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 GRE 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.

The perfect MBA applicant does not exist. However, a perception of the perfect applicant does—an individual who is scaling greater and greater personal, community, and professional peaks unabated until he/she finally applies to business school. So, those who take time off at any point perceive themselves as disadvantaged. They worry that the admissions committees will see the gap(s) in their resume and dismiss them outright. After all, they probably have numerous more determined individuals they could admit, right? Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Not sure where to start? Here’s how to handle the first two weeks of your GRE journey. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.

In each Quant section on the GRE, you’ll see three questions that ask about a graph or pair of graphs; these are the Data Interpretation (DI) questions. All three questions usually refer to the same graph(s) and show up about two-thirds of the way through the section. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Careless GRE Math Mistakes Cost Points

If you scored a 158 on your GRE Quant, you likely missed around 10-15 of the 40 questions you saw. A few of those may have been ones you didn’t know how to do. A few may have been ones you didn’t have enough time to solve. How many do you think were “careless GRE math mistakes”? 1 or 2? 5 or 6? Read more

Taking the GRE for your business school application? You’re in luck. Each month, we are featuring a series of MBA admission tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

If you do mostly short-term, project-based work, you might struggle with how to structure your MBA resume so that it does not give the impression that you switch jobs every few months. If you list each job separately, not only will your MBA resume be too long, but you also run the risk that your reader will think you have not had a stable career—when in fact, if you are a successful freelancer or contractor, the opposite is the case. So, how can you organize your MBA resume so that it showcases the strength of your work and avoid having the variety and number of your work experiences come across as a weakness instead? Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Practice tests are like cupcakes. Having one or two is great, but if you go through the entire batch too quickly, you’ll end up regretting it.

Before you decide how many GRE practice tests you’ll take, let’s talk about why we take practice tests. There are two good reasons to take a practice GRE: 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 GRE 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.

Harvard Business School (HBS) offers an excellent MBA program—this is largely a given, and we are not questioning that. However, what we will call into question is whether Harvard Business School (or any other school, for that matter) is right for you. Every year, we get a few calls from confused MBA aspirants who say, “I visited Harvard Business School, and I am not sure if there is a fit,” as if that indicates some sort of problem. Indeed, and this may be shocking to some, Harvard Business School is not for everyone—particularly those who do not relate well to case-based learning, those who want a lot of flexibility in their first-year curriculum, and those who would prefer a small class size (HBS’s Class of 2019 has 928 students, while the same class at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, for example, has just 282). Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

The GRE is a fair test. GRE word problems will always give you enough info to turn the words into the right equations. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll make the translation easy or obvious! To make tough GRE word problems tougher, the test writers use certain words and phrases that they know are frequently misinterpreted. This makes you more likely to write down the incorrect equations and more likely to get the problem wrong. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Taking a practice test is one of the most important first steps that you can take as you embark on studying for the GRE—even (especially) if you feel totally unprepared or anxious about doing so. Confronting this anxiety can be an important hurdle to overcome. You’ll also likely find some surprises in your results, both positive and negative, that will shape your study plan. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

GRE Verbal is Not a Rorschach Test

What do you see in the image above? A butterfly? A twisty rollercoaster? Your mother’s disapproval? Read more