I love hearing from applicants with whom I crossed paths in years past. Here's an update I just received from a soon-to-be JD. It's a great reminder not to tack on graduate degrees willy-nilly, but to think hard about how a more general degree (like an MBA)  stacks up against more specialized ones.

In my last email I told you that I was considering getting a MBA because of my interest in working for the Justice Department or the SEC. I am no longer considering pursuing a MBA because I found a graduate program that is more suitable to my career interest. After [X Law School], I am going to get a Masters in Forensic Accounting at Georgia Southern. I want to tell you about this program in case any of your clients have an interest in pursuing white collar prosecution. Georgia Southern is one of three universities in the country that offer a Masters in Forensic Accounting (Cornell University and Washington University are the others).

What makes Georgia Southern good for me (aside from location) is that Georgia Southern agreed to waive the GMAT requirement because I have demonstrated that I can handle a graduate workload. After completing the Masters in Forensic Accounting, I will be able to sit for the CPA; the school uses the Becker model (I am not sure who or what that is, but I hear it's effective) to teach the CPA. I will also take the CFE [Certified Fraud Examiner] exam after I finish the program. I hope this information helps.

I'd love to hear from others who are choosing (or have chosen) among general and specialized degrees. What makes the most sense for you? Please share your thoughts.

Former Dean of Admissions at the University of Chicago Law School and a recovering lawyer, Anna Ivey founded Ivey Consulting to help college, law school, and MBA applicants navigate the admissions process. Read more admissions tips in The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions, recently updated and available as an e-book. Follow Anna on Twitter (@annaivey).

I did an online Q&A recently with Dr. Marlena Corcoran, one of our educational consultants who counsels international MBA applicants. Marlena is based out of Boston, Massachusetts, and Munich, Germany.

Marlena, what's the biggest mistake you see non-US applicants make in applying to the top U.S. MBA programs?

They do not allow enough time to compose a convincing application. If your goal is to start at a top U.S. MBA program in the fall of 2010, I sincerely hope that you began preparing your application last winter. If you didn't, this newsletter is for you! Please remember that we will not be discussing an ideal scenario, but how to rescue your round-one application.

That sounds dramatic. Just to put this in context, how do non-U.S. applicants fall into this predicament?

Here in Germany, the problem arises from the difference between the general university admissions processes in Germany and the United States. German secondary-school students must wait until they have their diploma, or Abitur, before they can apply to university.

So that means they apply in, say, July, to begin their bachelor's studies in the fall?

That's right, Anna. And from the German point of view, it is just as startling to hear that the American admissions process is so complicated—and so long. In Germany, it's pretty much point-and-click. Unless you want to study, for example, medicine at a popular location, you can expect to be accepted at the university you designate. People will tell me smugly, "I want to do my MBA at Stanford." They assume that all they need to do is let Stanford know they are coming.

Do MBA-hopefuls still have a chance to prepare for Round One, if they begin today?

Yes. Sit down right now and make yourself a schedule for the next months. Fill in the big rocks, such as:

• take the GMAT
• take it again
• research programs
• draft your essays
• choose and approach your recommenders
• submit transcripts
• enter program deadlines

You'll be surprised at how few weeks are left in which to accomplish all of this before the October deadlines are upon us.

They had better start practicing for the GMAT soon . . .

Today would be good. Go to http://www.mba.com/mba/thegmat and download the free test preparation software. Set aside time to complete a full-length test. The full test is more grueling than you think. It's not only about content. In fact, a large part of success on the exam is developing habits of delivering consistently correct responses over a long period of time and under a great deal of pressure. This can be trained! As one of our GMAT trainers, a brilliant woman from Beijing, says: "I have been taking tests all my life." No wonder she has nerves of steel! You should start training today.

(Read Part II of our Q&A here and Part III here.) 

Marlena Corcoran studied for two years at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris and holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She has held research appointments at Harvard, Princeton, and Brown Universities, and at Wolfson College, Oxford. She has many years' experience teaching and has also worked in the business world. In 2004, she published two novels designed to help non-native speakers improve their English. In 2003, she received an award from Brown for her work with the international community. Marlena speaks fluent German and French in addition to her native English.

Former Dean of Admissions at the University of Chicago Law School and a recovering lawyer, Anna Ivey founded Ivey Consulting to help college, law school, and MBA applicants navigate the admissions process. Read more admissions tips in The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions, recently updated and available as an e-book. Follow Anna on Twitter (@annaivey).

