Starting April 10, Manhattan Prep and mbaMission will be coming together for an invaluable series of free workshops titled “Maximize Your Potential: 5 Steps to Getting Your Dream MBA.” Senior consultants from mbaMission will address and explain various significant admissions issues, while experts from Manhattan Prep will help you tackle some of the toughest challenges GMAT test-takers face, offering insight, advice, and more. Read more

This is your chance to meet Columbia, MIT Sloan, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Chicago Booth, Kellogg, Stanford, and more top business programs. Connect in person to ask MBA questions, learn about program offerings, and discover how a graduate business degree can boost your career. Read more

Guess what? 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.

Are you thinking of applying to business school this year? Perhaps you’re just starting to prepare for the GMAT or GRE, or maybe you haven’t yet begun to assess your overall fit at the top business school programs. How will you differentiate yourself from so many other MBA applicants? Where will you start? Read more

This September, we’ll be on the road with the QS MBA Tour! Together with dozens of business schools, we’ll be giving advice and providing you with all the info you’ll need on your MBA journey. The following post will give you more insight into the MBA Tour; we hope to see you in Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco!

The QS MBA Tour winds throughout North and South America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, providing thousands of future MBAs with the chance to learn more about and network with their target business schools. The MBA Tour is a way for us at Manhattan Prep to meet prospective GMAT and GRE students looking to take the test(s) and get into b-school, and it’s a way for you to ask us anything about the GMAT, GRE, and our offerings while connecting with schools you’re interested in. Everybody wins! Read more

Manhattan Prep and UCLA Anderson will be co-hosting upcoming MBA information events. We hope you’ll sign up to learn about the Anderson MBA program’s admissions process, student life, career options, and curriculum, directly from their admissions staff and esteemed alumni:

• New York Event – 8/23

• Boston Event – 9/12

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Great news for any of you based in New York or Canada: the Access MBA Tour is coming to town! Access MBA, a global leader in one-on-one business education events, will return to Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Toronto and New York City respectively on March 20, 21, 23, 25, and 28, the Advent Group announced today.

“Access MBA connects business executives and top international MBA programs through personalized one-on-one meetings between experienced professionals and business school representatives,” says Christophe Coutat, Advent Group’s managing director. Read more

Manhattan Prep offers instructors flexible hours and great pay ($100/hour for all teaching and $116/hour for all tutoring). As a Manhattan Prep instructor, you will have autonomy in the classroom, but you will also be joining an incredibly talented and diverse network of people. We support our instructors by providing students, space, training, and an array of curricular resources.

Our regular instructor audition process, which consists of a series of videos and mini lessons, usually takes weeks, even months, to complete. Through this process we winnow an applicant pool of hundreds down to a few people each year.

We are offering a one-day event on March 8^th for teachers interested in working with us. Candidates who attend will receive a decision that day. The event will take place at our Boston center at 140 Clarendon St., Main Fl (Back Bay), Boston, MA 02116.  It is open to candidates who live in the Boston area, have taught before, and are experts in the GMAT, LSAT, or GRE.

The day will include several rounds of lessons, as well as other activities. Each round will be pass / fail. The day will begin at 10:30 am. It may last as late as 5:30 pm for those who make it through the final round. Candidates will need to prepare lessons for some rounds; we will send more detailed instructions to candidates when they sign up for the event.

To register, please email Rina at auditions@manhattanprep.com by Thursday, March 5. Please include in your email a resume including your teaching experience and a score report.

Last week, I attended the annual GMAT Summit, held by the fine folks at GMAC (who own / make the GMAT), and I have some interesting tidbits to share with you.

It really is a myth

You know what I’m going to say already, don’t you? The first 7 (or 10, or 5) questions are not worth more than the questions later in the exam. I’ve written about this topic before but I’m going to mention it once again because of something that happened at the conference.

