All registrants will be able to enter for a chance to win a GMAT Complete Course or Interact self-study option with Manhattan Prep.

The Access MBA Tour, the worldwide leader in One-to-One business education events, will return to Toronto on Thursday, March 17^th, from 4:30 PM to 10 PM at the Fairmont Royal York, as well as to New York City on Tuesday, March 22^nd from 4:30 PM to 9:30 PM at the Warwick New York Hotel, the Advent Group announced today. Read more

U.S. News & World Report today released the 2016 Best Graduate School rankings.  As our friends at mbaMission have reminded us, all rankings should be approached with skepticism. “Fit” (be it academic, personal, or professional) is a far more important factor when choosing a school.

That said, here’s how the top 15 American business schools stack up this round:

1. Stanford University

2. Harvard University

3. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

4. University of Chicago (Booth)

5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)

6. Northwestern University (Kellogg)

7. University of California, Berkeley (Haas)

8. Columbia University

9. Dartmouth College (Tuck)

10. University of Virginia (Darden)

11. New York University (Stern)

11. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ross)

13. Duke University (Fuqua)

13. Yale University

15. University of California, Los Angeles (Anderson)

See the full list and check out the rankings by MBA programs and specialties, here.

We’ve invited our friends at mbaMission to share their 2016 MBA Class Profile Infographic! Check out their findings below and visit mbamission.com to sign up for a free consultation.

Choosing the right MBA program for your needs can be challenging. How do you identify the best one for your specific personal, educational, and professional goals? Read more

Last week, I attended the annual GMAT Summit, held by the fine folks at GMAC (who own / make the GMAT), and I have some interesting tidbits to share with you.

It really is a myth

You know what I’m going to say already, don’t you? The first 7 (or 10, or 5) questions are not worth more than the questions later in the exam. I’ve written about this topic before but I’m going to mention it once again because of something that happened at the conference.

Fanmin Guo, Ph. D., Vice President of Psychometric Research at GMAC, was answering questions after a presentation on the test algorithm. A couple of people were peppering him with questions about this myth and apparently just didn’t seem to believe that it could possibly be true that the early questions aren’t worth more. One of the questioners also made a pretty significant faulty assumption in his arguments—and now I’m worried that an article is going to pop up trying to revive this debate. I don’t want any of my students led astray on this topic.

First, to understand why the early questions actually aren’t worth any more than the later ones, see the article I linked a couple of paragraphs back.

Second: here was the faulty assumption that I heard:

“You said that the earlier questions aren’t worth any more than the later ones. So you’re telling us that students should spend the same amount of time on every question.”

Dr. Guo was saying the first part: that the location of a question on the test doesn’t impact its weighting in the overall score. He and the other GMAC folks weren’t saying anything, though, about how you should take the test.

In fact, it would be silly to spend exactly the same amount of time on every question. Some questions are harder than others. In addition, you have various strengths and weaknesses in terms of both accuracy and speed. There are, in fact, very good reasons not to spend the same amount of time on each question. All Dr. Guo was saying was that the location of the problem in the section is not one of those reasons.

So, if you read something that says that you should spend more time on the earlier questions, roll your eyes and click away. Alternatively, if you read something that concludes that you should spend the same amount of time on every question, drop that source as well. Take a look at the data in my other article to see that GMAC actually does know what it’s doing and the GMAT is not just a test of how you perform on the first 7 or 10 questions.

GMATPrep offers more data

GMAC has been building more score reporting functionality into GMATPrep to give us a better idea of how we do when we take the official practice CATs. In fact, this capability has already launched! I need to go download the newest version of GMATPrep to see exactly what’s offered (and I’ll report back to you once I’ve done so), but they’ve started to offer data for sub-categories such as question type and content area.
Read more

We’ve invited mbaMission: MBA Admissions Consulting to share their Business School Charts of the Week. Here is their Chart for November 2013 Social Currency Ranking. 

Rankings come in all shapes and sizes, but can any ranking truly capture social cachet? For a different perspective on the value of an MBA, we turn to the New York Times society pages, where the editors select and profile promising couples. Each month, we dedicate one B-School Chart of the Week to tallying how alumni from top-ranked business schools are advancing their social currency ranking.

Colder weather and holiday travel seem to have brought about a lull in the New York Times wedding announcements for November. Still, of the 124 total announcements last month, 19 included a business school mention.

