GMAT Tip: Think Like the Testmaker Series, Volume 4 » Clear Admit: MBA Admissions Consultants Blog

APPLICANT RESOURCES

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Admissions Director Q&A
Below are links to Clear Admit's exclusive interviews with MBA admissions directors at leading programs.
Dawna Clarke (Tuck)
Rose Martinelli (Chicago)
Judith Hodara (Wharton)
Sara Neher (Darden)
Soojin Kwon Koh (Michigan)
Randall Sawyer (Cornell)
Beth Flye (Kellogg)
David Simpson (LBS)
Liz Riley Hargrove (Duke)
Linda Meehan (Columbia)
Bruce DelMonico (Yale)
Peter Johnson (Berkeley)
Isser Gallogly (NYU)
Mae Jennifer Shores (UCLA)
J.J. Cutler (Wharton)
Jake Cohen (INSEAD)
Rod Garcia (MIT Sloan)
Mary Miller (Columbia)

Clear Admit School Guides
Become an expert on your target schools overnight! Get the program-specific details you need to craft essays that stand out. See how schools compare head-to-head in key areas like recruiting, curricular structure, elective offerings and more. Available for immediate download. As featured in the Economist.

Clear Admit Career Guides
Understand career-specific offerings at leading MBA programs and identify the schools that will best support your career goals with the Clear Admit Career Guides! Available for Consulting, Investment Banking, Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Healthcare.

Clear Admit Strategy Series
Craft a winning application with the Clear Admit Strategy Series! Step-by-Step guidance through the application process. Titles include a Resume Guide, Recommendations Guide, Waitlist Guide and more!

Clear Admit Interview Guides
Be as prepared as possible for your MBA interviews this season with the Clear Admit Interview Guides! School-specific sample questions and in-depth strategy, campus visit details and places to stay.

Application Deadlines
Below are the upcoming deadlines for admission to top-tier schools.
Feb 10: INSEAD R3
Mar 1: Michigan / Ross R3
Mar 3: CBS
Mar 3: LBS R3
Mar 4: Kellogg R3
Mar 8: Cambridge / Judge R4
Mar 8: CMU / Tepper R3
Mar 9: Duke / Fuqua R3
Mar 9: Penn / Wharton R3
Mar 10: Berkeley / Hass R4
Mar 10: Chicago Booth R3
Mar 10: Yale SOM R3
Mar 15: NYU / Stern R3
Mar 17: UCLA / Anderson R3
Mar 19: UNC / Kenan-Flagler R4
Mar 30: Cornell / Johnson R4
Mar 31: UVA / Darden R3
Mar 31: INSEAD R4
Apr 1: UT-Austin / McCombs
Apr 2: Dartmouth / Tuck R3
Apr 2: Oxford / Saїd R3
Apr 7: Stanford GSB R4
Apr 8: Harvard R3
Apr 14: CBS

Essay Topic Analysis
Below are links to our comments on some of the top programs' essay topics.
The Career Goals Essay
Berkeley / Haas*
Chicago Booth*
CMU / Tepper*
Columbia*
Cornell / Johnson*
Dartmouth / Tuck*
Duke / Fuqua*
Harvard*
Indian School of Business*
INSEAD*
London Business School*
MIT / Sloan*
Michigan / Ross*
Northwestern / Kellogg*
NYU / Stern*
Oxford / Said*
Penn / Wharton*
Stanford GSB*
UCLA / Anderson*
UNC / Kenan-Flagler*
USC / Marshall*
UT Austin / McCombs*
UVA / Darden*
Yale SOM*
* denotes '09-'10 commentary

Categories
Use categories to access all that has been written on each of the topics. We have categorized by school and by subject matter.

Interview Reports
A selection of interview field reports from fellow applicants posted to the MBA Admissions Wiki. Add your reports when you are finished with your interviews.
Chicago
Columbia
Dartmouth / Tuck
Duke / Fuqua
Harvard
Kellogg
Michigan / Ross
MIT / Sloan
Stanford
UNC / Chapel Hill
Virginia / Darden
Wharton
London Business School

GMAT Resources
MBA.com
Manhattan GMAT
GMAT Club
Princeton Review
Test Prep New York
Kaplan
Beat The GMAT
Knewton

Writing Resources
Guide to Grammar and Writing
The Internet Grammar of English
English Usage, Style and Composition
The Economist Style Guide
Paradigm Online Writing Assistant

School Rankings
Rankings are a good way to start your research on various MBA Programs. Keep in mind each uses a different methodology.
Business Week
Economist
Financial Times
Forbes
USNews
Wall Street Journal

Career Guides
The following resources should be useful to those who want to research the careers open to them after (or before) earning an MBA.
Vault.com
Wetfeet

Business School Resources
The following are business resources offered by a variety of leading Business Schools. It's useful to subscribe to these resources, especially for the schools to which you are applying.

