GMAT Course FAQ

Studies indicate that applicants who prepare for the GMAT score substantially higher than those who don't. In addition to the admissions process, GMAT scores are also considered in the process of awarding financial assistance to students. A good GMAT score can save you thousands of dollars in tuition.

The importance of GMAT scores in the admissions process is increasing, given the competitiveness of incoming classes each year. That development is also evidenced in comments by Professor Feldberg, former Dean of Columbia Business School, who stated that it is the school's objective to raise average GMAT scores of incoming students to 700 over the next few years.

We are frequently asked about the advantages of preparing with us rather than with books and CDs, which are available in countless numbers. We readily admit that you can prepare well with such materials - that is, if you do not need a top score on the test. We guarantee that everyone who takes our course will receive a higher score than if they study exclusively with store bought texts.

The weakness of preparing only with books and CDs is that such materials are written for the mass market. The majority of these applicants are not applying to top business schools. As such, the authors of the books target the average MBA applicant and leave out more complicated tips and tricks, which can make the difference between an average test score and an excellent one.

In sum, preparing for the GMAT with our course has the following major advantages over preparing with books and CDs:

• We offer tips & tricks, not readily available in common test preparation literature.
• No book or CD will answer your questions, walk you through the most efficient means of getting the right answer, or grade your analytical writing assessments upon your request.
• Visualization and discussion in a seminar environment will enable you to recognize complex structures better than learning the same material in a non-interactive way.
• The priceless opportunity to talk to actual individuals who have been admitted to an Ivy League Universities offers you the insights you can gain nowhere else.
• You will be more motivated and have more fun during the preparation!

The Official Guide includes questions from old tests and gives you some sense of the way the test makers think. We, therefore, do recommend purchasing the Official Guide, and you should look through it at some point during your preparation. However, the questions in the Official Guide may not representative of the difficulty level that you will face on the test when you look for score in the range of 700 or above. Courses based mainly on the Official Guide will not prepare you sufficiently to reach such a great result.

The reason those courses use the Official Guide is that such providers do not want to go through the painstaking and expensive process of developing their own material. In addition to failing to prepare you adequately for the more difficult questions, there is a tendency for such courses to be taught by only one teacher. Manhattan Review, with its focus on quality instruction, will strive to have a different instructor for the verbal and quantitative parts, not only because there are rarely teachers that have achieved teaching excellence in both, but also to provide you with a refreshing change in teaching style. Needless to say, it would be much cheaper for us to waive such strict rules, but - unlike our competitors - we look for an uncompromised learning experience for our course participants.

Conventional prep courses that spread their classroom time over a course of several weeks are suitable for students who would like to pace themselves and digest new knowledge over time. However, for some super-busy professionals, conventional prep courses have some negatives as students forget what they have learned from week to week and have to spend practice time in class.

At Manhattan Review, we believe that both programs can be right for different students. Our long courses will offer students in-depth problem diagnoses while our intensive courses provide key strategies for the test and each section. Also, our materials are finely tuned to be both taught and learned in various time spans. The successes of our past students, is a testimony to the fact that intensive courses indeed allow enough time to adequately prepare for the GMAT.

Although some of the standard quantitative techniques we teach might be repetitive for you, many parts of the course focus on more advanced and lesser-known techniques to increase the accuracy of your answers. The course contains many aspects commonly neglected in the studies of mathematics at universities. For example, do you know how to find out the remainder of a number when divided by 17?