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.

Maybe you are among the unlucky applicants who were/are on the outside looking in this year, shaking your head trying to understand why you did not get into an MBA program. As you look back and assess where you went wrong, you may narrow your focus and re-examine your interviews. After all, you were invited to interview but were rejected thereafter, so there must be a cause-and-effect relationship, right? Your rejection must mean that everything was at stake during those 30 to 60 minutes and that your interviewer just did not feel that you are of the caliber preferred by your target school, right? Wrong. 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 is a computer-adaptive test, so it makes sense that to beat it, you might need to think like a computer, right? It really is true, but maybe not in the way that you would expect. You might think that a computer is really smart and could solve lots of problems on the GMAT. Actually, the problems on the GMAT require a fair amount of creativity and critical thinking that would be hard for a computer. For solving problems, you need your own human brain. 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 promise you this will not be a diatribe directed towards the American school system, but I have to say that many of us were not taught proper grammar when we were in—ahem—grammar school. Many of us were also not taught how to make funny puns on blog posts. ? Read more

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

Applying to business school is a process rife with decisions—which schools to target, which recommenders to choose, which essays to write—and a common one giving candidates some serious pause these days is which exam to take, the GMAT or the GRE? As the number of programs accepting the GRE continues to grow, aspiring MBAs are becoming more and more confused about this element of the application process. 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.

In today’s latest installment of our Know the Code series, we’re going to talk about the most efficient way to tackle Table problems in the Integrated Reasoning (IR) section of the GMAT. You can check out our previous IR Table problems tips here. 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.

We know your time is precious while you’re prepping for the GMAT. To get the most out of your prep, we recommend analyzing your GMAT practice test results and then using those findings to create a smart study plan moving forward. This will help you strategize, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and get more accustomed to the format of 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.

Are you having trouble finishing GMAT Quant word problems within two minutes? Here’s a technique that will help. Read more

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admissions tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

Although putting yourself at the center of the stories in your MBA application essays is certainly important, a common mistake applicants tend to make is beginning too many sentences with the word “I.” As a general rule, you should never begin two sentences in a row this way. Consider the following example: 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.

If a basketball player makes a free throw, do you expect him or her to make every free throw after that?

Of course not! Certainly the player knows “how” to make free throws, but none of us expect that “knowing how” is good enough in sports. You have to practice over and over again, and even then, we still think hitting 80%+ of free throws in a game is pretty good. 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.

After you do even a little bit of studying for the GMAT, you’ll probably start to realize something: the test is as repetitive as a Katy Perry song. You’ll see that the one hard question you’ve never quite understood is actually the same old game, reformulated in some subtle way, but ultimately similar to what you’ve learned before. Read more