We are VERY proud to announce that the new ManhattanGMAT Test Simulation Booklet is now available! It is virtually identical to the real thing used in the Pearson Vue testing centers, complete with marker. So now, you can practice with the confidence that you won’t be the least bit surprised by the nature of the laminated booklet they give you on test day.

Though it’s a small thing, we’re very glad to be able to remove one more variable or bit of uncertainty for students in their preparation. 🙂

If you’d like to check it out or pick up a copy, click here.

One of our students (a very bright guy from the McKinsey corporate class) last month described a common problem with studying for the GMAT. He wanted to sit down and do timed blocks of practice questions, but it was cumbersome for him to use a stopwatch and time each ‘lap’ or question precisely, particularly when working out of the Official Guide. It was also an issue to record his answer choices for each question for when he wanted to review the set. He suggested that we come up with a practice center interface that would simply let students take timed practice sets of questions.

Not being too proud to immediately run with someone else’s idea, we decided to do just that! In our practice center, starting May 1st, students will find a blank interface that will simply record and time their answers to a series of questions, with the questions determined by the student. This way, students can work out of the Official Guide and still get practice with selecting answer choices on a computer screen (as with the real GMAT test), as well as have each of their questions precisely timed and recorded.

We hope that this ‘stopwatch’ proves helpful to all of our students. We will also have something interesting that one can do with the right and wrong answers from Official Guide questions in the next couple of weeks (hint – it involves an Excel spreadsheet that records one’s progress through the Official GMAT Review Guides . . . )

Last week, I was speaking to a student at the beginning of a course, when she made a surprising comment. She mentioned that she had completed a Kaplan course, but was seeing the Official Guides for the first time with us. Even though many of our students are refugees from Kaplan, I still found myself stunned at this; how could she have completed a full GMAT class without ever seeing the only publicly released questions from GMAC?

It turns out that Kaplan, for some reason, does not use the Official Guides! The only plausible reason I can think of for this is that the Official Guides, as the exclusive property of GMAC, cost a substantial amount of money to provide to students. There is no real ‘licensing’ of the content; you simply have to buy the books and give them to students.

Apparently Kaplan, looking at the vast number of students it would have to buy books for, decided that its own materials were superior to those provided by the writers and administrators of the actual GMAT test. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still find myself a little bit chagrined at Kaplan’s response to a choice between serving your students and serving the bottom line. It may represent, in some small part, the difference between the priorities of a large public company that has to hit numbers every quarter and those of a smaller, privately owned enterprise that can focus on providing the best offering possible.

The ManhattanGMAT Practice Test Assessment Reports have officially gone live.

If you are a student at ManhattanGMAT, simply go to:

//www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/practicecenter.cfm

There, you will have the option to Generate Assessment Reports. Simply mark which practice tests you would like to include (the more tests the better, generally).

We have already received tremendous positive feedback regarding this new feature of the practice exams.

Hope that you’re as excited about this latest offering as we are! It should be of immense value to students in helping to define their relative strengths and weaknesses in preparing for the GMAT.

There are a few exciting developments coming out later this month concerning the MGMAT 6 full-length adaptive exams that I wanted to let visitors know about.

The MGMAT tests have always given very detailed feedback and explanations in terms of what you got right and wrong, and how long you took on each question. Students have always found these detailed explanations to be invaluable.

However, by the end of March, students will have the added ability to compile and combine data across multiple tests as well. In other words, if you take 2 or 3 or more MGMAT adaptive exams, you will be able to run a report that uses data from ALL of your tests to point out your strengths and weaknesses, in terms of format and question type (e.g. Data Sufficiency, Sentence Correction), content (e.g. Number Properties, Verb Tenses) and timing. These reports will add explanatory depth to student test results, and will, we believe, make a valuable tool even moreso.

(If you’ve already taken MGMAT adaptive exams, not to worry. You’ll be able to run reports based upon your past exams! So your reports will already be chock full of results to work with.)

In addition, by the end of March, we will be offering one full-length adaptive GMAT test for FREE. We think that access to this diagnostic practice tool will help many students in their preparation.

Again, we are very excited about these developments, but even as the assessment reports become available, we’re working on other possible innovations and improvements . . . we’re also continuously open to other suggestions as to how we can best serve our students. So keep the ideas and suggestions coming!