GMAT Tip of the Week: Cause and Effect

Welcome back to Hip Hop Month in the GMAT Tip of the Week corner. One of the most underrated themes that one can find in 90s rap lyrics is the often-laughable unintentional use of cause-and-effect that rappers draw in their songs, using "(be)cause" as a connector of ideas with hilarious results. Take a line from the refrain of one of Biggie's biggest hits, Big Poppa:

...You got a gun up in your waist. Please don't shoot up the place. (Why?) 'Cause I've seen some ladies tonight that should be having my baby...baby...

Really, Big? The primary reason that someone shouldn't indiscriminately fire a gun around the nightclub is because you have an interest in some of the female patrons? Ethics...legality...these aren't primary concerns?

Ice Cube has another classic logical misstep in the title single from his cult classic movie Friday, in which he describes some horrific consequences of a disease, followed with the line:

And that ain't cool, fool, 'cause it's Friday.

Again, the logic is ridiculous. Any other day of the week would be fine for the kind of (explicitly-described) pain and suffering that he predicts? Just not heading in to the weekend?

As a favor to yourself, listen to your favorite hip hop lyrics from the 90s and seek out the comical cause-and-effect relationships that the rappers draw. It can be incredibly entertaining, and may also help you with your approach to Reading Comprehension questions on the GMAT. How?

When Reading Comprehension questions ask for specific details, they often ask you for either the cause or the effect of a cause/effect relationship. Questions can take the form of:

According to the passage, plants in desert regions can survive for weeks without rainwater because...

or

According to the passage, which of the following results from desert plants' retention of groundwater?

In either case, you're likely to return to the passage to analyze the portion that deals with desert plants and how they retain water. However, each question is asking for something completely different. The first asks for the cause of the plants' survival, while the second asks for the effect of the plants' water retention. Either question could have the same set of answer choices, and the passage will likely be written in a way that the intended answer to the question - cause or effect - will be a step farther from the key words (maybe "desert plants") for which you will be looking. The authors of these questions know that, when pressed for time and reading a passage that doesn't fall within your typical range of expertise, you're apt to simply find the answer choice that comes closest to the keywords from the passage and feel comfortable selecting that. In many cases, that answer choice will be the trap answer, giving you the cause if they ask for the effect, or vice versa.

To maximize your score on Reading Comprehension questions, look for and internalize the cause-and-effect relationships that are the subjects of the questions, and make sure that you know exactly which end the question seeks. Much like it will enhance your enjoyment of rap lyrics, isolating and focusing on cause-and-effect relationships will improve your score on the GMAT. And that's cool, you know, because it's Friday.

For more GMAT prep tips and resources, give us a call at (800) 925-7737. And, be sure to follow us on Twitter

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Law School Applicants: You Can Learn From Rappers

If you have been reading our excellent GMAT Tip of the Week series (penned by Veritas Prep's GMAT guru, lesson booklets co-author, and Director of Academic Research Brian Galvin), then you know one thing: it is "Hip Hop Month" here at Veritas Prep. The esteemed Mr. Galvin has been coming up with interesting and nostalgic ways to use rap music examples in order to better understand complex GMAT problems and solutions.

Today, it is our prospective JD readers who get to experience the joyful fusion of hip hop and graduate school admissions. This only makes sense, considering we once ran a blog post breaking down the legal implications of the Jay-Z song "99 Problems."

By now, you HAVE to be wondering: what can you, the law school applicant, possibly learn from a rapper?

It's pretty simple, actually: what you can learn is how to tell a story. Rappers - the good ones at least - are ultimately storytellers. The hip hop album generally considered to be the best ever recorded - Nas' Illmatic - is basically a spoken word version of his life's journal. The late great Tupac Shakur transitioned easily from "gangsta rap" to books of poetry and back again. These guys gave us tales of their life, made the words rhyme, and put it all over produced beats and sounds. That was their way of telling a story within the confines of a particular form.

Law school applicants also have the challenge of telling their unique story within the confines of a form ... the personal statement. We've written about the personal statement several times in the past (mistakes to avoid, how to write a great personal statement), but there is one critical mistake that applicants keep making ... they want to write about all the good stuff and ignore the bad.

