Manhattan GMAT Flash Cards now available
Here at Manhattan GMAT, we’ve had a long and involved history with flash cards, or at least the idea of them.
On one hand, many students seemed to enjoy and benefit from practicing with flash cards. Indeed several of our Instructors have recommended using flash cards to their tutoring students for years.
However, the same Instructors recommended that the student construct his/her own flash cards, in order to facilitate both learning and prioritization. There was a concern that providing our own flash cards might channel students down the wrong paths, toward memorization as opposed to learning problem-solving techniques. Also, students would naturally think that whatever was on the flash cards was what they should know – we feared that providing flash cards might even wind up wasting students’ time on topics that weren’t useful for the individual.
So we decided to be both more and less ambitious with our brand new GMAT Flash Cards, which are now available for free. These Flash Cards are intended to give each student a tool to keep his/her GMAT ‘muscles’ sharp. They also can be very useful to give a student at the beginning of his or her studies a broad sense of some of the topics that the GMAT will test. Last, we did our best to make the Flash Cards less about rote memorization, and more about thinking and applying certain principles. The problems are generally not calculation-intensive; our goal was to make each card pass “the Subway Test” – a student should be able to complete the Flash Card while just looking at the card on the subway, without pen and paper.
The MGMAT Flash Cards are NOT exhaustive in terms of topics. Indeed, there aren’t even any Flash Cards for Critical Reasoning or Reading Comprehension, as those content areas don’t readily lend themselves to the format. Please do regard the MGMAT Flash Cards as a potentially useful supplementary or introductory tool, but not as a replacement for real studying! And if you find them helpful, you should seriously consider making your own flash cards consisting of problems you didn’t get right the 1st time or concepts you struggle with. It may be labor-intensive, but that’s the kind of individual work that’s virtually guaranteed to pay off.
Happy studying!
Another iron law of studying for the GMAT
On our forums, there’s been a recent spate of posts in which well-meaning users have posted official problems from GMATPrep—usually sentence correction problems—and then questioned or decried the construction of the correct answer choices.
“Is X really allowed? Isn’t it supposed to be Y?”
Some of these posters have actually gone to the trouble of looking up the disputed constructions in sundry reference works, including dictionaries and style guides, to try to find ammunition with which to attack the officially correct answer.
Never forget the following iron law:
On official problems, CORRECT ANSWERS ARE CORRECT, in every possible way.
This fact may sound obvious, but many students don’t realize its full consequences: namely, that every grammatical construction found in a correct answer to an official SC problem is officially valid, that every idiomatic expression in such an answer is correct, and that every word choice in such an answer is appropriate.
ALL of them.
This is an inviolable fact. Remember that the GMAT is a dictatorship, a consensus of one: only GMAC ultimately makes the decisions about which grammatical and idiomatic constructions are acceptable and which aren’t. We’re all playing on GMAC’s playground, and GMAC makes the rules.
What this means for you, the student, is that it’s a complete waste of time for you to question any official answer to a problem published by GMAC. Indeed, the only appropriate response to a correct answer that you find surprising, illogical, or “ugly” is this:
“Wow, that’s unusual. I guess I’ll have to recalibrate the way I think about that, because now I know I can do _____.”
Again, this is the ONLY way to respond to surprising constructions, solutions, and so on in officially correct answers. If you respond by questioning or doubting the validity of such answers, or, worse yet, actively trying to dispute that validity, then you are at best sidelining your studies with needless detours, and at worst confusing yourself.
On official problems, correct answers are correct.
That’s it.
There may be answers that you don’t like—I, for one, have been positively disgusted by a few of the officially correct SC answers I’ve seen—but you’ve got to learn to play by GMAC’s rules.
Carrol Chang is moving to D.C.!
Carrol Chang, one of our most beloved New York Instructors, is moving to Washington D.C.! After interning at the Obama campaign, Carrol decided to become one of the awesome people joining the government to help the country get things done right!
New York’s loss is D.C.’s gain. Now, Carrol’s going to be teaching classes in our nation’s capital, starting next Wednesday! As you can see, Carrol doesn’t waste any time.
Have fun down there Carrol! 🙂
Pricing News
Effective March 1st, 2009, Manhattan GMAT Course Prices are going to increase $50 – $100 to $1,490 in all locations (with a couple of exceptions that will be explained below). Our online course will also increase in price, to $1,090.
This is not a move we make lightly. At MGMAT, we always try to provide the best value possible to our students; this is the 1st price increase we’ve had in over two years for much the same reason.
In those same two years, we have dedicated ourselves to providing the best, most complete GMAT prep course possible. We’ve added many things to our course during this period, including:
1. Updated 3rd Edition Strategy Guides and Curriculum. We spent hundreds of hours improving and updating our curricular materials to reflect lessons from the classroom as well as recent developments with the GMAT itself.
2. Improved Post-Exam Assessment. Students now can consult with a senior Instructor after they take their GMAT to debrief and plan next steps. Hopefully, this isn’t necessary! But we know that sometimes it’s exceedingly helpful to students to have guidance for a second shot; the average increase for a 2nd-time test-taker is 31 points (from GMAC data, not just among our students) for a reason.
3. Our Test Simulation Booklet. We added this to make sure that our students could practice using the same sort of laminated booklet and marker that they’ll have to use on test day. It’s been a hit with students.
4. Manual Stopwatches. We’ve provided an online stopwatch for practice for years. However, some of our students reported that they sometimes found themselves practicing away from a computer, so we’ve now added stopwatches with lap functions to the set of materials that each student receives.
5. Essay Rating Software. We now provide our course students access to the same essay-grading software that GMAC itself uses.
We have made many other improvements large and small during this same period (e.g. we revised our online labs, etc.). We have internalized the cost of these improvements over the past 2 years, and are only now modifying our pricing to reflect some of our increased costs.
Again, this isn’t something we like to do. Still, we do take some comfort in the fact that we are yet providing what we feel is the best GMAT prep course available at a price that remains competitive with the market rate (e.g. Kaplan) while still maintaining our industry-leading Instructor compensation ($100+/hour).
If you’re reading this and were considering signing up for a course in the next few months, try to get in before March 1st. 🙂
(Our pricing is somewhat lower in Los Angeles and Austin due to pre-existing commitments we’ve made. So if you’re in one of these two areas, you not only get sunshine, you get a bargain on your GMAT course!)
SixFigureStart Free Coaching Call
Our friends at SixFigureStart, a career coaching firm, will be holding a free coaching teleclass this coming Friday, December 19th, from 12 noon – 12:45 p.m. EST. The topic, apropos for the time, will be “How to Effectively Handle a Job Layoff & Move Forward.”
SixFigureStart co-founders Connie Thanasoulis and Caroline Ceniza-Levine will co-lead:
If You’ve Been Laid Off, What To Do Next
If You Haven’t Been Laid Off, How To Recession-Proof Your Current Job
Dial-in: 712 775 7100
Participant code: 151675# (you must hit the pound key)
*The call is free but long-distance charges apply depending on where you are calling from.
Hope this is either helpful or you can ignore it!
3rd Edition Strategy Guides – 1 month out
Our 3rd Edition Strategy Guides have been out for about a month now, and the feedback has been tremendously positive. Most of the feedback has centered on the obvious additions (e.g. advanced chapters of math content, new idiom list), which have been welcome to many students.
At the same time, we’re very conscious of the balance of giving students all the resources they would need without overwhelming them. It held us back from adding certain esoteric topics that we thought would be more trouble to students than they’d be worth on the test.
Right now we’re also working on a couple more math guides (one as a Math Refresher, one for very Advanced Math Topics), and are considering how best to add them to the curriculum without swamping students.
I’m sure someone reading this is thinking “I want the stuff MGMAT decided not to print!” To which I’d respond in my best GMAT Teacher Voice, “Think depth, not breadth. You’re much better off knowing 100 problems/topics in your bones rather than kind of knowing 500.”
To this end, one change we’re already considering for the next printing of the 3rd Edition Strategy Guides is to move all Advanced Content and accompanying In Action problems to the back of each book, as opposed to the end of each chapter. This physical separation may help keep students from knocking themselves out too early on.
Also, we plan on fixing some of the typos sharp-eyed students have found. 🙂
Accepted.com telethon Nov. 19th
If you are applying for Round 2 or later for Fall 2009 (or thereafter) and have questions about applying, we’ve got some good news: our friends at Accepted.com are holding a telethon during which you can talk to an admissions consultant for FREE.
Go to the telethon page on Accepted.com for more info and to sign up. You’ll submit a resume and fill out a questionnaire in order to make your conversation more specific and productive. Sign up now, as the slots will likely fill up before the 19th!
Washington Post article
A recent Washington Post article heavily referenced ManhattanGMAT, and even included a snippet of video from our Washington D.C. location. If you squint, you can see a couple of ManhattanGMAT Instructors, and our Strategy Guides make a star turn. 🙂
The article itself discusses more generally how it’s a very competitive landscape out there as people seek shelter from the recession in the oasis of business school.
Bschool Admissions Panel in New York on November 6th
We are very proud to announce that ManhattanGMAT’s New York office will host an Admissions Panel next week consisting of Admissions officers from 3 of the world’s top business schools. Ainsley Parker, Associate Director of MBA Admissions at Wharton, Yhana Chavis, Assistant Director of Admissions at Kellogg, and Heather Daly, Senior Associate Director of MBA Admissions at Stern will be participating. Our very own Chris Ryan will be the moderator.
This event is free on Thursday night, November 6th at 7 p.m. – click here for more info or to sign up. Space is limited, so first-come-first-edified!
The 3rd Edition ManhattanGMAT Strategy Guides have arrived!
After months of work, the 3rd Edition Strategy Guides have landed! The new guides include 200+ new pages of material spread over 8 books. We’re always trying to offer the most sophisticated and thorough preparation materials around, and these books reflect hundreds of hours of development work by some of our best Instructors.
If you want an inside look, go to the MGMAT Store and click on the individual books to look at .pdfs of the first chapter of each book. There’s a lot of new advanced content (not in the .pdfs so much, but in the books themselves!).
There’s no rest for us though, as we’re hard at work on a GMAT math refresher (working title “Foundations of GMAT Math”) as well as something for the really hardcore math types. There’s also a rumor that the 12th Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review comes in March, so it could be that Strategy Guides 3.1/4.0 will be on the way early next year.