Please sign up for each session separately via the links below. Space is limited!

Part One: The GMAT vs. GRE and Setting a Goal Score (October 16)

Taking the GMAT or GRE exam is a crucial part of your application to business school. Nearly every top MBA program will accept either one—so, which one should you take? Join us to learn the differences between these exams, how schools feel about them, and which one is right for you. We will also discuss how you should be setting a goal score for either exam based on your goals and target MBA programs.

Part Two: How to Get a Top Score on the GMAT/GRE (October 18)

How do you get a “Harvard-level” GMAT or GRE score? What level of difficulty should you be prepared to face? Join Manhattan Prep’s expert GMAT and GRE instructors to see the toughest content on both tests and strategies for succeeding at these levels.

Part Three: Long-Term Planning for Your MBA Applications (October 23)

It is not too early to start planning! By taking action now, you can dramatically improve your chances of gaining admission to a top MBA program in the coming years. Indeed, it is never too soon (and certainly not too late) to take several crucial steps to shape your MBA candidacy.

These live webinars will run from 8:30 to 10:00 p.m. EDT. Attendees of each event will receive access to a checklist of takeaways and to-dos so you can put what you learned into action.

Do not miss this chance to start your MBA journey early so that you are prepared to submit your most compelling application next year. Enroll for free today!

The post Next Year Starts Now: A New Webinar Series for 2019–2020 MBA Applicants! first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

We know you have questions as you prepare to begin the application process.

The leaders in the MBA admissions space—mbaMission and Manhattan Prep—are coming together to make sure you will be ready for the 2018–2019 MBA admissions season. Join us for a free, six-part online event series that will answer all of your MBA admissions questions—from taking the GMAT (or GRE) to assessing your MBA profile and eventually applying (and being accepted) to the school of your dreams!

During the live online series, Senior Consultants from mbaMission will address and explain different significant admissions issues, while experts from Manhattan Prep will help you tackle some of the toughest challenges GMAT and GRE test takers face, offering valuable insight and advice.

These live online events will be held twice a week from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. EDT.

Please sign up for each session separately* via the links below. Space is limited.

• Step 1—Tuesday, April 17, 2018: Should I Take the GMAT or the GRE?
  Applying to business school is a process rife with decisions, and a common one giving candidates some serious pause these days is which exam to take—the GMAT or the GRE? As the number of programs accepting the GRE continues to grow, aspiring MBAs are becoming more and more confused about this element of the application process. During this live session, learn how the two tests differ, which test specific MBA programs accept, how the content and scores relate, and other useful details—and move a little closer to crossing another important decision off your to-do list!
• Step 2—Thursday, April 19, 2018: Which MBA Program Is Right for Me?
  During this event, mbaMission will elaborate on areas that will profoundly affect both your academic life and your social life in business school, including flexibility of a program’s curriculum, breadth of core courses, different methods of instruction, and varying sizes of the cohorts. Start preparing now so you can be sure to make an educated decision when you apply!
• Step 3—Tuesday, April 24, 2018: What Factors Will Help Get Me into a Top MBA Program?
  In this session, learn to assess the quantitative and qualitative factors you bring to the table to better anticipate how you might be viewed by the admissions committee at the school of your dreams…and what you can do to improve that assessment!
• Step 4—Thursday, April 26, 2018: How Do I Get a Top Score on the GMAT or the GRE? 
  What is a “Harvard”-level score on the GMAT or the GRE? What level of difficulty should you be prepared to face to attain that score? Join our expert GMAT and GRE instructors to see the toughest content on both exams. Plus, learn strategies for overcoming it and achieving your goal score.
  
• Step 5—Tuesday, May 1, 2018: How Do I Write a Standout MBA Essay?
  How can you write essays that grab the attention of MBA admissions committees? In this session, mbaMission will use this simple but often perplexing question as the starting point to a workshop for prospective business school applicants. Attendees will walk through a series of exercises that challenge them to uncover their personal and nuanced stories, craft compelling opening statements, develop meaningful goal statements, connect their goals to their target school’s resources, and more.
• Step 6—Wednesday May 2, 2018: Top MBA Admissions Directors Answer Your Questions!
  During the final installment of our six-part series, mbaMission’s founder/president, Jeremy Shinewald, will facilitate a Q&A session with admissions directors at four of the top-5 business schools in the United States. Jeremy will take and share questions from attendees, while Bruce DelMonico (assistant dean and director of admissions at Yale SOM), Amanda Carlson (assistant dean of admissions at CBS), Kelsey Bergren (assistant director of admissions outreach at Chicago Booth) and Dawna Levenson (director of admissions at MIT Sloan) offer invaluable insight and advice.