If you click on the above links and read my previous offerings on the subject, you know that the personal statement is all about answering the admissions officer's biggest question. It's all about positioning. It's all about mitigating weaknesses. In other word, the best personal statements feature raw, honest, uncompromising storytelling. And now is where hip hop re-enters our discussion: the best rap songs are often not the brag and boast variety, rather, they are the tales told from the heart. Sure, there have been a few party anthems that have resonated over time and maybe this is me, but the hip hop tunes that have stayed with me over the years are tracks like 2Pac's "Dear Mama," "Keep Ya Head Up," and "So Many Tears," Common's love letter to rap itself ("I Used to Love H.E.R."), Jay-Z's "Lucky Me," and Biggie's "Juicy." Introspection, emotion, and brutal honesty is what elevated rap from shallow party music to something akin to literature. It made listeners sit up and take notice and to feel invested in the lives of the artists. There's a reason that so many people were devastated when 2Pac died and it wasn't because he penned "California Love."

Law school applicants would be wise to take a page out of the same book (of rhymes). Sure, you can brag about an accomplishment with artistry and make an initial impression - you may even have an admissions officer nodding her head for the rest of the day. But when admissions committee rolls around and precious few spots are up for grabs, your odds are better if your words have staying power - if you tell a story that resonates and makes the reader sit up and take notice. You want the reader to feel invested in your life as an applicant. Make them care about you and your story.

In short, when you write your personal statement, set out to write "Where I'm From" instead of "H to the Izzo."

For more information on law school admissions or for help incorporating career goals into the application, visit our law school admissions site or call our offices at 1.800.925.7737! And, remember to follow us on Twitter!

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Six Terrific Professors at Michigan (Ross)

Continuing our series of admissions insights clipped from Veritas Prep's Annual Reports, our in-depth insider's guides to 15 of the world's top business schools, this week we look at six of the Ross School of Business' most popular professors. (Our Annual reports are absolutely free with registration, but we thought we'd share some snippets here to help get you started in your Ross research.)

The Ross faculty is populated with many prominent business leaders, researchers, and teachers. Among Ross students, there are a handful of professors who are considered a "must" to have for a class, due to their reputation both as educators and as experts. This list isn’t merely a collection of famous names, but rather the instructors that Ross students deem to be essential for the full experience.

These notable professors include:

• Aneel Karnani, Associate Professor and Chair of Strategy. Known among Ross students as a "tell it like it is" straight shooter, Professor Karnani is most notorious for his ongoing academic battle with fellow Ross faculty member C.K. Prahalad. The two have been going back and forth about a concept known as "bottom of the pyramid" (exploring the market potential of the world's poorest people) for years.
  What students appreciate most is how candid Professor Karnani is about his work and his viewpoints and how willing he is to discuss somewhat controversial positions in class. All of this takes place as part of his interest in global competition – one of his two chief areas of research and instruction, with the other being basic strategic management.


• M.P. Narayanan, Professor and Chair of Finance. Professor Narayanan teaches in both the full-time MBA and EMBA programs at Ross and specializes in capital management and strategic growth. Known to pick up a racket and swing it with some of his students, Professor Narayanan is known and loved for making finance as simple and easy to understand as possible. His stated goal is to help students "connect the dots" between simple concepts and complex outcomes and he often does that through clever and entertaining metaphors.


• Christie Nordhielm, Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing. Recruited away from Kellogg in 2004 after being one of students' favorites there year after year, Professor Nordhielm is well known for her "Big Picture" method for strategically breaking down marketing problems. In fact, she was one of the first pieces in Dean Robert J. Dolan's vision for the school, which was to teach students how to be thought and action leaders in every segment of business. Having known about Professor Nordhielm's revolutionary framework (formally known as The Big Picture: Integrating Marketing Strategy and Execution), Dolan made it his first order of business to nab Kellogg's 2003 Professor of the Year. At Ross, Professor Nordhielm is teaching her marketing framework to not only individual classes and sections (as she did at Kellogg), but also to the entire faculty. With a style suggestive of her early career in advertising (at Leo Burnett), Professor Nordhielm is a engaging speaker who also presents seminars to top companies as well as to the Ross Executive Program (run through the Marketing Center for Excellence, which she also heads up). Finally, she is also a singer and songwriter who often has friends over to her house for an evening of singing. While she is extremely available to students, she draws the line at the singing parties.


