The only dislikings about MGMAT..

[gokul_nair1984]

Citing Sources vs Inquisitiveness (The desire to learn)

Hi Stacey:

I have been following MGMAT for sometime now and I am really indebted to all the Expert's who give their valuable feedback and feel happy about the usefulness that I derive from the forums here. However, I have certain issues with posts(with unknown sources). I am not debating for you to allow people to post questions without mentioning sources as that is clearly illegal , however, my question is what if there are some concepts (Let's say in mathematics) that I(or for that matter anyone) am doubtful of? These questions maybe general in nature.
For example: http://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/interger-t10945.html ----The one that you locked.

I don't know what could have been the source of those questions but I felt they were very general in nature.

How can we get a response to that and more importantly how can we discuss them on these forums?

Furthermore, I have seen a lot of MGMAT moderators mentioning copyright issues and related stuff. With all due respect, there are several ways of actually solving a problem and what if I change the question(merely by adding my own words and probably changing the numeric contents). Is it still a copyright issue?The number of questions in GMAT prep and in MGMAT CAT are so limited that we have solutions and discussions for almost all of them. Now the question threads are also duplicating in nature.Where is the room for new questions? Or is it that there is no need to look at any more questions apart from these? Why does MGMAT want its students to learn(Or should I say By Heart) questions and hence the concepts. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

With all due respect, the contents of GMAT Prep/MGMAT materials are very limited and there could be(and there definitely are) a plethora of more concepts/ questions that people would like to ask and get answers to. I do understand that some tutors have already mentioned about the lack of time due to which such general questions could be answered and which resulted in the closure of General Math/ Verbal content folder.

Let me put it this way. Let's suppose I encounter a problem, let's say on Overlapping sets and I do not understand the solution. I can merely change the names of the sets and probably the values in order to get a detailed and easy solution. Would the MGMAT accept it? Surely, there's no copyright issue on this one.

Verbal is the most problematic area for most people (especially for non-native english speakers) and for even basic grammar related posts, if citing a source is mandatory, then I wonder how a student could benefit? Can I quote dictionary.com/www.dailygrammar.com as sources. No, as per MGMAT!!

There's pirated/spurious/ stolen material available openly on the internet and that's being discussed on various forums. I sincerely respect the stance that MGMAT has taken against it and all I request is whether a student could rephrase questions in order to garner knowledge and whether there could be a forum for discussion?----
In my humble view-This would surely help the student.Please correct me if you encounter ambivalent thoughts about my opinion.

I wonder how many students might have my school of thought?

PS: You and your august team of Experts are doing an excellent job. It is a great endeavour that is helping many students for free.

Just Inquisitive.......

[StaceyKoprince]

Hi, gokul

You bring up points that we have discussed extensively here as we have made various decisions about how to run the forums. The main issue is a very basic business issue: we have limited time, and so we have to set priorities accordingly.

For most of this year, we have gotten so many questions that we have been very behind - people have been waiting weeks for an answer. Our goal is to be able to answer questions in all of the folders in several days, not several weeks, but we have not met that goal for many months. As a result, we decided to cut back on the scope of questions that could be asked in the hope that we could provide more timely responses.

We are still behind (though not as much - at one point, people were waiting more than a month). We're still working on answering everything within a week at the very most. We agree that it would be great to be able to open up some of the other threads again eventually, but we aren't going to do that while people are still waiting for more than a week for answers to existing questions.

In terms of our priorities, we feel a responsibility to address our own material, of course. And we feel the best material is the official material - we just wish we could add OG to GMATPrep. And when we include those two sets (our stuff and GMATPrep), we find that we're struggling to keep up with the volume of the discussion, so we just can't add even more right now.

(We're trying to find a way to address OG at least with our own students. Because all of our class and self study students have purchased copies of the OG books, we may be able to discuss together in a private, password-protected forum. But we're still figuring out what exactly we can do legally.)

Hopefully that gives you some insight into how we made the decisions that we made and why. I wish it were possible for us to answer every question for every student on the very same day that the student asks! But, for now, we're doing the best that we can. :)