We hope you will join us for these valuable events. Enroll for free today!
* Event recordings will be sent to all registrants within one week of the registered event’s completion.

The post Get All Your MBA Application Questions Answered in This Six-Part Online Event Series! first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

The post Your Dream MBA: 5 Steps to Getting In Webinar Series first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

If and are consecutive positive integers, and:

which of the following represents all the possible values of ?

(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
(E)

Verbal (SC)

For all his professed disdain of such activities, Auden was an inveterate literary gossip.

(A) For all his professed disdain of such activities
(B) Having always professed disdain for such activities
(C) All such activities were, he professed, disdained, and
(D) Professing that all such activities were disdained
(E) In spite of professions of disdaining all such activities

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The post GMAT Question of the Day (Nov 5): Algebra and Sentence Correction first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

The article explores in depth some of the issues we've heard before: there's a dearth of tenured female professors, female students are often less assertive in class, b-school life revolves heavily around alcohol and partying, etc.

It also sheds light on efforts to achieve more gender equity that we haven't heard about previously, such as the recent inclusion of stenographers in the classroom to guard against biased grading; hand-raising coaching for female students; and new grading software tools that let professors instantly check their calling and marking patterns by gender.

Readers may remember that HBS celebrated the 50th anniversary of admitting women to the two-year MBA program this past spring, and several articles at the time reported that despite the notable milestone, many inequalities still persist.

But what has really some ruffled feathers are the social elements discussed in the article---things like Section X, a secret society made up of über wealthy, mostly international, and mostly male students; or the reported incidents of sexual harassment; or how female students frequently scale back on class participation in order to protect their "social capital" in the dating scene.

While the article is certainly an eye-opener on many fronts, we've seen at least two rebuttals published in the HBS student news outlet The Harbus that paint a different picture of campus life. In "It Will Be OK", second-years Becky Cooper Nadis and Alana Hedlund assure first-year students that the campus environment is much more inclusive for women and people of differing socio-economic backgrounds than the NY Times article would leave readers to believe.

Second-year student Eric Lonstein offers another version of the "Culture at HBS" and believes Times writer Jodi Kantor should have looked beyond the sensationalist extremes of bad behavior because, he says, "the majority of people I know at HBS are thoughtful, caring, courageous, inclusive, and remarkably intelligent leaders."

Is the problem solely gender? Or is it really more a social or class divide, as Kantor suggests in a companion article. And the problem isn't limited to HBS; this week we've also seen an article quoting a Stanford GSB professor who says "The Boozy MBA Party Culture Needs to Change." Bloomberg Businessweek, meanwhile, asks "When Did Business School Become All About the Parties?" And US News chimes in with the opinion that "Harvard Business School Must Improve Student Culture" and should take a page from Yale School of Management when it comes to valuing intellectual curiosity over status and material goods.

The debate over the accuracy of the entire article will no doubt continue, but it's worth celebrating the fact that at least some of the measures initiated with the HBS Class of 2013 to improve gender equity have delivered on their promise.

The post Gender or Social Gap: What’s the Real Issue at HBS? first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

The playlist was created based on a Stanford study that shows that certain types of music engage different areas of the brain and can improve skills such as paying attention, making predictions, and memory.

Check out Wash U’s blog post on Spotify Playlist here.

An Attention Enhancing Study Playlist provided by @WashULaw, an online LL.M Degree

Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

Accepted.com's experienced admissions consultants can help you create the most impressive application possible with comprehensive packages, or provide targeted assistance from picking perfect programs to designing a dazzling resume, constructing engaging essays, or preparing for intense interviews…and more! Accepted.com has guided thousands of applicants to acceptances at top MBA programs since 1994 – we know what works and what doesn't, so contact us to get started now!

This article originally appeared on the Accepted Admissions Consulting Blog, the official blog of Accepted.com.

The post Music Playlist Proven to Boost Your Scores! first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

The World’s Best Online Course

e-GMAT celebrates a major milestone this week – 1500 kudos and 135 reviews on GMAT Club.

Now get the world's best line course at an incredible price of $199 - a 65% discount over the list price. The course now includes 7 mock tests,  4,000 questions, all the instruction that you need for GMAT Verbal as well as Integrated Reasoning combined with the world’s best analytics. The best thing – the course comes with mocks and GMAT Club tests ($250 value). To make the deal even sweeter, we have also included GMAT Verbal Workshop ($49 value) in the course.