• Andrew Hoffman, Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise. Professor Hoffman teaches at both Ross as well as the School of Natural Resources & Environment, and also serves as the Associate Director of the Erb Institute. He has published seven books and over 70 articles on sustainability and is a thought leader in every conceivable area of environmental impact on business. That said, Professor Hoffman's actually most popular for his Bargaining Behavior and Influence Skills course which almost always has the highest "market clear" price under the Ross bidding system. In some years, it will take more than half of a student's bid points to land a spot in Professor Hoffman's class.


• Gautam Ahuja, Professor of Strategy. A much decorated professor at the University of Texas, Ahuja has continued to rack up awards since coming to Michigan in 2003, where he was named the best professor in the entire PhD program in 2004. He is often cited by Ross students as a favorite professor despite his broad involvement in multiple programs and his research on innovation and technology as it relates to strategy has been groundbreaking.


• Linda Lim, Professor of Strategy. Often described as "plugged in," Professor Lim is a foremost expert on Southeast Asia and aims most of her research at that area of the world. Known for bringing her research to the classroom, Professor Lim's students enjoy looking at multinational problems from multiple angles, and often find themselves discussing her op-ed pieces or interviews from major publications. Her World Economy course is a very popular option for those students seeking to complete one of Ross' unique strategy requirements for graduation.

Today's blog post was clipped from our Ross Annual Report, one of 15 completely free guides to the world's top business schools, available on our site. If you're ready to start building your own application for Ross or other top MBA programs, call us at 1-800-925-7737 and speak with an MBA admissions expert today!

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Chicago Booth to Eliminate PowerPoint Essay Question

A new BusinessWeek article titled Business Schools Revamp the Application investigates how some schools are breaking with tradition and exploring new approaches to the MBA admissions process. In some cases it's a matter of moving deadlines earlier or accepting the GRE in addition to the GMAT, while in others cases some schools are replacing traditional written essays with audio and video responses.

All interesting stuff, but what we actually found most intriguing was the fact that Chicago Booth will drop its PowerPoint question this coming admission season (2010-2011). This questions had been a staple of Booth's application for the past couple of years, but apparently it wasn't doing what the school had intended, so they put it out to pasture.

According to the article:

For the past few years, Booth has asked candidates to provide a PowerPoint presentation to show another side of themselves to the admissions committee. Although the committee has decided to eliminate the PowerPoint presentations starting with applications for the 2010-11 academic year, a new component -- as yet undisclosed -- will likely be in place this summer, says Rosemaria Martinelli, associate dean of student recruitment and admissions at Booth. The new addition to the admissions process may be something that MBA applicants will have to do after they get through an initial screening process, says Martinelli.

The PowerPoint slides didn't work, Martinelli says, because they became rote and entirely too easy to predict, They didn't showcase the applicant's personality and help the admissions committee determine who is and isn't a good fit, she said, adding that she hopes the new application procedure will do just that. "It's hard for us, especially when so much of the applicant pool is admissible," says Martinelli. "It comes down to who fits the life, spirit, and culture of an institution."

When a school adds or changes or deletes an essay question, it's a sign that the admissions office isn't quite getting what it needs. When reviewing every application, two main questions that goes through an admissions officer's mind are, "How well does this applicant fit with the school?" and "What about this applicant makes me want to choose him over other, similar applicants?" If a question generates similar answers from hundreds of applicants, or doesn't add anything new to most applicants' stories, then it's not getting the job done.

We suspect that many applicants' PowerPoint slides were nothing more than recaps of the rest of their applications, offering not much in the way of personality or useful information. This definitely wasn't the case for everyone -- some of our clients got into Chicago Booth this year with terrific PowerPoint slides -- but odds are that not enough applicants took full advantage of the medium, so Booth will move on.

Still, kudos to the school for trying something new. Also, we're very intrigued by the "may be something that MBA applicants will have to do after they get through an initial screening process" comment... The natural move would be for Booth to follow schools such as UCLA Anderson and offer a video or audio component. But, maybe it will be something else entirely, and maybe it will be something used as the admissions interview is used -- to get to know an applicant better after the school likes what it initially sees. We'll find out this summer, when Chicago Booth releases its application for the 2010-2011 admissions season.

