In this video, Jen and Dave walk you through two typical GMAT Assumption questions — and outline an approach that can help you deal with all arguments on the GMAT Critical Reasoning section.
They start by breaking down each argument’s evidence and conclusion, then explain how a little pre-work can help you eliminate trap answers and identify right answers much more quickly. At the second question (4:30), press pause to try it out before Dave and Jen’s explanation.
This week, as part of our MBA Life on Youtube series, we thought we’d post a video on a super-intense joint degree program offered at some schools: the MD/MBA. And you thought business school was hard!
This video from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business features a student in Tuck’s MD/MBA program. Jessica Morgan ’10 discusses how an MBA can allow medical students to gain expertise in healthcare administration, and think beyond treating one patient to impact a wider range of patients on a larger scale.
If you’re interested in an MD/MBA program — or just interested in learning a bit more about Tuck’s MBA program — be sure to check this video out, and stay tuned for future MBA Life on Youtube posts!
In this Student Spotlight, meet Abhay Prasanna, an aspiring Operations Manager in the energy industry. Abhay’s hard work during his time in Knewton’s course certainly paid off when he scored an amazing 770 on the GMAT (Q51 V44) with an AWA score of 6.0. Read more about how Abhay did it below!
Name:
Abhay Prasanna
Hometown:
Bangalore, India
Current job?
Field Supervisor at an Oil & Gas firm
Why do you want to get an MBA?
At this juncture, I believe that an MBA is precisely what I need to obtain the skills necessary to manage an energy process, in a world of increasing demand and waning resources. As a leader of global operations, I would be optimizing production within efficient budgets, as well as managing a strong workforce and ensuring employee development. An MBA would set the foundations in finance, management and strategy – the core of any business, as well as provide me with the opportunity to take part in team projects that would find me solving live industrial problems and hone my analytical skills. I would benefit immensely from working in a team of international professionals from unique backgrounds.
What’s your dream job after b-school?
In the long run I’m hoping to become an Operations Manager in the Energy industry.
Can you tell us a bit about your experience prepping for the GMAT?
Time-frame: 2 months (took a break from work since I needed to move to a new city as well)
Sources: Grockit, Knewton course, BTG resources, OG, MGMAT SC guide, and other stuff I found around the web.
Strategy:
Month 1 – Practiced about 1500 questions in Grockit. The timed environment from the get-go really honed my speed. Interaction with other GMAT-takers was an added boon. Some of the discussions really helped improve my approaches. You need more than one approach for every problem so that you will never be completely stumped at a question. Did OG Diagnostic + GMATPrep1, and all the free CATs available.
Month 2 – Focused on content that I was weak in conceptually. Completed the Knewton course – this is an excellent online course that is perfectly structured. It helps you ensure you haven’t missed a question-type or are unaware of a concept. Did Knewton CATS 2-5 and MGMAT CATS 2-6. I attempted quite a few mock exams, and I stand by the fact that getting used to the time-constraints and improving your stamina is vital. My mock CAT scores ranged from 750-780 on average.
GMAT Score: 770 [Q51 V44] AWA 6.0
Any Knewton teacher shout-outs?
My favorites were Adam Sticklor, Rich Zwelling, and Alison Farrow. They made their classes so much fun!
Lightning Round: Favorite song right now?
I’m revisiting Air’s Moon Safari album, especially “All I Need”.
Data Sufficiency or Sentence Correction?
Data Sufficiency! I love how some of the questions are total curve-balls. Sentence Correction is a pain!
Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs. I want to see design taking more of a forefront in technological innovation.
Harry Potter or Twilight?
Harry Potter! I grew up with it and the world Rowling created is so much more involving and elaborate. Also, how badass is an arch-nemesis who cannot be named!
In this video, Jen and Dave break down the three most common question types on the GMAT Critical Reasoning section: Weakening, Strengthening, and Assumption questions.
They start by covering the structure that underlies all three question types, then show you two strategies for dealing with Assumption problems in particular: one, how to check the validity of an assumption by using the Negation Test, and two, how “pre-phrasing” can help you recognize an assumption in the answer choices much more quickly.
Stay tuned for the rest of the lesson, where Dave and Jen walk you through a full guide to CR questions and sample problems for each type.
One of the GMAT’s favorite ways to trip people up on the Sentence Correction section is to employ verbals where a verb is required. Verbals are words that look like verbs but function as nouns or modifiers.
Think of verbals as the long-lost cousins of verbs. They look similar and often appear in the same place in the sentence, but they serve very different functions.
To think of it another way — in the taxonomy of grammar, verbals are the genus, which can be broken down into the following species:
The GMAT tests our knowledge of verbals in four ways:
1) By treating verbals as verbs, creating sentence fragments.
Check out the sample sentence below:
The correct version of the sentence fragment above might read:
Although he specialized in large-scale commercial renovations, the contractor, who was licensed to work in this state as well as in several neighboring states, was painting the bathroom in the apartment building.
