The long-awaited Foundations of Verbal Strategy Guide is finally here! We’re also launching an Advanced Quant book; click on the link to read about that one.

We published our first Foundations book, focused on quant, last year, and now Manhattan GMAT teacher extraordinaire Jen Dziura has gifted us with the equivalent verbal tome “ everything you ever wanted to know about parts of speech, sentence structure, reading comprehension, and all of the basics that most GMAT books (including Manhattan GMAT’s “regular” series of Strategy Guides) assume you already know.

Who should use this book? Great question. If you have taken a practice or real test and scored below the 50^th percentile, then this book may be for you. If you are a non-native English speaker (or even a native!) who didn’t learn much by way of formal grammar (what’s a noun and what different types of nouns are there?), or who never had much practice with reading comprehension tests in English, then this book may be for you.

To give you an idea of what to expect, excerpts from the new Foundations of Verbal are below. Read more

Exciting news “ our Advanced Quant Strategy Guide is finally ready for prime time! We’re also launching a Foundations of Verbal book; click on the link to read about that one.

Who should use this book? Great question. Are you already at the 70^th-plus percentile (minimum) on quant and you’re looking to push yourself well into the 90s? This book is for you. In addition, please note that this book assumes that you have already worked through our five regular Strategy Guides (or the equivalent material from another company).

To give you an idea of what to expect, excerpts from the new Advanced Quant guide are below. The main point I want to make is that this book covers both advanced concepts / mathematical material, and advanced problem solving processes. Both are critical for a 90th-plus percentile test-taker.

Okay, without further ado, here’s excerpt #1, an introduction to a methodical solving style inspired by mathematician George Polya. Read more

Last week, in one of the government’s biggest insider trading cases ever, Raj Rajaratnam was found guilty on fourteen counts of securities fraud and conspiracy.  His conviction has stirred up even more conversation on what has been a hotbed topic since the financial crisis in 2008-09: business ethics.  Now, with 36 unrelated insider trading convictions in the past 18 months and several major b-schools attempting to refocus their curriculums, we thought we would share with you some of the articles we have been reading on the matter.

In an article on Poets & Quants, Joel Schectman discusses the hypersensitivity of Wharton graduates following the conviction of Raj Rajaratnam, a member of the Wharton ’83 class, just days before the business school’s May 15^th graduation.  The piece, which is filled with quotes from the students and staff, conveys the Wharton community’s mixed feelings about the trial.  Some of our favorite reactions include: We are all ethical; We can prepare them for the temptations, but we can’t inoculate them completely; and We hope we can do better. Read more

An article on Fortune.com last week pointed out that the debt burden for MBA students at top business schools has seen an increase as of late.  This rise has largely been attributed to the recent recession. B-school financial aid officers have noted that the resultant pay freezes at pre-MBA jobs have caused more and more applicants to dip into their personal savings to finance their degrees. With applicants making less money as they enter school, and tuition costs growing steadily, the higher debt load seems almost inevitable.
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We’ve written a fair amount about various alternative careers b-school graduates can have, like education, fashion, casino management and healthcare. We realize that prospective MBAs interested in these fields might not be traditional MBA candidates to begin with, particularly if they’ve been working in the nonprofit sector. Therefore, this summer, we’re offering our Social Ventures Scholars program, which will give 25 individuals a full tuition scholarship to a special Live Online 9-session course.

The course will begin on June 9, 2011. If you’re interested in applying for this scholarship (a $1090 value) you must meet the following three criteria:

1. you currently work full-time in an organization that promotes positive social change,
2. you plan to use your MBA to work in a public, not-for-profit, or other venture with a social-change oriented mission,
3. you can demonstrate a clear financial need.

If you meet these criteria and would like to apply, you can find the details of the scholarship, including applications requirements, here. You can also contact svs@manhattanprep.com/gmat/ with any questions.

Here at Manhattan GMAT we are proud members of the non-profit organization AIGAC (The Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants). This association keeps those of us who help prepare students for graduate school to the highest standards. It also makes sure we continue to act ethically, putting the interests of our clients and prospective clients ahead of our own. Currently, AIGAC is running a survey on MBA applicants, so that AIGAC members can gain a deeper understanding of our students so as to better serve them.

As a taste of what this survey finds, last year, it discovered that the median age of MBA Applicants who took the survey stayed constant from 2009 at 27 years old, but the distribution of ages was wider in 2010, with more of both younger and older prospects. The survey concluded that the larger proportion of younger prospects is related to the increase in international respondents and women. Looks like there was a higher diversity of applicants, in terms of age, gender, and nationality in 2010. Will this remain the same into 2011? Help us find out!