For more advice on getting into Chicago Booth and other top business schools, download our Annual Reports, 15 completely free guides to the world's top MAB programs. And, as always, be sure to subscribe to this blog and to follow us on Twitter!

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GMAT Prep Classes Start Worldwide Tonight!

Today is one of those extra exciting days at Veritas Prep HQ, when GMAT prep classes start in dozens of cities worldwide (and in a few other cities, where they start tomorrow night).

We try to only sparingly use this space for blatant promotion of our products and services. However, for some of our newer readers who plan to apply to business school this coming fall, now is the ideal time to start preparing for the GMAT. Taking a class now enables you to take the GMAT before summer, so that you can get that stressful part of the application out of the way. Or, you can retake our class for free, if needed, and take the text again over the summer, still giving yourself plenty of time to purely focus on your apps before the Round 1 admissions deadlines come in October.

As you may have seen on our sweet new Veritas Prep web site, we have courses starting in these cities tonight and tomorrow night:

• Atlanta


• Austin


• Boston


• Chicago


• Dallas


• Denver


• Houston


• London


• Los Angeles


• Miami


• Minneapolis


• New Brunswick


• New York


• New Haven


• Philadelphia


• Phoenix


• Salt Lake City


• San Diego


• San Francisco


• San Jose


• Seattle


• Sydney


• Toronto


• Washington, DC

If you don't live near one of the cities, or if you just prefer to do your studying online, we also offer multiple online GMAT preparation options: a live online format and a self-paced "on demand" class.

If the time for you to start preparing for the GMAT is now, give us a call (800) 925-7737 and speak with a Veritas Prep admissions expert today. And, as always, be sure to subscribe to this blog and to follow us on Twitter!

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GMAT Tip of the Week: Be a Method Man (not an Ol' Dirty Bastard)

Welcome to Hip Hop Month in the GMAT Tip of the Week space on the Veritas Prep blog. Now that we're a full decade removed from the entire span of the 90s, "classic hip hop" is a viable genre and discussion topic, and in this space we'll analyze some of the highlights of 90s rap and, more importantly, how these topics can help you succeed on the G-to-the-MAT.

No discussion of 90s hip hop would be complete without mention of the Wu Tang Clan, a group of Staten Island rappers that collectively created multiple top-selling albums, and individually produced several more. With unique individual styles that blended for a particularly eclectic overall sound, Wu Tang crafted its own place in the 90s rap scene just outside the scope of the East Coast (Bad Boy) -- West Coast (Death Row/Aftermath) icons, perhaps even giving Wu Tang greater staying power by its having stayed just outside that fray.

Two of the most popular members of the Wu Tang Clan were Method Man and the Ol' Dirty Bastard. Each a great MC in his own right, the two had different styles and vastly different arcs after the peak of the band in the late 90s. How can differentiating between the two help you succeed on the GMAT?

Ol' Dirty Bastard received that name because, as Method Man said, "there ain't no father to his style" -- his wide range of vocal tones and expressions, guttural sounds, and themes simply had no precedent in the mainstream world of rap, and because of his uniqueness he stood apart from much of the group as a figure that transcended hip hop in his own way. He blazed his own trail, leading in some cases to high-level success (a gold solo album in 1999 to go with his platinum record with Wu Tang in 1995) and some high-profile failures (multiple stints in jail, albums that still remain unpublished).

Method Man, perhaps coincidentally to his name, followed a more proven method toward success. Like Ice Cube before him, he took his success as a member of a popular group and parlayed it to commercial success as an MTV icon, a film actor, and an overall brand. In doing so, he has won Grammy awards, appeared in TV series and films, and produced a series of comic books.

On the GMAT -- particularly when it comes to Sentence Correction, you'll have a choice to make: will you follow your own, unprecedented (fatherless) style, or will you employ a proven method to break down the standardized tests questions?

Sentence Correction questions tend to lend themselves to an ODB-style process, as test-takers either try to determine which answer choice "sounds right," or gravitate toward the unique idioms in each sentence and attempt to process those. Just as Dirt McGirt found, however, this process will lead sometimes to success, but often to failure. As a test-taker, you simply can't memorize enough idioms or trust your ear enough to keep up with the various ways that the writers of the exam will craft questions to counteract your unique methods.

