I wrapped up my first week of GMAT preparation with Manhattan GMAT on Sunday. With the assigned readings, online labs, practice problems, and retired GMAT problems the program requires about 3 hours of study a day outside of class. MGMAT includes a really helpful excel spreadsheet homework tracker that lets you sort by day, week, assignment type, priority, etc using pivot tables. One annoying point about this process is apparently the homework tracker was organized using an older version of the study guides, so assigned problems don’t correlate and more importantly, I didn’t discover there are additional “advanced” chapters in the back of the book that are not factored into the homework timeline. The argument for this is the additional chapters are for students who wish to delve into the topics in greater detail. But if you’re going to pony up and study 20 hours per week after coming home from work I suspect you’re doing it to get the best possible score on the GMAT. So you probably want to do the advanced curriculum as well. It would be nice if the chapters were included in the assigned homework in a logical fashion, even if they were assigned lower priority.
Barring that minor complaint though, both of my instructors are extremely good at breaking down ideas or arguments and explaining them in simple clear terms. I initially hesitated to enroll in an online class because I doubted the ability of the format to communicate the material as well as a live class. But the format of online interaction includes a chat window to the side of the explanation board, and ways for students to raise their hand to speak, as well as the ability to poll answer results and then try to take arguments from each answer to prove/disprove that choice. It seems to be an extremely well adapted format to the medium, and because there is no video component you can sit in class in your boxers. There is also the added bonus of not having to arrive 30 minutes early to find parking and possibly have it validated.
Overall I think the class is most likely a very good investment in my preparation to apply to school. I don’t intend to do a weekly review, but if anything in the class stands out as worth mentioning I will bring it up. Now back to studying before I have to leave for work.