We here at Manhattan GMAT have done our utmost over the past 9 years to offer the best curriculum and the best Instructors in the test prep industry. We like to think that our growth and success indicate that we’ve succeeded in some measure.

Now, we are proud to introduce to the world our sister company, Atlas LSAT! Atlas LSAT will be driven by the same principles that have guided Manhattan GMAT:

Real Teachers. Instructors selected for teaching ability as well as test-taking expertise, with 99th percentile scores (172+) and paid the highest rates in the industry ($100/hour);
High-end Curriculum. A curriculum dedicated to teaching people the skills required to get the highest scores to get into top 10 programs;
Student-Centered. A belief that good teaching means building from the students up. No auditorium-sized classes.

We’re very confident that LSAT students will benefit from and gravitate toward an organization that reflects these principles.

A reasonable person might ask, Why not ManhattanLSAT? First, we believe that one of the reasons Manhattan GMAT has been successful is that we have remained laser-focused on just one thing: the GMAT. It was important to us to retain that focus. Thus, Atlas LSAT has its own staff and operations, and will establish its own identity. They might even have a bit more fun than we do. 🙂

Also, Atlas LSAT just sounds better.

Here’s to Atlas LSAT doing for LSAT students what Manhattan GMAT has done for GMAT students! (Note: Average GMAT scores have risen 15 points in the past 3 years, around the same time MGMAT has expanded worldwide. Maybe there’s some relationship there . . . )

Manhattan GMAT was recently profiled on SmarterMoney.com, part of the Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal network. Always good to get some recognition!

CNBC had Andrew Yang, CEO of Manhattan GMAT, as a guest last week to comment on the current outlook for young college graduates looking to enter the workforce.

Here at Manhattan GMAT, we’ve had a long and involved history with flash cards, or at least the idea of them.

On one hand, many students seemed to enjoy and benefit from practicing with flash cards. Indeed several of our Instructors have recommended using flash cards to their tutoring students for years.

However, the same Instructors recommended that the student construct his/her own flash cards, in order to facilitate both learning and prioritization. There was a concern that providing our own flash cards might channel students down the wrong paths, toward memorization as opposed to learning problem-solving techniques. Also, students would naturally think that whatever was on the flash cards was what they should know – we feared that providing flash cards might even wind up wasting students’ time on topics that weren’t useful for the individual.

So we decided to be both more and less ambitious with our brand new GMAT Flash Cards, which are now available for free. These Flash Cards are intended to give each student a tool to keep his/her GMAT ‘muscles’ sharp. They also can be very useful to give a student at the beginning of his or her studies a broad sense of some of the topics that the GMAT will test. Last, we did our best to make the Flash Cards less about rote memorization, and more about thinking and applying certain principles. The problems are generally not calculation-intensive; our goal was to make each card pass “the Subway Test” – a student should be able to complete the Flash Card while just looking at the card on the subway, without pen and paper.

The MGMAT Flash Cards are NOT exhaustive in terms of topics. Indeed, there aren’t even any Flash Cards for Critical Reasoning or Reading Comprehension, as those content areas don’t readily lend themselves to the format. Please do regard the MGMAT Flash Cards as a potentially useful supplementary or introductory tool, but not as a replacement for real studying! And if you find them helpful, you should seriously consider making your own flash cards consisting of problems you didn’t get right the 1st time or concepts you struggle with. It may be labor-intensive, but that’s the kind of individual work that’s virtually guaranteed to pay off.

Happy studying!

Carrol Chang, one of our most beloved New York Instructors, is moving to Washington D.C.! After interning at the Obama campaign, Carrol decided to become one of the awesome people joining the government to help the country get things done right!

New York’s loss is D.C.’s gain. Now, Carrol’s going to be teaching classes in our nation’s capital, starting next Wednesday! As you can see, Carrol doesn’t waste any time.

Have fun down there Carrol! 🙂

Effective March 1st, 2009, Manhattan GMAT Course Prices are going to increase $50 – $100 to $1,490 in all locations (with a couple of exceptions that will be explained below). Our online course will also increase in price, to $1,090.

This is not a move we make lightly. At MGMAT, we always try to provide the best value possible to our students; this is the 1st price increase we’ve had in over two years for much the same reason.