MBA Programs: North America
If an MBA Program is not listed, please e-mail and we will be happy to list it.
Berkeley / Haas
Boston College / Carroll
Carnegie Mellon / Tepper
Chicago
Columbia
Concordia
Cornell / Johnson
Dartmouth / Tuck
Duke / Fuqua
Emory / Goizueta
Harvard
HEC Montreal
Indiana / Kelley
Michigan
MIT / Sloan
Northwestern / Kellogg
New York / Stern
North Carolina / Kenan Flagler
Notre Dame / Mendoza
Pennsylvania / Wharton
Queens
Stanford
Syracuse / Whitman
Texas / McCombs
Thunderbird
Toronto
USC / Marshall
UCLA / Anderson
Vanderbilt / Owen
Virginia / Darden
Washington University in St. Louis / Olin
Western Ontario / Ivey
Yale

MBA Programs: Rest of the World
As there is some variety in the length of international MBA programs, we have denoted the length of the program next to its name (1 = one year; 2 = 2 years). If an MBA Program is not listed, please e-mail and we will be happy to list it.
AGSM (Australia) 2
Cambridge / Judge (UK) 1
CIEBS (China) 2
Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (China) 1
Cranfield School of Mgmt (UK) 1
ESADE (Spain) 1 or 2
HEC (France) 2
Hult (UK) 1
IESE (Spain) 2
IMD (Switzerland) 1
INCAE (Costa Rica) 2
INSEAD (France) 1
IPADE (Mexico)
ISB (India) 1
London Business School (UK) 2
Manchester Bus. School (UK) 2
Melbourne (Australia) 2
Oxford / Said (UK) 1
Rotterdam (Netherlands) 1
Tsinghua IMBA (China) 2
University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) 1

Additional Resources
Here we link a host of additional resources available across the web. E-mail info@clearadmit.com to have resources added to this list.
AACSB International
Association of MBAs
Beyond Grey Pinstripes
EFMD
gradschools.com (worldwide)
Infozee
International Student Loans
mba.com (GMAT Scores)
MBAInfo
mbaleague.blogspot.com
MBAzone
MBA Jungle
TOEFL
Top MBA

MBA Tipline
We encourage admissions officers, students and applicants to alert us of interesting news and developments, please send an email to news@clearadmit.com so we can blog it.

Blog Archive

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Saturday, January 09, 2010

GMAT Tip: Think Like the Testmaker Series, Volume 4

Today’s GMAT tip comes from our friends at Veritas Prep. In this article, they present the fourth installment of their “Think Like the Testmaker Series,” which focuses this week on sentence correction questions:

If you’ve written an essay or letter on your computer in the past few years, you’ve undoubtedly encountered that green underline somewhere in your composition that indicates that you’ve made a grammatical mistake. (Editor’s note: I guarantee that that will happen during the writing of this post.) Perhaps your subject didn’t match your verb, or your modifier was misplaced; whatever the situation, as soon as you put a period on that sentence, your computer recognized the error and not only alerted you to it, but also offered its suggestion for a correction. What a world we live in!

So why, in said world, would business schools test you on Sentence Correction as a primary means of determining your fitness for upper-level management?

Proper grammar is important for its own sake — effective communication is certainly a key element of a successful management team — but the strategic portion of these questions may well be more important to schools. In your corporate strategy classes, you’ll study the idea of “core competencies,” the smaller-scope things that a business does well, and items from which businesses should try not to stray. The ideology is that quality and efficiency are achieved through specialization, and that those who try to generalize, instead, won’t be able to compete.

Bringing that back to Sentence Correction, the writers of these questions will often try to bait you toward generalization, tempting you to discern the difference between methods of phrasing an obscure idiom or asking you to read a multi-clause, 45-word sentence five different times to see what “sounds right.” You’re applying to business school, however, not to the editorial desk of the New York Times; your “core competencies,” as they pertain to grammar, are likely somewhat limited. Accordingly, your goal should be to seek out the errors that you know how to correct, and only worry about others when absolutely necessary (which shouldn’t be often, if at all).

Consider the question:

Unlike water, which is complimentary, all passengers will need to pay cash for beverages during the transoceanic flight.

(A)   Unlike water, which is complimentary
(B)   Besides water, which is offered free of charge
(C)   Unless the drink is water, which is complimentary
(D)   Not like water, which is offered free of charge
(E)   With water being the only exception

The GMAT doesn’t explicitly test the preferential difference between “complimentary” and “free of charge,” nor does it explicitly test “unlike” vs. “besides.” It does, however, test the agreement of modifiers like “unlike water,” which cannot possibly describe “all passengers.” In fact, answer choices A,B, D, and E all make the same mistake — they attempt to modify “passengers” with “water,” which is an illogical comparison. In contrast, answer choice C changes that game, using “Unless the drink is water” as an independent clause and not a modifier. By doing so, it corrects the modifier error that the others commit, and is the correct answer. Modifiers are one of your core competencies — you should attack those whenever and wherever you see them. Seek out these items that fall within your power, and you’ll efficiently and correctly conquer these sentence correction problems.

For more information on Veritas Prep, download Clear Admit’s independent guide to the leading test preparation companies here. This FREE guide includes coupons for discounts on test prep services at ten different firms!

# posted by Clear Admit @ 9:00 am in GMAT - Verbal, GMAT News, GMAT Test Prep Company Series, GMAT Tips

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Individuals' Blogs

A selection of the latest updates to MBA blogs compiled by Hella.
MBA Applicants

MBA Students

Bloggers by School

The following are links to bloggers at each of the schools listed.
Chicago
Columbia
Dartmouth / Tuck
Duke / Fuqua
Harvard
Kellogg
Michigan
MIT / Sloan
New York / Stern
North Carolina / Chapel Hill
Stanford
Virginia / Darden
Wharton
Yale
ESADE
IESE
INSEAD
London Business School

Community Blogs

Bshoolers.com
Community blog with MBA student and alum contributors.

Forté Foundation MBA Diaries
Video blog entries posted by women MBA students.

Owen Bloggers
Independent blog with content by Vanderbilt MBA students.

Best of Blogging

2008-2009 Top Ten: