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.

You have poured your heart and soul into your business school applications and taken the time to craft the perfect essays. Now, you are eagerly looking forward to finishing up a few more applications to your target schools. You have heard that you can expect to spend as much time on your second, third, and fourth applications combined (!) as you did to produce your very first one. Encouraged by this claim, you might scan your third application and think, “Oh, look—here’s a ‘failure’ question. I can just adapt my Harvard ‘mistake’ essay to answer that one!” or “There’s a question about leadership. I’ve already written an MBA essay on that, so I can just reuse it here. It’s all so easy now!” 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.

Do you get the test-day jitters? Even when you’re taking a practice GRE? So do I, even though I’ve been taking the GRE for eight years. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years about how to stay calm during the GRE and get a great score. Read more

Need to crush the GRE to get into your dream grad program, but haven’t taken a math class since high school? Is algebra a foreign language to you? Does the mere thought of doing math trigger deep-seated trauma? Or maybe you’re not allergic to math, but your skills are rusty and you could use a thorough refresher. Perhaps you’re actually quite confident in your math abilities, but you want expert instruction to reach the highest level as quickly as possible.

We developed our Foundations of GRE Math™ workshop for anyone who wants to gain all the fundamentals of GRE math content and strategy as efficiently as possible—just one day, to be exact. 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.

Persistence is, in most endeavors, an admirable quality—just not when taking the GRE. For this test, knowing when to give up on a problem, guess, and move on, is a crucial skill. It’s important to remember that this is more than just a test of math knowledge or reading skills; it’s also a test of how one makes decisions under pressure. 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.

Study Like an Athlete

The GRE is not just any other exam. The Quant section contains questions you ostensibly learned how to do in fourth grade—some of them on topics like even numbers and factor trees. Underneath that elementary veneer, though, there are often some challenging inferences you have to make. The GRE Verbal section also tests you on reading and processing an incredible swath of information: passages cover every topic from pre-industrial leisure practices to radiation patterns in the Crab Nebula. Because of this breadth of content and the quirky questions asked about that content, the GRE is an exam you should practice for rather than just study for. Think of it more like a performance and less like a test. 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.

These days, the applicant pools for the top MBA programs are overfull with talented and experienced investment bankers, consultants, and software engineers. As a result, these candidates are considered overrepresented MBA candidates and may have a much harder time standing out from the crowd. However, if you fall into one of these groups, do not lose hope. Although you cannot alter your work history, you can change the way you present yourself and your candidacy to the admissions committees. We at mbaMission can offer a few suggestions for ways to ensure your essays grab an admissions reader’s attention. 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.

Let’s take a look at some of the most useful GRE vocabulary words. These words don’t look that important on their own, but they can reverse the meaning of an entire phrase or sentence! Get started by trying out this GRE Text Completion question: Read more