ManhattanGMAT, shortly after opening a center in our nation’s current capital, is proud to announce the opening of another location in our nation’s original capital. Worry no longer, denizens of Philadelphia, for ManhattanGMAT has scheduled a preview class on August 21st at 6:30pm and a 9-session course (with accompanying trial session) set to begin the following week, August 28th also at 6:30pm.

We are also pleased to announce that the preview class and the 9-session course will be taught by ManhattanGMAT’s first hire and current CEO, Andrew Yang. To register for any of the sessions, simply follow any of the links above.

ManhattanGMAT is growing by leaps and bounds, and we are constantly searching for new Instructors.

It is a very hard thing to become a ManhattanGMAT Instructor; one must have a 99th percentile real GMAT score (now a 760+) and prior teaching experience to even be considered. Of those who satisfy these requirements and audition, we take about 1 in 5. Instructors must then complete training of approximately 100 hours before they are given a class or a tutoring student.

If that sounds like an awfully daunting selection and training process, it is! But we make it worth people’s while; in order to attract and retain instructors that are this talented, we pay $100/hr, by far the highest in the industry. And our selectivity has paid off – it is not an exaggeration to say that our outstanding Instructors are the main reason we have been so successful as a company. Feel free to check out their bios here.

If YOU know someone you think may be interested in applying to us, send them our way! As they apply, let us know that you referred them by e-mailing jobs@manhattanprep.com/gmat/, and have them mention you. If we hire your friend and they begin teaching for us, we will pay you an “Instructor Bounty” of $1,000! That’s right, you can finally take advantage of having brilliant friends who happen to be outstanding teachers!

The information your friends needs to apply can be found here, as well as a list of locations for which we are hiring. And if you don’t have any friends that fit the bill yet, go find one!

As first announced on businessweek.com, ManhattanGMAT is officially arriving in Washington D.C.! Our first open house will take place next Thursday, July 19th at 6:30 p.m. And our first course will begin the following Saturday, July 28th, taught by veteran ManhattanGMAT Instructor Eric Caballero.

We are awfully excited to FINALLY be able to serve the students in our nation’s capital!

Last night saw the Business School Admissions panel here in New York, with Admissions officers from Harvard, Kellogg, NYU Stern, and Wharton in attendance. Each school aired a presentation highlighting the specific features of its MBA program, and then answered questions for over 140 prospective students in a lively Q & A session.

We will be posting some of the insights generated via the panel in this space in the coming days. One early tidbit – Harvard is reducing the total number of essays it requires, and also increasing flexibility to give applicants more choices for essay topics (2 required + 3 chosen from a number of different topics).

Andrea Mitchell Kimmel, Associate Director MBA Admissions at Harvard Business School answers a question, as Ellen Kim of Kellogg and Alison Goggin of NYU Stern look on.

The event was tremendous, and we’d like to thank our panelists for sharing their time. Again, we will be posting additional points raised and addressed by the panelists in the days to come.

Also, while we’re thanking people, here’s a picture of the organizer of the panel, Jessica Eliav (on the right), Director of Corporate Accounts for ManhattanGMAT, with Katie Buongiorno from the Marketing Department. Kudos to a great event!

Due to an immense level of interest, we are going to be capping attendance at our Business School panel on June 21st here in New York (Admissions officers from Harvard, NYU, Kellogg, and the recently added Wharton are scheduled to attend). If you missed out this time, we will be having another similar panel here in New York later in the year. If you’re already coming, see you on the 21st!

A recent article appeared on Businessweek.com that described some of the major GMAT Test prep options out there, and ManhattanGMAT was prominently featured.   If you missed it, click here to check it out.

The next Business School Admissions Panel discussion will take place on Thursday, June 21st, from 7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. at ManhattanGMAT’s Chelsea Center (138 West 25th St.).

Admissions Officers from Harvard, Kellogg (Northwestern), and NYU Stern will be in attendance to discuss the business school admissions process. They will also be advising applicants on what one should and shouldn’t be doing to prepare.

I will post again with the link to sign-up for this FREE panel discussion in the coming week or so. Watch out for it, as this event will be first-come first-serve until it reaches capacity.

We are VERY proud to announce that the new ManhattanGMAT Test Simulation Booklet is now available! It is virtually identical to the real thing used in the Pearson Vue testing centers, complete with marker. So now, you can practice with the confidence that you won’t be the least bit surprised by the nature of the laminated booklet they give you on test day.

Though it’s a small thing, we’re very glad to be able to remove one more variable or bit of uncertainty for students in their preparation.

If you’d like to check it out or pick up a copy, click here.

One of our students (a very bright guy from the McKinsey corporate class) last month described a common problem with studying for the GMAT. He wanted to sit down and do timed blocks of practice questions, but it was cumbersome for him to use a stopwatch and time each ‘lap’ or question precisely, particularly when working out of the Official Guide. It was also an issue to record his answer choices for each question for when he wanted to review the set. He suggested that we come up with a practice center interface that would simply let students take timed practice sets of questions.

Not being too proud to immediately run with someone else’s idea, we decided to do just that! In our practice center, starting May 1st, students will find a blank interface that will simply record and time their answers to a series of questions, with the questions determined by the student. This way, students can work out of the Official Guide and still get practice with selecting answer choices on a computer screen (as with the real GMAT test), as well as have each of their questions precisely timed and recorded.

We hope that this ‘stopwatch’ proves helpful to all of our students. We will also have something interesting that one can do with the right and wrong answers from Official Guide questions in the next couple of weeks (hint – it involves an Excel spreadsheet that records one’s progress through the Official GMAT Review Guides . . . )

Last week, I was speaking to a student at the beginning of a course, when she made a surprising comment. She mentioned that she had completed a Kaplan course, but was seeing the Official Guides for the first time with us. Even though many of our students are refugees from Kaplan, I still found myself stunned at this; how could she have completed a full GMAT class without ever seeing the only publicly released questions from GMAC?

It turns out that Kaplan, for some reason, does not use the Official Guides! The only plausible reason I can think of for this is that the Official Guides, as the exclusive property of GMAC, cost a substantial amount of money to provide to students. There is no real ‘licensing’ of the content; you simply have to buy the books and give them to students.

Apparently Kaplan, looking at the vast number of students it would have to buy books for, decided that its own materials were superior to those provided by the writers and administrators of the actual GMAT test. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still find myself a little bit chagrined at Kaplan’s response to a choice between serving your students and serving the bottom line. It may represent, in some small part, the difference between the priorities of a large public company that has to hit numbers every quarter and those of a smaller, privately owned enterprise that can focus on providing the best offering possible.