Here, “was painting” (helping verb + “-ing” form) acts as the main verb.
Now, on to the second way the GMAT tests our knowledge of verbals:
2) By matching verbals, which are singular when they function as nouns, with plural verbs.
The second sentence on the slide is correct because “skydiving,” a verbal acting as a singular noun, is matched with the singular “its” and “is.”
The third way the GMAT tries to trick test-takers with verbals is:
3) By misplacing verbals used as modifiers.
Does it make sense for “the boat” to be “drinking rum”? No! The “jolly pirates” are the ones boozing (as the picture clearly shows!). When a participial phrase begins a sentence, always check to see that it is modifying the noun directly after the comma.
Participial phrases at the end of the sentence don’t have to follow such strict rules, however:
Both sentences above are correct. When a participial phrase appears at the end of the sentence, just check to make sure it has a logical antecedent somewhere in the sentence.
Now, for the final way that the GMAT makes sure test-takers know their verbals:
4) By including verbals in constructions that require parallelism.
As you can see in the examples above, verbals that appear in a construction that requires parallelism must be in the same form.
Now that we’ve covered all four ways the GMAT tests your knowledge of verbals, check out the quick recap below.
In the fifth and final installment of Knewton’s Intro to GMAT Quant Lesson, expert teachers Jess and Rich give you a chance to try out some tricky Data Sufficiency questions involving ratios. They’ll also talk about proportions, and give you a list of common powers and common decimal-fraction-percentages equivalencies to memorize in order to save time on test day.
If you missed any of the previous lessons, be sure to check them out here!
Recently, b-schools have begun to post a ton of great resources online to help aspiring MBA students learn about their offerings.
If you’re interested in learning more about entrepreneurship in business school, for example, check out this video from Michigan Ross, about the process three of their students went through to start a successful business while still in school.
The company, Husk Insulation, aims to transform agricultural waste in high-grade, affordable insulation for the refrigeration industry. The students went on to win the MIT Clean Energy Prize, a national student competition founded by MIT, the U.S. Department of Energy and utility NSTAR.
The video discusses some common struggles faced by entrepreneurs, as well as the many lessons the founders of Husk have learned along the way.
An article in the Wall Street Journal indicated that newly minted MBA salaries and bonuses rose last year, a sign that employers are recruiting more intensely at business schools across the country:
“Students who graduated in 2010 received a median salary of $78,820, up from $66,694 for the class of 2009. Last year’s grads also reported bigger signing bonuses, a median of $13,318, nearly double the previous year. Still, both salaries and bonuses are down from prerecession levels.
The rebound speaks to the diversity of companies seeking to employ M.B.A.s, says Dave Wilson, president and chief executive officer of GMAC. ‘There are a lot of different players, other than just consulting and finance, in the M.B.A. marketplace,’ he says. Energy, clean technology, health care, government and nonprofit companies have all boosted their M.B.A. recruiting, he says. ‘And they are willing to pay more competitive salaries for an attractive M.B.A.’”
A few things to note about this trend:
1. Companies are still “cautiously optimistic.” Recruitment still hasn’t hit prerecession levels, but more banks and consulting firms are enticing MBAs with fancy “sell dinners.”
2. Recruiting is up across a broad range of industries. “Consulting is up, energy is up, banking is up,” says Julie Morton, associate dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
What this means for you: Given the current employment trend, an MBA degree is still a solid investment. Though MBA average total compensation figures may seem attractive to you, remember that the degree can cost up to 150k and that you are giving up 2 years’ worth of salary to invest in your education. Therefore, the salary jump is by no means magic.
While you should not necessarily be concerned about finding a job (especially if you attend a top-tier school), understand that you may not land your first-choice job out of an MBA program. Don’t forget that your peers in the program will also have passed through the hurdles of the admissions process and also have rich, exciting work experiences to boast of; and while MBA programs are generally supportive communities, you will have to compete with your peers if you intend to land the most prestigious jobs (the interview process is there for a reason).
Also be aware that your pre-MBA employment record is a significant factor in the recruitment process. You want to have a solid track record of success to point to on top of your educational pedigree, especially if you want to be competitive for the top banks and consulting firms. Considering all of this, the best thing you can do for yourself is to be extremely realistic about your skills, your work experience and how you intend to market yourself given the current economic climate.
Back in the days before the Internet, when teachers needed to give students important lists of facts or vocab words, they had few options other than handing out boring, photocopied sheets of paper. Needless to say, technology has progressed a bit since then.
Looking for a 21st-century way to spice up your lessons and engage your students? Check out tag clouds.
Tag clouds are similar to the “word clouds” that many news sites use to show the trending topics; they can scrape a website and pull all the terms that are used, and weight them by how many times they’re used. Tag clouds have one advantage over word clouds, though; they are all separate links to more information. There are several programs that can be used to create these tag clouds — I recommend Tagul because it’s easy to use and free for the first 20 clouds!
