Manhattan GMAT Blog

We’ve all heard various things about getting into business school. Is it true that only quant types get into Wharton and marketing types into Kellogg? Do alumni recommendations matter more than others? Is the third round really the dead zone in terms of getting into a selective school?

Well, if you want to know the real scoop on these and other issues, our admissions consulting partner mbaMission is holding Mythbusters events in Boston and Philadelphia next Thursday, March 18th, and online on March 23rd! All events are free and conducted by an experienced Admissions Consultant from mbaMission. Thanks to them for dispelling MBA Admissions myths everywhere!

Every day we see candidates vying to join the ranks of our Instructors here at Manhattan GMAT. We’ve exerted considerable effort in trying to identify what makes a teacher great, though we’ll admit that in practice, despite our developed body of insight, we rely substantially on the “you know it when you see it” technique. That’s one reason we fly all candidates to New York for their final round of auditions (approx. 1 out of 5 candidates that’s flown to New York gets an offer, so we spend a lot of time on this process).

The New York Times today published a fascinating article on the efforts to figure out what makes a good teacher and how to develop the qualities/techniques/knowledge necessary. There has long been a disconnect between professional education (i.e. teachers’ education programs) and success in the classroom, and the article details different researchers’ findings on what a ‘good teacher’ should know and should be doing. It’s something that’s overdue – in many aspects we feel that we in the test prep industry may have a leg up on many institutions in terms of focusing on the mechanics of effective teaching. There’s a shout-out in the article to The Equity Project, which was started by Zeke Vanderhoek, who also founded Manhattan GMAT in 2000.

Over time, our Instructors have written a number of articles about various GMAT-related substantive topics. Now, our Internet ace Michael Dinerstein has worked to transform several of those articles into online tutorials. For those of you who struggle with more than one continuous paragraph of text, your ship has come in!

In all seriousness, they’re a lot easier to make use of now. Kudos to Mike for bringing these awesome kernels of wisdom to students everwhere!

Businessweek recently hosted a chat with admissions officers from Kellogg, one of the most popular business schools for our students. We thought we’d pass the link along, as it’s always great to get insight directly from the people who will be reading applications. (Also, they mention that they just care about your highest GMAT score, so don’t fret if you didn’t knock it out of the park the first time!)

If you have ever downloaded our popular free GMAT flash cards, you might have been one of the many individuals who requested that we make this resource available as an iPhone/iPod Touch app. You also probably heard us tell you that we were working on developing this very app and were excited over the prospects of a mobile version of our flash cards. That apparently wasn’t good enough for you guys because you flooded our phone lines with requests to get the app out faster and with more features such as flagging cards right or wrong and shuffling the deck. We added those features to the docket, but it still didn’t prevent you from following us out of our office, clamoring over this flash cards iPhone app. “Create an interface that is enabled for gestures so you can flick the cards!” “Create an iPhone-friendly version of the Manhattan GMAT website!” “Build in functionality to cast spells, like Harry Potter!”

While we were baffled by the spell request, we implemented the other two suggestions and produced a flaggable, gesture-realistic, and self-contained version of our flash cards that is now available in the iTunes app store for free!

We hope this is finally enough for you guys because our email server is about to explode from all your flash cards requests. However, we know this isn’t the case and in a few months from now, you’ll probably be asking us to make a new version for the iPad. Well, we hope that these flash cards keep you busy for at least a little while.

Also, please remember to rate the cards in the app store!