So, to succeed, become a GMAT "Method Man," looking for the tried-and-true error families that the GMAT exclusively tests: check to see if the subject of the sentence agrees with the verb; check to see if each pronoun in the sentence agrees with and refers back to its specific antecedent; check to ensure that any comparisons that the sentence draws compared equivalent elements. The GMAT will test these same concepts repeatedly, and will reward you for finding the proven path to success on each question, instead of trying to invent your own style each time you face a grammatical issue. There's a method to success on Sentence Correction questions, and much like the hip hop Method Man, you can employ it to replicate the success of those before you.

One more reason to be a Sentence Correction Method Man: Method Man's given name is Clifford Smith, the same as Veritas Prep Instructor of the Year winner (and Palo Alto-based instructor) Cliff Smith, who co-wrote the Veritas Prep lessons (and methods) for Sentence Correction. Coincidence? Maybe, but Veritas Prep's method man Cliff Smith can confirm that there's a method to the madness -- he employed these methods for the Triple Crown of GMAT success -- 99th percentile on each section and overall. It pays to be a Method Man.

Just another friendly tip from Veritas Prep, where "we don't got no problem with you scoring well, but we've got a little problem with you not scoring well."

For more GMAT prep tips and resources, give us a call at (800) 925-7737. And, be sure to follow us on Twitter!

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HBS 2+2 Application Deadline Announced for 2010

Harvard Business School has just announced this year's application deadline for the HBS 2+2 Program: June 15, 2010. Note that this is a couple of week's earlier than last year's deadline.

Harvard launched the HBS 2+2 Program to encourage high achieving undergraduate students who are not on a "business track," to pursue careers in business. The program targets students focused on non-business concentrations such as engineering, liberal arts, science etc. Accordingly, they're looking for students coming from those majors, rather than from undergraduate business programs. (If you're in college now and fall into the latter camp, have no fear! That's what the traditional HBS two-year MBA program is for.)

If you're current a college junior, this deadline announcement is most relevant to you, since you will apply right after your junior year ends. To get a feel for what to expect in the coming months, take a look at the HBS 2+2 Program Timeline on Harvard's web site. You'll notice that the timeline suggests taking the GMAT or GRE this spring. If you haven't yet gotten ready for the test, take a look at Veritas Prep's GMAT prep options.

After getting the GMAT or GRE score that you want, then you'll need to focus on writing a terrific application. Fortunately, we've been helping applicants do that for years, and we have helped many HBS 2+2 Program applicants since the program's inception in 2008. To get an early read on your own admissions chances, give us a call at 800-925-7737 and speak with a Veritas Prep MBA admissions expert today!

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A Bold Law School Recruiting Proposal

For the last year and a half, there has been a steady stream of articles, blog posts, and opinion pieces about the law school recruiting process. Some have explored new apprenticeship models employed by law firms, others have focused on what law schools are doing to protect students, still others have put a renewed focus on public interest fellowships and job opportunities. Most, however, have merely predicted more doom and gloom. It's perfectly fine to report what is going on out there, but how many more profile articles and pithy blog posts do we need about stranded 3Ls with no prospects?

That's why it comes as such a relief to come across an opinion piece about the legal recruiting pipeline that actually suggests bold and decisive action. Not only that, but the author of the article, Aric Press, actually goes so far as to call law firms out and challenge them to push the envelope. Thank you, Aric Press!

In the piece, Press lays out the situation clearly. The old way of recruiting - where NALP puts rules in place that allow firms to go do the meat market on campus interviewing circuit, follow it up with four months of "call backs," and then submit offers - isn't working and neither NALP or the individual law firms are doing anything to react to new realities. This part of the article is all well and good, but nothing we don't already know. What was so interesting to me is where Press took it from there, as he laid out a plan for firms to go outside the NALP system in their recruiting efforts. This plan includes a call for transparency, honest interviewing approaches, and probing to see if the applicant has practical skills that will match the firm's needs. Press even calls for a two-step interview process with the second session serving as a mock client interaction, to truly test out whether the firm and the law student are a good match for each other.

Having worked in a law firm where everything is hidden behind the magic curtain until it's "too late," I am all for increased transparency and more rigorous interviewing processes that truly flesh out proper fits. Press has put forward a fairly bold initiative that would vastly improve the quality of law firm hires and give law students a much better view into life at individual firms. And all at a time when the recruiting process badly needs a facelift. Sounds like a win all the way around.