Whether you are someone who is looking to jump start his/her preparation or someone who is looking to boost his/her score 10 days before the exam, this course will get you there with 50+ hours of effort. Check out our success stories for evidence of past success. Here are some key features of the course.

Competitive Comparison

Key Features:

Completely online, accessible from anywhere:
The e-GMAT courses are accessible from anywhere as long as you have internet connection with speed128Kbps or higher.

100+ hours of instruction covering all aspects of GMAT Verbal: Verbal Online includes our Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension and Integrated Reasoning eLearning courses and 1 year of 800score membership including 5 full length mock exams.

Most updated course:

Heard about the new “meaning based question-types” on GMAT Sentence Correction? Well it was not new for e-GMAT customers. The e-GMAT course had 33 such questions in August 2010 itself since our course was based on OG 12 and not on an older incarnation. We continuously update our course based on the updates from GMAC so you can be rest assured that you study from most relevant material.

Proper practice makes you perfect. The course provides you ample practice on the entire GMAT curriculum. And these are “gmat like questions” that you can take any time as per your convenience.

Foundation concepts:
You need a solid foundation if you plan to attain new heights on GMAT. To help you master these key skills we have designed concepts such as Sentence Structure, Logical Structure of arguments, & Pre-thinking for assumptions.

Learn from full time instructors:
Helping you succeed on GMAT is all we do. So when you work with us, you can be rest assured that you will be working with someone who is dedicated to your success. How does this make a difference in your prep– ask our customers who have interacted with us and you will know.

Hassle free return policy:
We are a small company and we like to keep things simple. If you don’t like our course, let us know and we will refund the money to you, as long as you have attempted less than 33% of our course. We are reasonable people and don’t want your money if you don’t like our product.

More Successful in Helping Non-Natives Succeed

More non natives succeed using e-GMAT's courses than do using courses from all other test prep companies combined

Testimonials

Sumeet Vatsav (730, V39): “E-GMAT is blessing. Loved it! They cleared my -Ing modifier dilemma and As vs Like curse. Please give standing ovation to Rajat, Payal and the E-gmat team!” Click here to view his debrief on GMATClub.

Mahesh: It’s not enough to know all the rules, you need to know how to apply the rules. That’s where e-GMAT shines. I would not have been able to get into the 700 club without e-GMAT. Thanks to BB, I registered for SC course on e-gmat. Excellent course. If only I had a time machine and I could go back 2 months in time, I would have joined e-gmat SC course on day 1 of my preparation.

Jai Chandra Reddy: The live classes on Prethinking were amazing. The process of thinking yourself is amazing. If you take any other course, or read the book, you will take twice the time.

Payal's phone interview with Jai Chandra Reddy (GMATClub: icaniwill) GC Testimonial link: click here

Success Stories

e-gmat course has helped many acheive their dream score. Let us share a few success stories with you.

Vipul - VIPS0000 -

10 days to go- thanks to some really twisted questions posted without OAs by some members, my confidence was shaken and I looked for some more help in SC. Thanks to BB, I registered for SC course on e-gmat. Excellent course. If only I had a time machine and I could go back 2 months in time, I would have joined e-gmat SC course on day 1 of my preparation.

Pooja Jolie (GC: pjolie)

About e-gmat Verbal: At this time, I decided that I needed a prep course to boost my verbal. After considering Vertias, MGMAT and Kaplan, I decided on e-GMAT’s live course because of its focus on verbal. This course took my preparation to the next level.

SC course: The SC concepts that I learned through MGMAT were crystal clear after going through this course. Two other things helped me a lot on SC. Firstly the fact that the course is very heavy on application. There are these application files that don’t teach you anything but to apply what you have learned. Secondly, they have this OG solutions video course that is awesome. SC articles by Shraddha form egmat were really helpful too.

CR course: The CR course when combined with live sessions is really good too. It helped me weave through the logic of arguments and provided me an approach for most CR questions types. My accuracy just shot up. I would definitely recommend this course if you need help on verbal. This course played a major role in improving my verbal from 30 to 42.

Gurpreet Singh (GC: gurpreetsingh)

I joined E-gmat course and found it very useful. I saw improvement in verbal after e-gmat course. The live sessions of RAJAT on strategy and CR are awesome. Payal and Shraddha are no less than Stacy and Ron of MGMAT. No doubt no one knows more than these two experts of Mgmat, but sometimes I used to find their replies too technical to grasp. On the other hand - the lives sessions of Payal and Shraddha were awesome. Their articles and replies on the questions are fabulous. REALLY something that helps you to learn the concepts. I would highly recommend e-gmat for non natives, not only the course but also the replies and articles of its representatives.

