What have you been told about applying to business school? With the advent of chat rooms, blogs, and forums, armchair “experts” often unintentionally propagate MBA admissions myths, which can linger and undermine an applicant’s confidence. Some applicants are led to believe that schools want a specific “type” of candidate and expect certain GMAT scores and GPAs, for example. Others are led to believe that they need to know alumni from their target schools and/or get a letter of reference from the CEO of their firm in order to get in. In this series, mbaMission debunks these and other myths and strives to take the anxiety out of the admissions process.

Have you heard the following admissions myth?

When a school that has placed you on its open waitlist says that it wants no more information from you, this is some kind of “test,” and you should supply additional materials anyway. Read more

Each week, we are featuring a series of MBA admissions tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania sends out Round 2 interview invitations on February 8, and once again, the school is using its Wharton team-based discussion format rather than a traditional admissions interview to evaluate its candidates. Understandably, Wharton applicants get anxious about this atypical interview, because the approach creates a very different dynamic from what one usually encounters in a one-on-one meeting—and with other applicants also in the room, one cannot help but feel less in control of the content and direction of the conversation. Yet despite the uncertainty, here are a few things that interviewees can expect: Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Before I was a GMAT teacher, I was a piano teacher. At my first job out of college, I would go house to house giving piano lessons to kids. The most important lesson I had for them was always the same: practice slowly, correctly, and in small, manageable pieces. Read more

Guess what? You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free—we’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Why do I have to take the GMAT? Who cares about the Pythagorean theorem? Or perfect grammar? Why do we need to know the rules of exponents? Or what the prime factors of a number tell us? Or how to read a passage about science we’ll never study? Read more

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admissions tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

Within the next several months, many candidates will receive a response from MBA admissions committees that can sometimes be far more frustrating than a rejection: “You have been placed on our waitlist.” What should you do when your status is uncertain? Read more

Guess what? You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free—we’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Do you know how to work backwards on Problem Solving problems? More important, do you know when to work backwards—and when not to? To get a really high score on this test, you’ve got to Know the Code in order to get through the questions efficiently. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

There are a lot of things the GMAT can’t measure. It can’t measure your intelligence, your value as a person, or your ability to succeed. But is it really just about your test-taking skills? And if you’ve always done poorly on tests, are you doomed to GMAT failure? Read more

What have you been told about applying to business school? With the advent of chat rooms, blogs, and forums, armchair “experts” often unintentionally propagate MBA admissions myths, which can linger and undermine an applicant’s confidence. Some applicants are led to believe that schools want a specific “type” of candidate and expect certain GMAT scores and GPAs, for example. Others are led to believe that they need to know alumni from their target schools and/or get a letter of reference from the CEO of their firm in order to get in. In this series, mbaMission debunks these and other myths and strives to take the anxiety out of the admissions process.

Maybe you are among the unlucky applicants who were/are on the outside looking in this year, shaking your head trying to understand why you did not get into an MBA program. As you look back and assess where you went wrong, you may narrow your focus and re-examine your interviews. After all, you were invited to interview but were rejected thereafter, so there must be a cause-and-effect relationship, right? Your rejection must mean that everything was at stake during those 30 to 60 minutes and that your interviewer just did not feel that you are of the caliber preferred by your target school, right? Wrong. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

The GMAT is a computer-adaptive test, so it makes sense that to beat it, you might need to think like a computer, right? It really is true, but maybe not in the way that you would expect. You might think that a computer is really smart and could solve lots of problems on the GMAT. Actually, the problems on the GMAT require a fair amount of creativity and critical thinking that would be hard for a computer. For solving problems, you need your own human brain. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

I promise you this will not be a diatribe directed towards the American school system, but I have to say that many of us were not taught proper grammar when we were in—ahem—grammar school. Many of us were also not taught how to make funny puns on blog posts. ? Read more