAT prep offerings here.

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