I just read this fascinating article in the New Yorker.  It describes a professor's research into mechanisms by which people learn to delay instant gratification.  Specifically, it describes an experiment where a marshmallow is placed in front of a young child, and the child is told that he or she can eat the marshmallow at that moment, or wait 15 minutes and get 2 marshmallows.  Surprisingly, only 30 percent of children can wait the 15 minutes, but those that do have a much higher rate of success in life, both academically and emotionally.

I am struck by the parallels between this article and the work that I do in standardized testing.  Most of the students I work with feel a need, a compulsion even, to solve the problem as quickly as possible.  Now, this initially might not sound like a bad trait, but when I say as quickly as possible, I mean that they show no work, have no idea whether their answer is correct or not, and become slightly agitated if I dwell on the problem for too long.

In a previous posting, I talked about how few students really study their wrong answers and attempt to learn from them.  I referenced how I thought there were deep-seated psychological reasons for this behavior, and this article provides at least a clue in that direction.  I suspect that many students are intimidated by abstract thought [we're not wired for abstract thought, apparently - Anna], especially in a topic in which they do not have innate confidence.  Very few students have innate confidence in standardized tests, and so like any unpleasant subject, they try to do things as quickly as possible and avoid thinking about the problem solving process itself.

The metaphor to the article above works as follows:  instead of placing a marshmallow in front of students, you place a standardized test problem in front of them.  The rewards to solving the problem correctly are not as tangible as the marshmallow, but for students primed to get into a competitive university or graduate school, the benefits are certainly obvious.  Now, the answer to the problem is not obvious at first glance, but with a little persistence and patience, the student could certainly work out a solution in a relatively short amount of time.

I would concur with the article that students are by nature impatient [and maybe also distractable - Anna].  They want the quick fix, the one formula or principle that will tell them the answer.  I emphasized the phrase ‘tell them,' because often these formulas and principles are a substitute for thought, not a vehicle for it.  

So much of what I do is to show these students how to be patient, to attack a problem in a piecewise manner so that the problem unfolds before their eyes.  There are some students who have the greatest difficulty in making this adjustment.  For the ones who do, the higher scores that initially seemed so remote turn out to be not that remote after all.

Thoughts? Comments? Please share.

To kick things off here with my new column at the Ivey Files, I wanted to share an idea that's been going through my head recently: the idea of efficiency in test preparation.  

As a tutor, I would sometimes get calls from parents who wanted to find out more about what kinds of "services" I offered. More than looking for a specific answer, they seemed to be trying to assess whether I sounded competent.  

Well, having spent many years thinking about the tutoring process, I wanted to answer this question a little more completely and give an idea of what it is a tutor actually does (or is supposed to do).  At the same time, I hope to provide a framework so that everyone can make a well reasoned decision regarding whether hiring a private tutor, taking a class, or just buying some test prep books is the best way to study for a standardized test.  (I'll talk about online preparation in another posting.)

First, let me hit you with a whammy (in bold, no less): 

Test prep students would drastically improve their scores if they simply bought the official study guides, read them cover to cover, did all the exercises, and spent time trying to learn from their mistakes.   

In other words, the idea that certain classes and tutors possess "proprietary knowledge" or "secret tricks" is a quaint hypocrisy.  (This is a topic I will cover in detail in a later posting.)  

That last part of the statement in bold is especially important.  One of the things that baffles me the most is when students show zero interest in understanding why they got a question wrong.  I have spent more time than I would care to recount trying to convince students to spend more time learning from their previous mistakes and less time taking new tests.  I think there are some deep-seated psychological reasons for this, and the consequence is that people spend massive amounts of time making the same kinds of mistakes.  

When studying for any standardized test, you need to cover a certain amount of groundwork, whether you work with a tutor, a class, or a book.  Far too many people out there think that if they hire a tutor or sign up for a class, then they can skip the groundwork.  Part of what I hope to show over the course of these postings is how mistaken this notion is.

To those of you who read the statement in bold and think, "Well who has time to read the book cover to cover?":  you're on the right path.  What classes and tutors actually do is to provide a more efficient process.  A good class or tutor can zero in on exactly what you, as a student, are doing right and wrong, and prevent you from having to spend the time to read that book cover to cover.  The Official SAT prep guide currently clocks in at 889 pages, the ACT guide at 623.  My point is that if you actually took the time not just to read what was contained in those pages but actually to learn it, then you would be able to get most, if not all, of the score increase that you would get from a class or with a tutor.  

Classes and tutors provide a quicker way to learn the same thing.  Tutors are more efficient than classes in the same way that classes are more efficient than reading a book.  When thinking about getting a tutor or signing up for a class, don't just look at the dollar cost of things, but make sure that you factor in the amount of time that it will take to get your goal score, and factor the amount of time you need to spend getting there into your calculation.  

