Former Manhattan GMAT President Andrew Yang was featured in full-page article in Time Magazine about Andrew’s new endeavor, Venture for America! Added bonus: Manhattan GMAT gets a shout out in the first paragraph!

Below is a screen shot of the post. You can read the whole article over on Venture for America’s site.

The 13th Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review (the Official Guide 13 or OG 13) has finally been released publicly. Here at Manhattan GMAT, we’ve done an initial analysis of the OG13 book.

1. The Official Guide 13 Is Not Radically Different

OG13 contains 907 practice problems for the main part of the GMAT (Quant & Verbal). Of those 907 problems, only 17% are new. Since you know your fraction equivalents, we don’t have to tell you that 17% is about 1 out of 6.

Out of 907 problems, 749 are repeats (yes, that’s 5 out of 6). If you already have the 12th Edition, a good way to look at the 13th Edition is as a source of 158 great new practice problems. We’ve listed them by number at the end of this post. Read more

We are excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for our Winter 2012 Social Venture Scholars (SVS) program. For those unfamiliar with the program, it was launched in 2007 with the goal of making GMAT prep more accessible to MBA-hopefuls working in the non-profit sector. The very first SVS class was taught by our founder, Zeke Vanderhoek. Over the past 5 years we have run 6 SVS programs and helped dozens of deserving individuals get a step closer to business school. Past SVS students have gone on to gain admission to competitive business schools (such as Columbia and Duke), and have used their degrees to advance and found organizations dedicated to positive social change.

Recipients of our SVS scholarship receive free enrollment into a dedicated Live Online GMAT prep course (a $1090 value). Up to 25 scholarships will be awarded to applicants who (1) currently work full-time in an organization that promotes positive social change, (2) plan to use their MBA to work in a public, not-for-profit, or other venture with a social-change oriented mission, and (3) demonstrate clear financial need. This year’s SVS course will begin on Monday, February 20th.

For complete details and application requirements, visit our Social Venture Scholars page. Applications for the Winter 2012 program are due on February 1st. Good luck!

This December, the team at Manhattan Prep ran its first holiday season food & toy drive. Manhattan Prep staff, Instructors and students at our New York City headquarters contributed games, stuffed animals, food items, and spare change to the efforts. In just over two weeks, we collected over 100 items of food, donated to City Harvest, and over 40 toys for Toys for Tots.

The United States Marines’ Toys for Tots program collects toys between October and December every year for children who otherwise wouldn’t have any gifts to open during the holidays. City Harvest, a New York-based nonprofit, collects food year-round to support its many community programs aimed at feeding New York City’s hungry. We’re thrilled to be supporting such worthy organizations. Thanks to all who contributed!

On Saturday, November 12, 2011, the Gilda’s Club New York City Associate Board, a volunteer board of young professionals supported by Manhattan Prep staff member Jessica Trujillo, hosted a day of lectures and workshops geared towards health and wellness at the Manhattan Prep headquarters. These lectures and workshops, free to all GCNYC members, promoted techniques for healthy living and included activities for the whole family. The Health and Wellness Day incorporated everything from meditation sessions, nutrition lectures, hair and beauty makeovers and family portraits. Gilda’s Club New York City creates welcoming communities of free support for everyone living with cancer “ men, women, teens and children “ along with their families and friends.

The following is written by Manhattan Prep College Marketing Associate Kristen Pittard.

New York Cares Day is a day dedicated to service for in-need elementary schools around the five boroughs, where people volunteer their time to renovate schools by painting, restoring playgrounds, organizing libraries, planting flowers, etc.

Last month, a group of Manhattan Preppers made their way to PS 137k, a school that has served the Brooklyn community for over 100 years, to participate in the rejuvenation of the interior by focusing on repainting the main hallway. With rollers and paint brushes in hand and a mint green color picked by the school principal, we were ready to go. After nearly 7 hours of painting, we had transformed an intense red and yellow hallway, into a calming mint green one, just in time for the students to arrive back to school the following Monday. Though we might be better at Data Sufficiency and Reading Comprehension than painting, it was a great experience for our staff to get together on a weekend to give back to the community.

New York Cares Day was a perfect fit for Manhattan Prep due to our core belief in helping students reach their educational goals – and who better to help than the children of New York? If you would like to get involved with any future New York Cares’ projects, they have thousands of projects listed on their website, which range from children’s education to working with the elderly of New York.