Now we wait to see if anyone paid attention.

For more information on law school admissions or for help incorporating career goals into the application, visit our law school admissions site or call our offices at 1.800.925.7737!

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Four Important Characteristics of the Duke MBA Program

Continuing our series of admissions insights clipped from Veritas Prep's Annual Reports, our in-depth insider's guides to 15 of the world's top MBA programs, this week we investigate a few things that make Duke's approach to graduate management education unique. (Our Annual reports are absolutely free with registration, but we thought we'd share some snippets here to help get you started in your Fuqua School of Business research.)

Like most elite business schools, Duke is focused on providing hands-on learning opportunities, global perspective, and a flexible curriculum. What makes Duke somewhat different is that the school is focused most of all on collaborative leadership. Other than Kellogg and perhaps UCLA Anderson, few business schools can cite that as the program's most distinguishing feature to the degree that Fuqua can.

With that in mind, the following are the key elements of the Duke Approach:

• Collaborative Leadership. Teamwork and leadership are common in every aspect of the Duke MBA experience from inside the classroom to clubs and activities. Each class includes group projects as a learning tool, so the ability to lead and work in a group environment is essential for success at Fuqua. Outside of the classroom, students are encouraged and almost expected to assume a leadership role in a club, activity, or Fuqua-related event. Fuqua is truly a student run program, which generates numerous opportunities to lead projects or even create new ones.


• Global Perspective. "Global" is a major MBA buzzword in this day and age, but few schools boast an international emphasis and flavor that rivals that of Fuqua. Each incoming MBA class begins with "Global Institute," a one-of-a-kind program that runs for three weeks prior to the first term and introduces students to the global business environment and the world economy structure. Students discuss current global business issues and are exposed to diverse backgrounds and perspectives while also gaining exposure to more traditional "orientation" concepts such as leadership and team building. Fuqua also offers study abroad programs and the increasingly popular "Global Academic Travel Experience," a course where students study international business trends from select regions and then travel to designated locations for hands-on experience.


• Diversity of Instruction. As has become increasingly common among innovative business schools, Duke's courses feature a blended teaching approach that includes an almost equal distribution of case studies, lectures, and team projects. Each class is typically two hours and fifteen minutes long, allowing ample time for a highly interactive case discussion, followed by a course lecture. Duke professors conduct leading research and are adept at integrating relevant and topical business issues into every class. Team projects are absolutely an integral part of each course, and select groups are called upon to present insights and strategic recommendations as a way to launch a class discussion. Class participation is expected and is a prominent grading criterion.


• Experiential Learning. While Duke does not boast of an experiential learning program as robust as that of Ross or Tuck, Fuqua does offer numerous courses which help students convert theory into application. These classes provide knowledge and experience by assisting real-world businesses in such areas as consulting, strategic planning, marketing strategy and business plan development. Faculty members guide and participate in strategy sessions with the students to reinforce the translation of academic concepts to real world solutions.

Today's installment was clipped from our Duke (Fuqua) Annual Report, one of 15 completely free guides to the world's top business schools, available on our site. If you're ready to start building your own application for Fuqua or other top MBA programs, call us at 1-800-925-7737 and speak with an MBA admissions expert today!

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Business Schools Pound the Pavement for MBA Job Seekers

Recently the Yale Daily News ran an article about how the Yale SOM alumni network has matured to the point where current students benefit from the wide variety of Yale alumni across industries. This is notable since the school has only been around since 1976 -- making it a spring chicken compared to most top MBA programs.

However, as good as that news is for Yale students, what we found even more impressive is how the school's own administration -- all the way up to Dean Sharon Oster -- hasn't hesitated to make personal appeals to the school's alumni and supporters, in the name of helping students find jobs in a tough economy.

According to the Yale Daily News:

In an e-mail to all SOM alumni, Oster called on the school's graduates to step up and help current students, recent graduates and even other alumni seeking jobs and internships.

"Although the economy seems to be showing signs of improvement, most of my faculty colleagues agree that we're not out of the woods yet," Oster wrote in the e-mail. "The strength of the SOM community is most visible in times of adversity, and so I am writing to you now to tap into some of that strength."

Within a few hours, Oster had received hundreds of responses.

