What have you been told about applying to business school? With the advent of chat rooms, blogs and forums, armchair “experts” often unintentionally propagate MBA admissions myths, which can linger and undermine an applicant’s confidence. Some applicants are led to believe that schools want a specific “type” of candidate and expect certain GMAT scores and GPAs, for example. Others are led to believe that they need to know alumni from their target schools and/or get a letter of reference from the CEO of their firm in order to get in. In this series, mbaMission debunks these and other myths and strives to take the anxiety out of the admissions process.

Many business school applicants believe that the MBA admissions committees have distilled their criteria for selecting candidates over the years and have in mind a specific “type” of individual they want. For example, within this world of business school stereotypes, applicants believe that Harvard Business School (HBS) is looking only for leaders, Kellogg is looking only for marketing students, Chicago Booth is looking only for finance students, and even that MIT Sloan is looking only for “eggheads.” Of course, these business school stereotypes—like most stereotypes—are inaccurate. Chicago Booth wants far more than one-dimensional finance students in its classes, and it provides far more than just finance to its MBA students (including, to the surprise of many, an excellent marketing program). HBS is not a school just for “generals”; among the approximately 950 students in each of its classes, HBS has a wide variety of personalities, including some excellent foot soldiers. So, at mbaMission, we constantly strive to educate MBA candidates about these misconceptions, which can sink applications if applicants pander to them. Read more

Did you know 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.

I’m excited about the problem I have to share with you today in the latest installment of our Know the Code series. ☺ Interest rate GMAT problems can be extremely annoying—you might find yourself spending 4 minutes and still having to guess in the end. So your first decision is whether you even want to tackle these kinds of problems in the first place.

But there are some things you can learn that could make answering interest rate GMAT problems a lot less irritating. Try out this Integrated Reasoning (IR) Two-Part problem from the GMATPrep® free practice exams. (Note: This one is an IR question, but I could absolutely see them testing the same principle on a Quant problem.) Read more

With immigration being a current hot-button issue in the U.S., many international MBA students are understandably concerned and confused about studying there. For those who find themselves with questions on immigration and studying abroad, the people at GMAC (the makers of the GMAT exam) have dedicated a page on their website to providing resources on those topics.

These resources include: Read more

Did you know 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.

In the previous articles in this series, we developed a critical skill for GMAT probability and combinatorics problems: listing out cases. Let’s start by taking another look at the practice problem from the end of the last article. Read more

Each week, we are featuring a series of MBA admission tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

By being proactive and doing some advance planning, aspiring MBA candidates can remove a great deal of stress from the business school application process and substantially bolster their candidacy. We have several big picture recommendations for applicants to consider to help them be as competitive and prepared as possible when admissions season begins in earnest. Read more

Did you know 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.

This is the first in what I hope will be many student-question inspired posts. Allyson from Philadelphia was wondering whether “nor” had to be paired with “neither” or whether it could be used on its own. The answer was far more complex than expected, so here it is. If you have an idea for a GMAT grammar blog post, or just have a question that you want answered, email me at emadan@manhattanprep.com.

To begin, you’ll need to understand the essentials of parallelism. You can get in-depth coverage of parallelism in our Sentence Correction Strategy Guide, but here are the basics. Two (or more) things in a list have to be both structural and logically parallel. Let’s start with the positive form: either/or. Read more

Did you know 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.

Most overlapping sets on the GMAT have two distinct groups. Students take French and/or Spanish (or neither), pianists play either classical and/or jazz (or neither), people like either QDoba and/or Baja Fresh (definitely neither. Chipotle, please)—and for these situations, the familiar, double-set matrix approach works best. Read more

Each week, we are featuring a series of MBA admission tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

The MBA application process is really more of a marathon than a sprint, but many candidates make things harder on themselves than necessary by ignoring certain tasks until late in the game. Here we will cover some pragmatic and practical steps you can take to avoid feeling rushed and to ensure that all the parts of your MBA application are as strong as you can make them before you submit. With some foresight and planning, when the schools start releasing their essay questions in June and July, you will be able to focus solely on them, without the distraction and demands of some of the other parts of your MBA application. Read more

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If you’re in college, business school might sound like a faraway, almost ominous concept. Do you have a dream business school that you want to attend one day? Do you know what it takes to get into a top b-school? Have you heard about the GMAT, or Graduate Management Admissions Test?

It can definitely be an overwhelming experience, but it doesn’t have to be. If you give yourself enough time to prep the right way, the test starts feeling less scary and easier to understand. You’ll stop breaking into a sweat at the sight of an exponent or a sentence with five commas, and you’ll feel your confidence building. Read more

Guess what? 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.

Welcome to part 3 of our series! If you haven’t seen the earlier installments yet, please start with part 1 and work your way back to me here.

We’ve talked about how to create sets of GMAT problems and how to set your time limit. We haven’t yet discussed what you need to learn from one of these sets before you try another one. Read more