Saurabh (GC:SOURH7WK)

I subscribed for e-gmat verbal live course and started once again my preparation for 4th attempt. After I subscribed to E-gmat course I realized my shortfalls in my verbal strategy. The course was very very helpful to bring up my V23 score to V40. And I would fully attribute my verbal success to e-gmat.

SC course: A ton of thanks to the ace teachers of e-gmat (Rajat, Payal & Shraddha) for putting up their efforts in this forum too. I got everything I needed to crack SC and RC (the RC strategy worked very well with me). Knowledge of sentence structure & attacking SC question by splitting the clauses was the key in improving on SC.

The post Verbal Online first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

Learn what to read now to best prepare yourself for GMAT Reading Comprehension

Not surprisingly, one of the very best ways to prepare for GMAT Reading Comprehension is simply to read, preferably from a high-quality reading list of GMAT-style material.  If you have only a few weeks between now and the GMAT, you probably should stick to GMAT RC passages for practice.  If, though, you have several months between now and your GMAT, you can afford to invest time in reading for the GMAT.  If you don't like to read, that is all the more reason why you have to read, to get your mind in shape for the reading you will have to do on the GMAT.

What to read for the GMAT

First of all, what subject areas would be relevant?  All GMAT Reading Comprehension passages fall into one of four areas

1.  Physical Sciences

2.  Biological Sciences

3.  Social Sciences

4.  Business

A good reading plan for the GMAT should cover all four of these areas, and should all be material written at a high level of English usage.  While reading a Wikipedia article about a science topic you don't understand might stretch your mind, there's no guarantee the grammar or the choice of vocabulary will be of the highest quality.

The easiest area for which to make a recommendation is business, and there are more Reading Comprehension passages on this in the OG than on any of the other three categories.  If you are planning to go to Business school, get an MBA, and pursue a corporate career, you already should be reading the Wall Street Journal newspaper every day and the Economist magazine every week.  If you have never taken economics, it would be worthwhile to get either an Economics text book or some other introductory books, such as Yoram Bauman's Cartoon Introductions to Micro and Macroeconomics.  Those latter two books may not be at the highest level of English usage, but if you are lacking a strong background in economics, those books would be an excellent way to catch up.

For both the physical and biological sciences, Scientific American is an excellent source.  If you have a relative weak background in the natural sciences in general, pushing yourself through Scientific American articles could be excellent training for wrestling with similar passage on the GMAT.  If you are more ambitious, get your hands on a textbook (borrow from a friend or from the library) and force yourself to read a couple chapters.

For the social sciences, unfortunately most popularly available publications (e.g. Psychology Today) are not nearly academic enough.  Occasionally, the New York Times will cover an academic social science issue; in particular, if the Sunday NYT Book Review reviews a book about social science, that can be good material to read.  Here, unfortunately, there is no analog to the Economist magazine or Scientific American.  If you really want social science reading practice, I have to banish you to the academic journals.  Go to a good academic library, and peruse the highly respected social science journals: yes, this will be very dry and cerebral, but if you can stomach these, then anything the GMAT throws at you will seem easy.  You may also try this open access listing of online academic journals.

How to read for the GMAT

You know a question the GMAT Reading Comprehension almost invariably asks is the "main idea" question, so whatever you read, you should constantly be in the habit of summarizing the main idea(s) and the roles of each paragraph.  That's a bare minimum.

Ideally, you will find a GMAT reading partner.  Then, if both of you struggle through the same article, you can quiz each other on the main idea, you can discuss points of view and tone and details.  If you are very ambitious, you can every start to write full practice GMAT Reading Comprehension for each other.  (If you practice having to create four tempting and credible-sounding wrong answers for each question you write, that process will give you great insight into the patterns that the GMAT uses in crafting its wrong answers.)

Here's a practice social science GMAT Reading Comprehension question:

1) https://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/1215

This post was written by Mike McGarry, GMAT expert at Magoosh, and originally posted here.

The post GMAT Reading List first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

If and are consecutive positive integers, and:

which of the following represents all the possible values of ?

(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
(E)

Verbal (SC)

For all his professed disdain of such activities, Auden was an inveterate literary gossip.