Fanmin Guo, Ph. D., Vice President of Psychometric Research at GMAC, was answering questions after a presentation on the test algorithm. A couple of people were peppering him with questions about this myth and apparently just didn’t seem to believe that it could possibly be true that the early questions aren’t worth more. One of the questioners also made a pretty significant faulty assumption in his arguments—and now I’m worried that an article is going to pop up trying to revive this debate. I don’t want any of my students led astray on this topic.

First, to understand why the early questions actually aren’t worth any more than the later ones, see the article I linked a couple of paragraphs back.

Second: here was the faulty assumption that I heard:

“You said that the earlier questions aren’t worth any more than the later ones. So you’re telling us that students should spend the same amount of time on every question.”

Dr. Guo was saying the first part: that the location of a question on the test doesn’t impact its weighting in the overall score. He and the other GMAC folks weren’t saying anything, though, about how you should take the test.

In fact, it would be silly to spend exactly the same amount of time on every question. Some questions are harder than others. In addition, you have various strengths and weaknesses in terms of both accuracy and speed. There are, in fact, very good reasons not to spend the same amount of time on each question. All Dr. Guo was saying was that the location of the problem in the section is not one of those reasons.

So, if you read something that says that you should spend more time on the earlier questions, roll your eyes and click away. Alternatively, if you read something that concludes that you should spend the same amount of time on every question, drop that source as well. Take a look at the data in my other article to see that GMAC actually does know what it’s doing and the GMAT is not just a test of how you perform on the first 7 or 10 questions.

GMATPrep offers more data

GMAC has been building more score reporting functionality into GMATPrep to give us a better idea of how we do when we take the official practice CATs. In fact, this capability has already launched! I need to go download the newest version of GMATPrep to see exactly what’s offered (and I’ll report back to you once I’ve done so), but they’ve started to offer data for sub-categories such as question type and content area.
Read more

Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week. All times are local unless otherwise specified.

12/15/13– Online – Essay Writing Workshop presented by mbaMission-  8:00AM- 9:30PM (EST)

12/15/13- Online- Free Trial Class- 7:00AM- 10:00AM (EST)

12/16/13-New York, NY-MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed presented by mbaMission– 7:30PM- 9:00PM

12/19/13–  Online – MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed presented by mbaMission– 12:00PM- 1:30PM (EST)

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week. All times are local unless otherwise specified.

Remember, our Black Friday GMAT special ends on December 15th. Receive $150 off all December GMAT courses will the code BLACKFRIDAY150.

12/8/13– Online – Free Trial Class-  7:00AM- 10:30AM (EST)

12/8/13- Washington, DC- Free Trial Class– 10:30PM- 1:30PM

12/8/13-New York, NY- Free Trial Class– 5:30PM- 8:30PM

12/8/13–  Irvine, CA- Free Trial Class– 5:30PM- 8:30PM

12/8/13– San Francisco, CA- Free Trial Class – 2:00PM- 5:00PM

12/8/13– Santa Monica, CA- Free Trial Class– 10:00AM- 1:00PM

12/8/13– San Diego, CA – Free Trial Class-  11:00AM- 2:00PM

12/8/13– London-Free Trial Class- 10:00AM- 1:00PM

12/8/13– Online- Free Trial Class– 8:30AM- 11:30PM (EST)

12/8/13- Boston, MA- Free Trial Class– 5:30PM- 8:30PM

12/8/13-Toronto, ON-  Free Trial Class– 2:00PM- 5:00PM

12/9/13 –  Bellaire, TX- Free Trial Class– 6:30PM- 9:30PM

12/10/13– Online- The Last-Minute MBA Application presented by mbaMission – 3:00PM- 4:30PM (EST)

12/10/13– Santa Clara, CA- Free Trial Class– 6:30AM- 9:30PM

12/10/13– Online – Free Trial Class-  3:00PM- 6:00PM (EST)

12/11/13– Philadelphia, PA-Free Trial Class- 6:30PM- 9:30PM

12/14/13– Online- Free Trial Class- 2:30PM- 5:30PM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.