If you discover that your time isn't free (and it almost never is), then think about signing up for a class or getting a tutor, but just going through this exercise will prepare you to start asking some smart questions of whatever tutor or class you run across.  "How will you get me to my goal score faster than reading the book?" rather than "What can you teach me?" is an example of the way I would think about it.

There are two conclusions here.  The first is to remember to stay on your toes.  If you start working with a class that's basically an excuse to do problems and then go over them in class, ask yourself, "Could I be doing this on my own or do I need a classroom to keep me focused?"  If you think you could be doing the exact same thing on your own, then it's probably not a good class to be in.  If you're working with a tutor and the tutor is merely walking you through a set of classroom type exercises, ask yourself if the tutor is really making the process more efficient.  Too many classes and tutors fall into lazy habits.  Being aware of the bigger picture can keep you on your toes.  

The second conclusion is that any option needs to cover that important groundwork.  Efficiency doesn't kick in until that groundwork is covered, so before you start looking to classes and tutors, make sure you spend some time reviewing the basics.  If you have to spend lots of time in a class or with a tutor covering the basics, then you've essentially discovered a more expensive way to read a book.

Any thoughts or comments from your own test-taking experience? Please share.

Charles Williamson has helped hundreds of students prepare for standardized tests. He blogs for the Ivey Files about test prep, the intersection of education and technology, education policy, and whatever other topics strike his fancy. 

Most people think of standardized tests as a necessary evil and really boring to think about.  Charles Williamson is not one of those people, and we're excited to bring him on board as an Ivey Files blogger.

For the past eight years, Charles hasn't met a standardized test he didn't like, helping hundreds of students in everything from the SAT and ACT to the SSAT to the GMAT to AP Calculus. 

A longtime student of the thought process that defines performance on standardized tests, Charles got off to a good start, receiving a perfect score on his SATs in high school. He then graduated from Brown University, earning bachelor's degrees in computer science and history.  He has long been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology, and when not writing about standardized tests and educational policy, he will be happy to speculate rampantly about how the Internet will affect the ways that we learn. 

Because all of the above makes him sound less than socially well-adjusted, I would hasten to add that he does lots of normal stuff too. If you bug him enough, he might even write about it.

Keep an eye out for his postings -- first one coming soon!

BusinessWeek just launched a year-by-year guide to get you on track to apply to business school in five years. This is perfect for recent college graduates.

Here's their plan for Year 1, with special emphasis on your first job out of school.

It's depressing that I have a whole blog category called "Cheating," but there you go.

From BusinessWeek:

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid $30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be effectively over.

On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site, Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information.

GMAC said any students found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat, your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."

Read the rest of the article here.

I've decided that I need to be posting more of the discussions I have (largely by email) over the course of the day. I yak all day long about things that might be of interest to readers of the Ivey Files, and I need to get over the fact that reproducing things I've written in an email will by necessity offer up writing that is less than polished (although Lord knows that's true for blog postings as well).

So, just today, I was chatting with some people who were commenting on the habit of finance employers to ask job applicants for their SAT scores (as well as LSAT or GMAT scores, as the case may be). On the one hand, we laughed our butts off -- we're in our mid-thirties and can't imagine that a test we took back in, oh, 1989 (!!) could possibly say anything meaningful about us. Can SAT scores say anything meaningful about someone who just graduated from college? Maybe yes, maybe no. Some argued that SAT scores do say something about raw horsepower under the hood, while others argued that good SAT scores just prove you're good at taking the SATs. Either way, to people who aren't routinely dealing with recruiting practices in the the finance world, it seems weird to ask for the scores.

However, if employers are asking for the scores, then employers obviously see some value in that information, and I'm very curious where that value comes from.

From one of my emails:

This is, I suspect, also a reflection of the fact that college grades, and college transcripts  as a whole, don't really mean squat [to the interviewer].

Unless you have very inside-baseball *and* recent knowledge of a school's grading practices, as well as knowledge of the grading practices and substantive difficulty of individual courses and professors, transcripts really mean nothing. When I look at a transcript, I have no idea whether PHYS 325 is string theory or "Physics for Poets" (as the gut physics class was called at Columbia in my day). And when I was still on the job market, I was bummed that my law school transcript didn't say who taught my Financial Accounting class at the business school -- it was Roman Weil, and that actually means something to some people, but I never got the benefit of that on my transcript.

The uselessness of transcripts also leads to over-reliance on the name brand of the school to signal something about the applicant.