We love this kind of commitment to helping Yale students find jobs. After all, as important as a student's two years in the classroom are, at least as important are the professional opportunities that an MBA opens up for that student. Some schools were a little slow to remember this (in our opinion) as the economy started to sink in 2008, but it's great to see that this is not the case in 2010.

Of course, when Yale SOM makes news, our co-founders (both Yale SOM '02) are always happy to weigh in! Veritas Prep co-founder Chad Troutwine was quoted in the article, and he cheered Oster's actions:

Chad Troutwine SOM '02, the co-founder and owner of test operations and admissions consulting company Veritas Prep, said he was glad to receive Oster's message.

"I'm always impressed with a dean who rolls up her sleeves and dives in to perform what is perhaps her most important function —- and that is doing everything in her power to help graduates or first-year students to land jobs," he said.

For more advice on your own candidacy for Yale SOM or any other top business school, call the business school admissions experts at Veritas Prep at (800) 925-7737, and we'll gladly give you an initial assessment of your candidacy!

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GMAT Tip of the Week: Carving Out A High Score

As we enter the final weekend of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, plenty of drama remains. Will Canada clinch the ice hockey gold medal on its home ice? Will it do so against the rival Americans? Will Lindsey Vonn withstand the pain of another injury - this time a broken finger to go with her badly bruised shin -- to add another medal to her haul? Will Bob Costas ever look older than 29? Will Bode Miller summon the magic one more time to erase his Torino disappointment with an unexpected (or perhaps just delayed... we expected this from him in 2006) display of overall alpine mastery?

As Vonn and Miller attempt to add to their legacies, they will need to employ a strategy that you should be thinking about as you gear up for your peak performance on the GMAT. The last race for each is the slalom, an event in which skiers are required to navigate a series of gates making quick side-to-side turns while keeping their momentum focused as straight downhill as possible. A daunting challenge, to be sure -- just like those of you taking the GMAT, these skiers must be aware that losing time on any one gate (or question) can be catastrophic, and must also keep in mind that, upon the successful navigation of one challenge, another will be approaching just as quickly.

How do they (and how should you) cope?

If you watch slalom skiers, you'll notice that they seemingly take wide turns around each gate -- instead of taking a straight line from one gate to the next, which would require them to make an abrupt change of direction at each gate, they swoop in from wide of the gate, building speed through the turn toward the next flag. The rationale behind this strategy is that, by employing it, skiers can use the position of the next gate to set up the previous turn, always thinking further downhill and being prepared far in advance to avoid having to make last-second, ice-crunching, turn-on-a-dime turns that kill a skier's speed and waste valuable time. If the skier uses the downhill gates to set up his movements uphill, he can take as direct and efficient a line as possible, and maximizes his chances at success.

The GMAT affords you the same opportunity -- you've already noted that each question contains within itself five answer choices, but you may not have thought about using those "downhill" answer choices to set up your work.

Consider:

• If multiple answer choices include the square root of 3, there's a good chance you're going to have to use a 30-60-90 or equilateral triangle, as those triangles lend themselves naturally to sides with the square root of 3.



• If answer choices, similarly, include the square root of 2, you'll probably want to look for an iscosceles right triangle (45-45-90), for which the hypotenuse is going to have a side the length of the other side multiplied by the square root of 2.



• Other answer choices can guide you in the right direction, as well - look for clues such as denominators (do you need to end up with something divided by 3?), exponential terms (do you need to factor to get everything in terms of 2 to a power?), etc. If you let the answer choices be your guide, you'll often find that they provide you a template of what your mathematical goals should be.

As an example, consider the question:

What is 3⁸ + 3⁷ - 3⁶ - 3⁵?

(A) (3⁵)(2⁴)

(B) (3⁵)(2⁶)

(C) (3⁶)(2⁵)

(D) 6⁵

(E) None of the Above

The initial statement may not lend itself at first to any type of manipulation that would make it any clearer, but if you look at the answer choices, you’ll realize that your job is to try to convert the given statement to the multiplication of two exponential terms. Knowing that you’ll need to multiply an exponent of 3 by something else, you can determine that your first move is to factor out 3⁵, giving you:

3⁵(3³ + 3² – 3 – 1)

Looking again at the answer choices, it appears you’ll need to somehow find a base of two with an exponent, so it makes sense to simplify the parenthetical term to see if you can find an exponent of 2:

