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

The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University has made minimal changes to its application essay prompts this year. The school’s required first essay has maintained its focus on leadership, but gone is the reference to teamwork, replaced by a request for evidence of “lasting value.” Kellogg also no longer stipulates that the incident candidates share be “recent,” thereby allowing applicants to plumb the full range of their history as needed to identify the most compelling or appropriate story. As for the video essays, we note that Kellogg is not stating this season that one of the questions will definitely be about a challenge, though we take this to mean merely that some applicants may receive such a question while others may not. The bottom line with Kellogg’s video questions is that they have no wrong answers and are intended to help the admissions committee get a more authentic impression of your personality (not to intimidate you!), so we hope applicants are not too concerned by that part of the application. In our Northwestern Kellogg essay analysis, we present our thoughts on how to address all the school’s prompts for 2017–2018. Read more

We’re thrilled to announce the release of our brand-new 5lb. Book of TOEFL Practice Problems! The TOEFL 5 lb. Book brings our best-selling 5 lb. Book series to students who need a study tool for the TOEFL. Written exclusively by expert Manhattan Prep instructors, this book is 5 lbs.* of TOEFL knowledge on everything you need to learn for the test. 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.

The three-digit Total GMAT score is calculated from your performance on the Quant and Verbal sections of the test. The actual algorithm isn’t disclosed—but we’ve been able to “backwards engineer” the process via a lot of official score research, leading to our GMAT Score Calculator tool. (Thank you to all of our students who shared their official test score reports!) Read more

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

Letters of recommendation are a vital element of every MBA applicant’s profile, because they provide a school’s admissions committee with its only truly objective insight into what the candidate has to offer. For this reason, recommenders can play a significant role in helping an applicant gain admission to his/her target business school, but only if the letters they write are credible and compelling. Fortunately, even though your letters of recommendation are technically in someone else’s hands, you still have some measure of control over them. Here, we explain where some of these opportunities lie—and where they do not—to help you navigate this portion of your application with less anxiety and better results. 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 a perfect world, everyone would take the GMAT exactly once, get a fantastic score, then never think about the test again. Unfortunately, things sometimes don’t work out that way. Part of my role at Manhattan Prep is to sit down with students who didn’t quite achieve their goal scores on their first try and help them analyze what happened. (This type of meeting is called a Post-Exam Assessment, and it’s part of what you get when you sign up for the Manhattan Prep 9-week GMAT course.) Read more

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

This season, the UCLA Anderson School of Management has abridged its primary essay question and shortened the word limit from 750 to just 500. However, it has also added a “short-answer” question (read: mini essay) that in many ways recollects the “lost” element of the main essay and reinstates those other 250 words. As the program has been doing for as long as we at mbaMission have been offering essay analyses, it asks applicants about their short- and long-term goals, this time along with the oft-seen “Why our school?” element. And the newly added short answer prompt focuses on what candidates will bring to the school’s community. Given this rather modest essay portion of the UCLA application, you will need to make the most of your recommendations, resume, and interview to ensure that the school gets the full story of who you are as a candidate. We offer our advice on approaching the school’s 2017–2018 queries with this UCLA Anderson essay analysis. 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.

One common complaint I hear from my students is that they ‘haven’t done math like this since high school.’ And they’re pretty much right: the concepts in the Quant section are by and large wrapped up by Algebra II. But for some subjects, my students drastically underestimate how long it has been since they’ve thought about them. One such subject: remainders on the GMAT. Read more

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 MBA candidates do not thoroughly consider and revise their resumes for their applications, often dismissing this element because an existing version may already be saved on their computer. We strongly caution you not to underestimate the value of your resume—the admissions committees, in fact, review applicants’ resumes carefully, because they serve as a road map of each candidate’s career. 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.

The GMAT requires you to write an essay. But here’s the interesting part: The schools don’t care very much about your GMAT essay score. So why even try at all? 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.

You know the story. You haven’t taken a math class for eight (or ten, or fifteen, or twenty) years. You weren’t even that great at math when you were in school! And now that it’s been a decade since you last simplified a quadratic or calculated an average speed, you’re feeling rusty. You’ve got a lot of work to do. Read more