We went on to discuss grade inflation more generally, and I recalled a Boston Globe article from the early 2000's about the fact that 91% of Harvard undergraduates had graduated with honors that year. (The rest of the ivies are pretty inflationary too, so I'm not just picking on Harvard, although it has seemed to be the worst offender.)

So I throw that out there, because transcripts are so unhelpful not just in the job hiring process, but also in the graduate school admissions process.  When applicants complain about the seeming over-reliance on standardized test scores, understand that most transcript are in fact very, very hard to interpret in any meaningful way.

There I days I don't miss being an admissions officer. Last week I attended an MBA admissions panel. I used to do those roadshows, where five admissions officers sit on a stage talking to an audience of hundreds about the admissions process in vague generalities and answer audience questions with vague generalities. Admissions officers are very limited in the candor they can express in public, but there were some nuggets that were dead on, so I'll condense them here and paraphrase a little bit:

1. If your college grades weren't so hot, be upfront about that and explain why. Show that you are in a better position now to do the work. How do you prove that? By taking classes and guiding your recommenders to cite examples from your job that could allay fears about your ability to hack it in a competitive academic environment. Admissions officers care about your undergraduate performance not because they want to obsess needlessly over who you were five or eight or ten years ago, but because they don't want to set you up for failure. They'll also scrutinize your transcript for evidence of both quantitative and verbal skills, so if your background appears to be lacking in one or the other, go make up that deficit either in the classroom or on the job or on your GMAT.

2. Recommendations from people who've seen your day-to-day performance on the job are the best predictor of future performance. Ideally they'll talk about what kind of impact you've had on the organization and on the people with whom you work. Admissions officers know that you likely have not been managing other people yet at this stage in your careers, so you need to think about what impact you've had, and how you achieved those results without direct authority over people (meaning, you managed from the side and managed from below).

Guiding your recommenders is fine: take them out for coffee (the best five bucks you'll spend) and give them examples that you think highlight and demonstrate that impact. Admissions officers insist that you can't and shouldn't write those recommendations yourself, but honestly, they are delusional if they think that even a majority of the recommendations they receive were written by the recommenders rather than the applicants. If admissions officers enforced the rule, they'd have to cut their applicant pool in half. The fact is, most recommenders will not take the time to write the letters themselves and delegate that task to the applicants to varying degrees. Still, it's in your best interest to find recommenders who are willing to write the letters themselves. Those letters are almost always stronger, in my experience, than when you try to speak for your recommenders.

3. Admissions officers are not impressed by long lists of activities. They'd rather you whittle that list down to the activities that really matter to you. Schools are building communities, and they seek people who are engaged with the world around them. They want to see demonstrated, continued involvement, so banging some nails for Habitat once a year isn't going to cut it. Activities are also often a great way to demonstrate your leadership experiences and lessons in your essays.

There were a few statements that made me scribble furiously in disagreement:

1. "Try not to worry about your essays." Huh? That makes no sense. The essays are the most labor-intensive part of the application. I would hope applicants worry about them, if that means taking them seriously and expending a lot of effort on them. It's insulting to require all those essays and then tell applicants not to worry about them.

2. In your essays, "be yourself." "Differentiate yourself." How is that helpful advice? It's not. At all.

3. "Embrace the opportunity to interview." "Be yourself in the interview." Except that some people really stink at interviews. Not everyone is good at interviewing. It's a learned and learnable skill, but it takes practice and plenty of feedback.

4. It's not enough that admissions officers from top business schools butcher English grammar; apparently they have to butcher Latin grammar as well. My ears bled a little bit when one of them referred to her school's "curriculi."

One other observation: I spotted a large number of women dressed inappropriately for a professional event. Simple rules to remember: no miniskirts, and no high-heeled slides (which, aside from looking unprofessional, also sound unprofessional: slap, slap, slap. Not good.)

A last note: this particular admissions event was co-hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Alumni Club of Boston and Kaplan. The venue was papered in slick Kaplan brochures and folders and fliers. Do not choose Kaplan just because of their huge advertising budgets. There are much better GMAT options out there.

Learned about this cool new test prep service based in NYC -- it promises a "holistic" approach to test prep, so you're not just learning how to ace the test (SAT, GMAT, LSAT, etc.), but also learning how to tackle your test anxiety and stress using tools like hypnosis. I haven't ever tried a holistic approach to test prep, but given the number of applicants I hear from who feel absolutely crippled by their test anxiety, I thought I'd share it with you here. Apparently the founder (Bara Sapir) also has a 5-CD course coming out.

More info here.