(A) For all his professed disdain of such activities
(B) Having always professed disdain for such activities
(C) All such activities were, he professed, disdained, and
(D) Professing that all such activities were disdained
(E) In spite of professions of disdaining all such activities

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The post GMAT Question of the Day (Nov 8): Algebra and Sentence Correction first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.

What is the difference between these two GMAT tasks?

Some GMAT Reading Comprehension passages or AWA questions will have a "compare and contrast" type question.  Others will ask us to compare "the pros and cons" or "the benefits and liabilities" or "the advantages and drawbacks" of a particular decision or plan or strategy.  Students sometime wonder: what is the difference between these two tasks?

First of all, let's consider a concrete example.  Suppose the topic is the New Deal programs initiated in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  This was a series of programs to combat the worst effects of the Great Depression as well as some of the problems in the financial system that caused it.  It produced numerous public works across the country, as well as systems that are still in place today, including both the Social Security System and the Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC).  (Incidentally, both of those are systems with which you should have at least passing familiarity before taking the GMAT.)  Politically, the New Deal is a charged topic, as American liberals would tend to valorize it as one of the great examples of a government program doing good for the public, and American conservatives would tend to vilify it as one of the worst examples of "big government" increasing spending and doing the jobs that private industry could have handled.  This is a complex topic with lots of room for disagreement.

Compare and Contrast

Any "compare and contrast" question is going to ask you to compare and contrast the New Deal with something else.  That's the big idea of "compare and contrast": it's always an external comparison, a comparison of the thing you are discussing to some completely new thing.

For example, you might be asked to compare and contrast the New Deal with some other social or political program in the United States: Reconstruction, or L.B.J's Great Society, or Obamacare.  Alternately, you might be asked to compare the New Deal with a major social program in some other country, for example, the Great Leap Forward in China, or Gorbachev's Perestroika.  You would be asked to "compare" --- that is, find similarities between the New Deal and the other program --- as well as "contrast" --- that is, find differences between the New Deal and the other program.

Any similarity could be a good thing both share, or a bad thing both share, or something neutral that they both share.  Any contrast or difference might be something good that one plan included and the other lacked, or might be a bad effect of one that wasn't a bad effect of the other.  In other words, either comparing or contrasting could make the New Deal look either very good or not-so-good, and any particular comparison or contrast might be completely value-neutral and objective, simply stating a similarity or difference that doesn't engender strong judgments.  Neither the word "compare" nor the word "contrast" necessarily mean either something good or something bad.

Here's a GMAT RC practice question in which doesn't use the word "compare" buy asks you to discern what makes a newer study different from earlier research.

1) https://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/1231

Pros and Cons

Any question about "pros and cons" or "benefits and liabilities" or "advantages and drawbacks" is asking you to talk only about features of the New Deal.  That's the big idea of "pros and cons": it's always an internal comparison, a comparison of one feature of the thing you are discussing to some other feature of the same thing.  Unlike "compare and contrast", this is definitely about good vs. bad.  A "pro" or "benefit" or "advantage" of the New Deal is about something you (or the author of the passage) believe is a good thing, a worthwhile thing, something worth admiring and emulating.  A "con" or "liability" or "disadvantage" of the New Deal is something you (or the author of the passage) believe is a bad thing, an unfortunate or problematic aspect, something to repudiate and avoid in the future.

Unlike "compare and contrast", an analysis of "pros and cons" necessarily involves value-judgments.  Value-judgments about something as charged as the New Deal could be contentious.  American liberals might think the New Deal a "holy cow," replete with benefits, and might be hard pressed to formulate any criticism beyond something like "it should have gone further."  American conservatives, by contrast, might consider the New Deal a colossal failure, the worst example of bloated government overspending, and might be at a loss to find anything at all positive about it.  The big idea: in considering "pros and cons", both the liberal and the conservative are focused only on qualities of the New Deal itself, pluses and minuses of this program only, without bringing in any comparison to anything outside the New Deal.

Of course, the GMAT is certainly not a place for you to air your own political biases, whatever they may be, but it may well be that in a particular Reading Comprehension, the author (through some subtle cues) will indicate something about his or her own political leanings, and discerning this can be invaluable in answering inference questions.

Here's a practice RC question that doesn't use the word "pros and cons" but asks you to make a value-judgment about someone's conclusions.

2) https://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/1228

This post was written by Mike McGarry, GMAT expert at Magoosh, and originally posted here.

The post Compare and Contrast vs. Pros and Cons on the GMAT first appeared on GMAT Club Blog.