Looking for advice on evaluating your practice exams? Be sure to check out this article too.

First Steps

If you are just beginning to look into the GMAT, we recommend reading through The GMAT Uncovered before continuing. The same information can be obtained by attending our in-person or Live Online GMAT Open House Sessions. You can read more about these programs here.

If you feel like you have a good understanding of the exam, then it’s time to take a practice test! Until you’ve taken a full practice GMAT, there’s no way of knowing exactly how much you need to prepare for the exam. Fortunately, ManahttanGMAT makes this easy by offering a free computer adaptive exam that will serve as a useful diagnostic tool. Before you continue to structure your prep program, it is important to take a full exam. Additionally, in the scope of your business school application, it’s important to know the average GMAT score of the schools you are applying to. Here is a list of the top business school programs and their associated GMAT scores to get you started.

Read more

Our 8 Strategy Guides, organized by topic, have been around for several years.  However, we were seeing some students who hadn’t looked at math in a LONG time and wanted a refresher.

So, after months of development, we are very happy and proud to announce the publication of our brand new Strategy Supplement, the Foundations of GMAT Math!  This book starts from the basics to give students those “Oh yeah, NOW I remember how to FOIL” moments.  We start with Order of Operations/PEMDAS and algebra, and go from there to fractions, geometry, exponents, divisibility and other flashback-inducing topics.  If you’re confident in your math skills, you may not need this book at all.  But otherwise, you may like it a great deal.  You know who you are . . .

All Manhattan GMAT Course Students will receive this book for free as part of their course materials.  If you’ve already started your course and want this book, contact studentservices@manhattanprep.com/gmat/ and they’ll hook you up (you may have to pay shipping depending on your location, but the book will be free).

Kudos to our curriculum wizards for their latest contribution to the best in GMAT Prep!

Manhattan GMAT’s award-winning flash cards (okay, they don’t give out awards, but if they did . . . ) are now available online.  They’ve actually been downloadable for print for quite some time, but we went ahead and made them web-friendly as well.  With the new interface, you can ‘flip’ the cards onscreen, flag the cards that were tricky to you, and save your progress to return for another session.

You can, of course, still download and print them for a more corporeal experience.  To choose either flavor, click here.  However you choose to make use of them, we hope you find them handy!

Some big news – Robert Wilburn, one of our veteran Instructors, is moving to London!  That means that Manhattan GMAT will shortly be offering in-person classes on the other side of the Pond!  This is Robert’s second jaunt in the U.K.; he was a Sloan Fellow at London Business School a while back.  Robert has taught for MGMAT for several years, including classes at Bank of America and Duke University.

If you’re in London, this is what you’ve been waiting for!  If you’d like to get on the waiting list for our first set of courses, click here.

Have a great time over there Robert!  Send us back some fish and chips (though I guess they wouldn’t travel very well).  🙂

We receive many requests from students asking, “When are you coming to [City X]?”  Here at Manhattan GMAT, we take on a new location only when we’ve found an experienced teacher with a 99th percentile score who’s up to our standards in the relevant market.

It took us the better part of a year to identify, enlist, and train Instructors in each area, but we’re very happy to announce our first classes in San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, and Ann Arbor!  If you’d like to meet the Instructor(s) in your area, just click on the link and sign up for a free trial class or open house.  We think you’ll agree that he/she was worth the wait.

We have completed our analysis of the GMAT Official Guide Quant Review 2nd Edition.  Of the 300 questions, 74 (25%) are new to the 2nd edition.

These 74 problems did not break dramatic new ground in terms of tested material.  The bottom line is that the 2nd Edition is a nice add-on, but you should still feel fine about studying from the original Quant Review Guide if that’s what you’ve got handy.  For a complete list of the new problems and a detailed breakdown by topic, click here.

As promised, we now have a detailed write-up of the Official Guide for GMAT Review Verbal 2nd Edition.  The skinny is that there are 81 new problems (27%) that were not present in the 1st Edition.  None of the new problems is particularly groundbreaking, and some of them appeared in past released GMAC resources.  For a detailed problem list by topic, visit our write-up and select a topic to see precisely where the new problems lie.

The bottom line is that if you own the 1st Edition, spending an additional $17.95 for 81 problems would be helpful, but not vital.

The Quant Guide will be reviewed next week.  Also, in case you missed it, we did the same for the 12th Edition a little while back.

One of the great GMAT myths is that the first 8 questions in each section “make or break” your score and that nothing you do after that point has much of an effect on the score you end up with. False! Eight questions are not enough to determine your score. If they were enough, each section would consist of 8 questions.

One of the consequences of the myth is the belief that in order to break 700, you must answer those first 8 questions correctly. Untold numbers of test-takers have labored over the first eight, afraid that any mistake will send their scores plummeting to unthinkable depths. While it is true that you should give each question your best shot, the absolute number of questions answered correctly is not as important as their difficulty level. Better to have a 50/50 success rate at a high level than a 50/50 success rate at a lower one, even though the percentage of right and wrong answers is the same.

The most serious upshot of this myth is that its believers spend far too much time on the first eight questions and then find themselves racing to finish the section. Often, these test-takers run out of time and leave some questions unanswered at the end of a section. Given that unanswered questions are essentially counted as incorrect answers, it makes more sense to move at a steady pace throughout the entire section rather than concentrate on any particular subset of questions. In fact, spending too much time on early questions may actually damage rather than help your final score.

Read more

Following up on the release of the 12th Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review, GMAC is now releasing the 2nd editions of both the Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review (released this week) and the Official Guide for GMAT Quantitative Review (to be released in the next couple of weeks).

As was the case with the 12th Edition, we will be breaking down the new guides in detail.  As a preview, 81 of the 300 verbal questions in the 2nd edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review are new, in that they didn’t appear in the 1st edition or the Official Guides.  That means that 219 of the 300, or 73%, appeared in the 1st Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review.  We’ll be analyzing the 81 newbies in detail later in the week.

About 2 years ago, one of our L.A. Instructors, Mike Kim, suggested that we provide a math curriculum  for students who want a refresher on fundamental math topics (e.g.  fractions, algebra, etc.).  We thought it was a fantastic idea.  Being an extraordinarily productive guy, Mike went on to author the Foundations of GMAT Math Workshops I and II which take place online (it turns out there are too many fundamental math topics to teach in one sitting).

Now, the Foundations of Math Workshops will be available for free to any Manhattan GMAT course student.  If you are a course student, you can simply go to the website and add the Foundations workshops to your account.  You will immediately receive access to dozens of practice problems in your student center as well as class recordings, and you can attend the next scheduled Foundations workshops live.

For non-students, the Foundations of Math Workshops will each be available for only $95.  Additionally, if you end up signing up for a course after taking the Workshops, we’ll credit you whatever you spent on the workshops, so they’ll essentially wind up being free for you too.

Remember, these workshops review foundational math topics such as algebra, basic geometry, fractions, etc.  They’re very useful if you need a refresher because you haven’t seen the math in a long while, but if you’re comfortable with the math already you can feel free to go straight to the Official Guides, Strategy Guides, etc.

P.S.  The Foundations of GMAT Math Book is due out this Fall, as Mike’s original idea is taking multiple forms to reach as many people as possible.