We are excited to announce the release of our newest Strategy Guide, the GMAT Roadmap! Consisting of articles and essays written by our 99th percentile instructors, this book was created to help students navigate the complex and often frustrating waters of GMAT prep. Unlike our other strategy guides, the GMAT Roadmap is not designed to teach you content. Instead, we wrote it to address a need not often met.

Many a time we have seen students dive into their GMAT preparations headlong, without pausing to consider what and how they should study so as to best improve their scores. Yes, you can study everything from start to finish, but do you need to? Sure, you can review every day for ten hours a day, but will that improve your comprehension and retention? The GMAT Roadmap answers these questions by offering the guidance and structure you need to maximize your GMAT preparations.

Start with the first few chapters to learn about the GMAT, organize your study plan, and gauge your current skill level before diving into your preparations. Then, as you progress in your studies, dip back into the Roadmap when needed for strategy advice on the Quant and Verbal sections, tips on how to improve your time management, guidance on how to manage test anxiety, and a run-down on what to do before test day.

Success on the GMAT requires far more than content knowledge, and we want all GMAT students to achieve the score they’ve been working towards.  If you are looking for that extra boost to get you to the score you are looking for, or maybe just a little guidance along the way, the GMAT Roadmap is for you!

Interested in learning more? We’ve been posting samples of the GMAT Roadmap to our blog for the past few weeks, so check out the articles listed below for samples of the content covered in the GMAT Roadmap.

Determining Your Trajectory Up the GMAT Mountain: Developing a GMAT Study Plan
Determining Your Trajectory Up the GMAT Mountain: Working Within Your Timeline
How to Use Your Strategy Guides
Breaking Down Two Minutes: Time Management Within a GMAT Problem

Ready to dive right in? We are giving away the first two chapters of the book for free! Just click here.

Looking for a little extra? Sign up for our free GMAT Roadmap Webinar!

The London Business School recently interviewed Manhattan GMAT instructor and Director of International Development Robert Wilburn. Below is an except.

Q: Are their any common misconceptions about the test you can provide clarity on?

There are a lot of misperceptions about the exam! Perhaps the most common one is that you should spend more time on the first 10 questions. This has floated around the Internet for years. GMAC, the organisation that produces the exam, explicitly discusses this in its Official Guide book, claiming that it is a myth that the first 10 questions are more important for your score. But, students still don’t buy it and want to spend more time on the first questions! The problem is that this leads students to run out of
time at the end of the exam, for which there is a severe penalty, in the words of the GMAC.

There are some great sites out there on preparing for the GMAT, but even with the best sites, you have to be careful of the advice you get.

If you haven’t been a good test-taker in the past, you won’t score well on the exam. I’ve seen lots of students hit 700 through hard work, despite struggling at first with the exam. At the same time, I’ve seen many students who just try to rely on intuitive skill, and don’t score well because they never take the time to prepare for the exam.

The exam is biased towards native-English speakers. We work with a lot of students whose first language is not English, and actually, often these students know English grammar better than the native English speakers! The GMAT recently announced that over the past year it has been deemphasising idioms on the Sentence Correction part of the exam. This is good news for non-native English speakers (Note “ it doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be idioms on the exam anymore, just that they will be tested more infrequently). While you certainly need to have a strong written Englishlanguage capability, I’ve found that most students applying to top business schools have sufficient English skills that they are not at any noticeable disadvantage on the exam.

You can read the whole interview HERE.

Several weeks ago, GMAC (the people who make the test) held its biennial Test Prep Summit, and we’ve all been writing articles about it ever since.  I have more for you today “ and enough for several more articles after that, including another idioms article that I had hoped to have for you today, but the research isn’t done yet. Instead, today I’m going to share with you some very useful knowledge that has been published by Lawrence M. Rudner, Chief Psychometrician of GMAC, in his Demystifying the GMAT article series.

Read more

Since the GMAT Prep summit, we have been covering what the changes that were described there mean based on what Larry Rudner, GMAC vice president of research and development and chief psychometrician, has told us. Now he has written an official response, which we have re-posted below.  Hopefully this will further clarify what those differences consist of and how you can study for the GMAT successfully. You can find the original posting here.

Idioms, Sentence Correction, and the GMAT Exam

Recently there has been some discussion and questioning about the role and place of idioms and sentence correction as they apply to the skills tested in the GMAT exam.  Much of what has been written has been well reasoned but some of what has been written is only partially accurate or reflects some misconceptions. With this posting I hope to put these two important pieces of the GMAT exam in their proper place within the context of what the exam measures and how.

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