Several weddings featured MBA students specifically. For example, Nicholas Tangney, who is a managing director for Lorentzen & Stemoco and is studying for his MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business, was married to Samantha Lee, a vice president and account manager for consumer products clients at DeVries Global. Similarly,Tracy Massel, a student at Harvard Business School, married Steven Melzer, the director of finance and operations strategy at Expeditionary Learning. Morgan Fauth, a first year at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business who married research analyst Kevin Patrick Coleman, Jr., was also featured among the wedding announcements.
Read more

Catch up on some business school news and tips with a few of this week’s top stories:

Boost B-School Applications by Attending Diversity Events (U.S. News Education)

Attending diversity events can give minority MBA candidates a window into the admissions process.

Three Myths About Your Strengths (Harvard Business Review)

HBR addresses the shift in focus from correcting weaknesses to identifying and expanding on strengths.

B-School Chart of the Week: June 2013 Social Currency Ranking (mbaMission)

For a different perspective on the value of an MBA, mbaMission turned to the New York Times society pages, where the editors select and profile promising couples.

Ask Farnoosh: What’s the Right Business School Program for Me? (Yahoo Finance)

Here is some advice for picking a program that meets your career objectives while carrying a price tag that doesn’t keep you indebted for decades to come.

In Business, Foreign Language Skills Help (Graduate Guide)

Whether individuals plan to work with colleagues in other countries or conduct business with companies abroad, having a global perspective helps.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments below or tweet @ManhattanGMAT

Catch up on some business school news and tips with a few of this week’s top stories:

Heading to Business School? An Essential Pre-MBA Strategy To Hit The Ground Running (Forbes)

Given your considerable investment of time, money, and effort in pursuing an MBA education, can you afford not to have a pre-matriculation strategy?

Business Schools Keep the Admissions Process Interesting (Graduate Guide)

Stiff competition between applicants has led some business schools to get creative in terms of how they select their ideal MBA candidates.

Business School Lessons From the Top of the World (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Professor at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business plans to integrate his experience of climbing Mount Everest into a required leadership course for MBA students. Pretty cool!

Learning to Appreciate the Nuts and Bolts of B-School (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Associate dean of corporate partnerships at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management asks grads which aspects of their MBA experience they enjoyed most.

Find Health Care Opportunities for B-School Students (U.S. News Education)

A business school residency can prepare MBA candidates to be leaders in health care.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments below or tweet @ManhattanGMAT

Catch up on some business school news and tips with a few of this week’s top stories:

MBA Salary Expectations: Sober Reckoning or Wishful Thinking? (Bloomberg Businessweek)

New research suggests that business school applicants have ratcheted back their post-MBA salary expectations, but in the U.S. and elsewhere they may still be wildly optimistic.

Warren Buffett Shared Some Great Career Advice For Millennials (Business Insider)

Here are some highlights of Warren Buffett’s interview with Levo League, a networking and career advice site.

The Graduation Advice We Wish We’d Been Given (Harvard Business Review)

Harvard Business Review reached out to some of their favorite writers, asking them: What do graduates really need to know about the world of work?

10 Business Schools With the Most Full-Time Applicants (U.S. News Education)

Of the top schools, all except Stanford University and UCLA saw a drop in full-time applicants.

Triangle B-School Leaders Lend Wisdom to Graduates (Triangle Business Journal)

Here are some tips from Triangle business school leaders. While they are directed at the graduating class, they could certainly apply to anyone out there looking for a job.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments below or tweet @ManhattanGMAT

Note: This post comes from our friends at mbaMission.

A question that might keep prospective MBAs up at night is what they can expect in the way of a return on their business school investment. One way to assuage those fears is to size up your current salary against what business schools report as their graduates’ post-MBA incomes. At one of Bloomberg Businessweek‘s top-ten MBA programs, at least, the payoff looks enticing”with an average income boost of 33%“83% (excluding signing and performance bonuses, which can drive compensation even higher).

In recent years, economic turmoil has pushed percentile incomes”namely the 1% and the 99%”to the fore of the public imagination. Highlighting the impact of the MBA, we thought taking a look at the median graduate’s pre-MBA and post-MBA percentile incomes, illustrated in the graph below, might be interesting.

Although most MBAs will fall short of the 1% straight out of business school, the typical MBA from one of these top-ten schools can expect to leap into the top quintile in society with their first post-graduation position, earning more than 83 out of 100 others. With a degree in hand (and with plenty of hard work, of course), the median 29-year-old MBA will climb the income pyramid to join the 16.8%.