Soon I’ll post a step by step guide to creating tag clouds — but for now, check out these four awesome classroom applications. We’ve made all our tag clouds holiday-themed to help break up those mid-winter doldrums! Be sure to click around to get the full experience.
1. Valentine’s Day: SAT Vocab List
Vocabulary is one of the easiest, but most effective pedagogical uses of Tagul. Throw your favorite word list into the system, weigh the words by their importance, or difficulty, and link each word to its definition in your favorite online dictionary — I used dictionary.com. Check it out below: hovering over any word highlights it, and clicking on it takes you directly to the definition. You’ll have the snazziest vocabulary list your students have ever seen (and then, of course, you can teach them to make their own!).
Go further:
• Use the cloud for prefixes or suffixes and link to word lists.
• Create clouds for names, terms, dates, ideas.
• Have each student answer a survey and make a cloud of the results, link to an appropriate site so that other students can research the answers.
2. President’s Day: Matching Influence to Size
This tag cloud contains the names of all the U.S. Presidents. Sure, it looks good; but what does it do? Well, for one thing, it’s organized by time in office. The Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin) have a combined 6 terms of elected office, while lowly Garfield and Fillmore have but one. Secondly, every name links to the Wikipedia page about the president. Have your kids never heard of President Arthur? By the time they finish clicking through this tag cloud, they’ll know so much about him they’ll be calling him Chester! This tag cloud would be a great discussion piece for a social studies classroom.
Go further:
• Size the states by electoral representation
• Size the world leaders by the population of their country
• Size countries by their number of nuclear weapons (or Nobel prizes, or literacy rates, etc.)
3. Black History Month: Parse a Famous Speech
This tag cloud takes the text of the “I Have a Dream” speech and sorts it by word popularity. Tagul lets you scrub out common English words (“that”, “with”), so you’re left with pure semiotic history. You can see King’s religiosity (Isaiah, mountain, faith), his hopefulness (hope, justice, that giant freedom) and the historical details of the time (Alabama, Georgia, urgency, segregation).
Go further:
• Parse several speeches or articles and compare the clouds. Do certain words come up more often based on the speaker?
• Use this cloud method on short stories for close-reading.
• Consider politics and rhetoric; parse a speech or article from the past and a current one about the same topic.
4. The Egyptian Revolution: Media Literacy/Current Events
In this tag cloud, we’ve scraped the NY Times topic page on Egypt, which updates in real time as news about the country is published. If you click on an individual word in the cloud, it links to Google news search results for that word. This is a great way to illustrate the important players and themes in an ongoing news story.
Go further:
• Watch how current events develop over a day by rebuilding the cloud.
• Parse a sales website and see what words are used for persuasion.
• Teach digital literacy and politics; how can you parse a site to determine the “talking points” behind
Here’s another weekly MBA admissions tip from our friends at Clear Admit. For more advice about the b-school application process, check out their blog.
In addition to actively evaluating the applications of Round Two applicants at this time of year, many top programs revisit their Round One waitlists and consider the strength of those individuals with respect to the new information about the pool. While schools vary in their receptivity to correspondence from applicants, those programs that do welcome additional materials offer a great chance for waitlisted candidates to reaffirm their interest in the school and keep themselves fresh in the mind of the adcom.
With the notification dates for a number of second round schools coming up in a manner of weeks, we wanted to offer some tips to students who have been waitlisted at such programs while there’s still some time to tip the balance in their favor.
It’s clear that you should take advantage of this chance to add to your file, so the first real step is determining what you want – and need – to communicate in your waitlist correspondence. We suggest that you begin by revisiting your application with a critical eye. Being waitlisted is ultimately a positive sign of the strength of your candidacy, so it’s likely you’ve put together a very solid set of materials; you do, however, want to consider what you might have done to make your application even better. For instance, if your comments in your essays focused primarily on your work experience, you might want to convey some information about your outside interests and activities in your waitlist letter.
Another important aim is to cover new developments and recent improvements in your candidacy. For instance, have you made any progress toward your stated career goals? Visited the school? Taken on additional responsibility at work or in an extracurricular? Sharing impressive information about your work will help to underscore the idea that you are on an upward trajectory, while writing about additional steps you’ve taken to familiarize yourself with the program will emphasize your interest in attending.
In addition to considering content, presentation is also important. Rather than jotting off a few quick sentences to the adcom or the waitlist manager, you should treat any written contact as a formal element of your application, much like your essays, resume and data forms. This affords you a great chance to underscore your communication skills and ability to market yourself.
In addition, for valuable guidance about being on the waitlist, check out the Clear Admit Waitlist Guide. This guide will teach you to understand the ground rules of a program’s waitlist policy, formulate a plan to address weaknesses in your candidacy, craft effective communications to the admissions committee and explore every opportunity to boost your chances of acceptance. This 26-page PDF file, which includes school-specific waitlist policies and sample communication materials, is available for immediate download.
