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 weekly series, mbaMission debunks these and other myths and strives to take the anxiety out of the admissions process.

“I had an internship from June to August of 2014. Will the MBA admissions committee count it as work experience?”

“I was running a lab during my Master’s program—is that part of my total number of months of work experience?”

“I ran a small business that ultimately failed—will I get credit for my time as an entrepreneur?” 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.

A lot of my GMAT students struggle to nail down their timing on the Quant section. If you’re in this situation, you can’t just tell yourself that you’ll work faster next time. Instead, with the help of this post, figure out where your timing problem is coming from. Then you’ll know exactly how to fix it. 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.

Participles. Just the word is enough to inspire dread in the heart of most GMAT Test Takers. Let’s break down what they are and why you should care. 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.

If you’re anything like me, you read books and articles avidly (although maybe less often than you did in college), and you’ve been told that you’re a good writer (although you definitely write less than you did in college). The Sentence Correction portion of GMAT Verbal seems like it should be easy for you: fix anything that sounds like bad writing, and you’ll do well here.

Unfortunately, that assumption is wrong. Read more

All registrants will be able to enter for a chance to win a GMAT Complete Course or Interact self-study option with Manhattan Prep.

The Access MBA Tour, the worldwide leader in One-to-One business education events, will return to Toronto on Thursday, March 17^th, from 4:30 PM to 10 PM at the Fairmont Royal York, as well as to New York City on Tuesday, March 22^nd from 4:30 PM to 9:30 PM at the Warwick New York Hotel, the Advent Group announced today. 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 weekly series, mbaMission debunks these and other myths and strives to take the anxiety out of the admissions process.

Many MBA candidates believe that admissions committees have narrowed down their criteria for selecting applicants over the years and that each school has one distinct “type” that it seeks. So, in this world of stereotypes, Harvard Business School (HBS) is looking only for leaders, Kellogg is looking only for marketing students, Chicago Booth is looking only for finance students, and in some extreme cases, people actually believe that MIT is looking only for “eggheads.” Of course, these stereotypes—like most stereotypes—are not accurate. Chicago Booth wants far more than one-dimensional finance students in its classes, and it provides far more than just finance to its MBA students (including, to the surprise of many, an excellent marketing program). HBS is not a school just for “generals”; among the approximately 950 students in each of its classes, HBS has a wide variety of personalities, including some excellent foot soldiers. So, at mbaMission, we constantly strive to educate MBA candidates about these misconceptions in hopes that they will eschew these stereotypes, which can sink applications if applicants pander to them. 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.

In GMAT Sentence Correction, a “split” is a clear difference among the answer choices that allows you to identify and eliminate several incorrect answers. You can’t always find a perfect, straightforward answer choice split to work with in every Sentence Correction problem. Sometimes, most or all of the sentence is underlined, and the answer choices seem completely different from each other. When this happens, don’t fall back on bad habits. Even if you can’t find a great split, you can take a smart, fast approach to the problem. Let’s work through that approach using the following problem, from the GMAC’s GMAT Prep software. 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.

Welcome to the 2^nd installment of our dive into Number Properties. If you haven’t yet tried the first problem, start with the first article in the series.

Let’s dive right into our second problem from the GMATPrep® free exams: 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.

Have you been following our grammar tips series? We’ve already talked about opening modifiers and noun modifiers. We’re almost done with this much-feared topic. If you’re still having problems, it’s probably with adverbial modifiers.

These can be the most overwhelming, so let’s break them down now. Back to our favorite modifier-riddled sentence:

Barking ferociously, the dog, which was known to be vicious, ran down the street, chasing the boy who had been poking at it just moments before.

An adverbial modifier is something that describes almost anything in the world that is not a noun. There’s actually a one-word adverbial modifier in our ferocious dog sentence (or, put far more simply, an adverb). Go back and see if you can find it. 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.

If you read the first post in this series, then you already know how to get the most you can out of the first 5 seconds of a GMAT Quant problem. But what about the other 1:55? Let’s continue to delve. Read more