In those same two years, we have dedicated ourselves to providing the best, most complete GMAT prep course possible. We’ve added many things to our course during this period, including:

1. Updated 3rd Edition Strategy Guides and Curriculum. We spent hundreds of hours improving and updating our curricular materials to reflect lessons from the classroom as well as recent developments with the GMAT itself.
2. Improved Post-Exam Assessment. Students now can consult with a senior Instructor after they take their GMAT to debrief and plan next steps. Hopefully, this isn’t necessary! But we know that sometimes it’s exceedingly helpful to students to have guidance for a second shot; the average increase for a 2nd-time test-taker is 31 points (from GMAC data, not just among our students) for a reason.
3. Our Test Simulation Booklet. We added this to make sure that our students could practice using the same sort of laminated booklet and marker that they’ll have to use on test day. It’s been a hit with students.
4. Manual Stopwatches. We’ve provided an online stopwatch for practice for years. However, some of our students reported that they sometimes found themselves practicing away from a computer, so we’ve now added stopwatches with lap functions to the set of materials that each student receives.
5. Essay Rating Software. We now provide our course students access to the same essay-grading software that GMAC itself uses.

We have made many other improvements large and small during this same period (e.g. we revised our online labs, etc.). We have internalized the cost of these improvements over the past 2 years, and are only now modifying our pricing to reflect some of our increased costs.

Again, this isn’t something we like to do. Still, we do take some comfort in the fact that we are yet providing what we feel is the best GMAT prep course available at a price that remains competitive with the market rate (e.g. Kaplan) while still maintaining our industry-leading Instructor compensation ($100+/hour).

If you’re reading this and were considering signing up for a course in the next few months, try to get in before March 1st. 🙂

(Our pricing is somewhat lower in Los Angeles and Austin due to pre-existing commitments we’ve made. So if you’re in one of these two areas, you not only get sunshine, you get a bargain on your GMAT course!)

Our 3rd Edition Strategy Guides have been out for about a month now, and the feedback has been tremendously positive. Most of the feedback has centered on the obvious additions (e.g. advanced chapters of math content, new idiom list), which have been welcome to many students.

At the same time, we’re very conscious of the balance of giving students all the resources they would need without overwhelming them. It held us back from adding certain esoteric topics that we thought would be more trouble to students than they’d be worth on the test.

Right now we’re also working on a couple more math guides (one as a Math Refresher, one for very Advanced Math Topics), and are considering how best to add them to the curriculum without swamping students.

I’m sure someone reading this is thinking “I want the stuff MGMAT decided not to print!” To which I’d respond in my best GMAT Teacher Voice, “Think depth, not breadth. You’re much better off knowing 100 problems/topics in your bones rather than kind of knowing 500.”

To this end, one change we’re already considering for the next printing of the 3rd Edition Strategy Guides is to move all Advanced Content and accompanying In Action problems to the back of each book, as opposed to the end of each chapter. This physical separation may help keep students from knocking themselves out too early on.

Also, we plan on fixing some of the typos sharp-eyed students have found. 🙂

A recent Washington Post article heavily referenced ManhattanGMAT, and even included a snippet of video from our Washington D.C. location. If you squint, you can see a couple of ManhattanGMAT Instructors, and our Strategy Guides make a star turn. 🙂

The article itself discusses more generally how it’s a very competitive landscape out there as people seek shelter from the recession in the oasis of business school.

We are very proud to announce that ManhattanGMAT’s New York office will host an Admissions Panel next week consisting of Admissions officers from 3 of the world’s top business schools. Ainsley Parker, Associate Director of MBA Admissions at Wharton, Yhana Chavis, Assistant Director of Admissions at Kellogg, and Heather Daly, Senior Associate Director of MBA Admissions at Stern will be participating. Our very own Chris Ryan will be the moderator.

This event is free on Thursday night, November 6th at 7 p.m. – click here for more info or to sign up. Space is limited, so first-come-first-edified!

After months of work, the 3rd Edition Strategy Guides have landed! The new guides include 200+ new pages of material spread over 8 books. We’re always trying to offer the most sophisticated and thorough preparation materials around, and these books reflect hundreds of hours of development work by some of our best Instructors.

If you want an inside look, go to the MGMAT Store and click on the individual books to look at .pdfs of the first chapter of each book. There’s a lot of new advanced content (not in the .pdfs so much, but in the books themselves!).

There’s no rest for us though, as we’re hard at work on a GMAT math refresher (working title “Foundations of GMAT Math”) as well as something for the really hardcore math types.  There’s also a rumor that the 12th Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review comes in March, so it could be that Strategy Guides 3.1/4.0 will be on the way early next year.