And if you don’t want to take the survey just to help us out, you can always do it for the one free iPod Touch and two free iPod Shuffles that are being raffled off to the survey takers.

The survey takes about 10 minutes and can be found here: //surveys.marketpointsinc.com/mba11.asp. Thanks in advance for your participation! This info really helps us make sure we’re tailoring our classes and materials to fit well for you.

Manhattan GMAT has always prided itself on hiring the highest-quality instructors in the industry.  It’s one of our greatest points of distinction, and probably the first thing we would mention if you were to  ask us what sets us apart “ we have the best instructors out there. But what, exactly, does that mean?

In 2010, MG Prep received 915 resumes from prospective instructors.  After reviewing their credentials, we conducted phone interviews with 274 applicants. From there, 232 people were offered the opportunity for an online audition, where we got a chance to check out their knowledge, teaching methods, and classroom persona.  Of those auditions, 102 applicants were invited to our corporate offices in New York for a face-to-face audition.  Only 18 were hired.

In that final face-to-face audition, applicants are asked to teach real problems to students of varying ability levels.  We look for instructors who teach to every level of understanding, who interact positively and productively with their students, and who are receptive to criticism and eager for their own improvement. Plus, we always like to hire instructors with vibrant, engaging personalities and a deep-seated passion for education.  If the audition process is any indication, the 18 applicants who were offered positions were selected for more than just their 99^th percentile score and their teaching backgrounds.  They were selected because they truly are the best of the best. (Think about it: Harvard Business School accepts 12% of applicants. Manhattan GMAT accepts less than 2%.)

If you’ve had the opportunity to interact with any of our instructors, you have some idea of what we mean.  We spend over 100 hours training our instructors, we pay them 4x the industry standard, and we expect them go above and beyond.  They are continually meeting to discuss the best teaching strategies and how to make the most of the course format, and they are always eager to work on improving the curriculum.  It’s not uncommon to hear a conversation between instructors in which the words I love that problem make several appearances. Manhattan GMAT instructors are great at what they do, and, more importantly, they love it.

Want to learn more about Manhattan GMAT’s outstanding instructors? Check out our instructor bio page, where you can read about their backgrounds and take a look at what former students have said.

We recently discussed our move towards a more international market, with online classes geared towards students in East Asia and India as well as in-person classes in London and Paris.

However, while we are expanding abroad, we are also continuing to focus on our new markets in the U.S. We’ve recently started offering classes in Miami as well as San Antonio and we are also expanding to Salt Lake City in the near future.

Because of our strong belief in high instructor quality, we only expand where we find instructors who meet our stringent qualifications. If you want to see us expand further, and you know of anybody in the locations listed on our instructor hiring page, be sure to send them our way! Our application process is tough, but in the end, both our students and our instructors benefit!

After having established ourselves as a bastion of high quality GMAT prep in the United States, Manhattan GMAT has begun to expand beyond that country’s borders. With our eight Strategy Guides shipping to all parts of the globe, we realized the call for more comprehensive prep worldwide and have scheduled classes to meet the demand of students across the world.

Though Manhattan GMAT already has classes in London, we recently started offering classes in Paris as well, with the first class scheduled to begin on January 18.

Cognizant of the vast numbers of test-takers further East, we have also begun to address those students’ needs with an online class specifically scheduled at a convenient time for those in India and in the Middle East.

For those whose time zones make even the India class inconvenient, we’re also offering a class specifically scheduled for students in China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.

For a full listing of locations for Manhattan GMAT, click here.

At Manhattan GMAT, we take pride in the quality teaching of our instructors. In fact, we value their Socratic method so much that for a long time we have been worried about posting videos, which are a decidedly not interactive media (unlike our classes).

However, to show our continuing commitment to preparing our students for the GMAT, we have been hosting a live free study hall series called “Thursdays with Ron:” every other Thursday, our instructor, Ron Purewal, hosts a free 1.5 hour long session. Anybody can submit questions ahead of time, and Ron chooses some questions to answer. The event itself is interactive (in fact, you can submit your own questions and sign up to attend the next study hall session here) and therefore continues to help students in the way that we feel best suits their needs: having them actively participate.

Still, in 90 minutes of lesson, there are some sections that help you understand certain aspects of the GMAT better, without requiring too much additional interaction. We’ve found those highlights of our Thursdays With Ron series, and we’ve posted them in easily digestible chunks on our youtube channel. Below is a sample of one of the most popular videos, in which Ron explains a new way to easily find the point of a reading comprehension passage:

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