3⁵(27 + 9 – 3 – 1) = 3⁵(32) = 3⁵(2⁵)

Now, one last time, you’ll want to look at the answer choices. We’re close to A, B, and C, but each is one factor off. Answer choice D, 65, may look a little unlike what we have, but when you have the choice between an answer and “none of the above”, you’ll at least want to do your best to make your answer look like one of the tests. With 65, or something close to it, as our goal, we can play with our expression to see if we can restate it in that form. Doing so, we find that it gives us:

(3*2)⁵ = 6⁵

By using the answer choices as a guide, we took the initial statement and manipulated it until it looked like what we needed, employing that slalom strategy of looking downhill to set up our moves from the top.

To be successful on the GMAT, think like a slalom skier and see if the answer choices, like downhill gates, can set up your work for you as you seek efficiency. It's all downhill from there!

Author's Note: In honor of the 2010 Winter Olympics, Veritas Prep is offering 15% off all of its GMAT prep courses to students who enroll before the end of the Closing Ceremonies on Sunday. Use the offer code JULEZRULEZ2010 on any Veritas Prep course to qualify for the discount. (Veritas Prep congratulates fellow Californian Julia Mancuso on two silver medals to add to her gold from 2006!)

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Northwestern Law is Ranked #1, but Does it Matter?

By at least one measure, Northwestern University's School of Law is the best law school in America. But what is that measure? And what does it mean? Should would-be Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago students suddenly reverse course?

You may have already heard the "Northwestern ranked as best law school" sound bite in the last week and scratched your head. "Really?" Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the National Law Journal is a highly respected publication that put out a legitimate ranking that had Northwestern had the top of the heap. No, in the sense that this ranking measures one thing -- and one thing only -- and has nothing to do with academic excellence, peer reputation, class profile, or any other metric that we're used to analyzing. And no in the sense that the one thing it does measure might be a pretty misleading statistic.

The NLJ survey focuses purely on the number of graduates from each school that land jobs at "NLJ top 250" law firms. That's it. The school with the highest percentage wins and for Northwestern, that percentage (55.9%) is enough to edge out the likes of Columbia (54.4%), Stanford (54.1%), and Chicago (53.1%). Since the NLJ is very good at determining what the top firms are, this is surely a pretty credible finding, right?

Again, yes and no.

Northwestern has rightly taken advantage of this ranking and used the news as a way to advertise the practical, hands-on training provided by their law school model. I've visited Northwestern Law, studied there, interacted with students there, worked at a large firm with graduates from the program and I can say that this is absolutely true. Northwestern does indeed do a great job of turning the esoteric study of law into something more practical. It's a progressive, innovative, interesting law school and all the things they say in their own student newspaper are completely true.

So what's the problem? The problem is that the data is skewed by certain realities. Such as: if every graduate from U. of Chicago chose to work at a top law firm rather than a prestigious clerkship, then that school would probably beat Northwestern like a drum in this kind of ranking. Such as: If Berkeley students stopped caring about public interest and went "all in" on top 250 firms, they would soar right past Northwestern. If Yale students no longer pursued academia first and foremost, not only would the legal heavyweight get back into the top 10 of this list, it would probably go right to the top. If Harvard Law went back to being the "law firm mill" it was before Elena Kagan became the dean and it students stopped pursuing all of the above (clerkships, public interest, and academia), surely Northwestern would have to take a back seat.

In other words, Northwestern may be placing such a robust percentage of students into top 250 firms in large part because its graduates don't have the same alternative elite options as some of its more prestigious brethren. If you revised this survey to include graduates who go into: "NLJ top 250 firms, federal clerkships, and academic fellowship programs" (i.e., the three most prestigious paths, probably in reverse order), I promise you the list would look much different.

This isn't to knock Northwestern. Again, they are doing a fine job of training good lawyers and firms recognize that fact. But this ranking is just as much about the jobs that Northwestern students aren't getting as the ones they are. And, more importantly for potential law school students, it's one more reminder that rankings -- particularly those that measure just one thing -- are never the be-all, end-all scorecard for the quality of a school.

(And yes, I went to U of C, so feel free to start lobbing tomatoes at me in the comments section!)

If you need help with your law school applications, give us a call at (800) 925-7737 and speak with an admissions expert today.

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