The 3 Courses You Need To Do Before Your MBA | Business Fundamentals

Enrolling at business school is a top choice if you want to level up your skillset, access elite networking opportunities, and strengthen your career, but these benefits come with a demanding curriculum. 

To help you cope and make the most out of the experience, it’s essential to hit the ground running. To support you, GMAC, the organization behind the GMAT, has teamed up with Kaplan to offer a series of micro-courses called Business Fundamentals to further enhance your readiness for the challenges of business school, and to help ease some of the pressure.

Business Fundamentals includes three courses—Accounting, Finance, and Statistics—that will enhance your understanding of key business concepts, giving you an advantage whether you’re in the pre-application phase or already enrolled. Completing these courses can instill confidence, both in yourself and in the schools you're applying to or enrolling at, that you can master core business principles. 

Authored and reviewed by faculty from top business schools such as UCLA Anderson, UT-Austin, Emory Goizueta, and the University of Chicago Booth, these courses ensure relevance and establish a common starting point for students. 

The course is self-paced, featuring bite-sized content accessible 24/7 via desktop and mobile. Each module includes a mix of lectures, short quizzes, exercises, and answer explanations.

Here we take a closer look at each course to highlight the key concepts you'll learn, ensuring you are fully prepared when you start.

1. Statistics Fundamentals

Statistics are essential for business school candidates, as they learn to make sense of data for effective decision-making. In this course, students explore the fundamentals of descriptive and inferential statistics, understanding how these concepts inform business strategy. Additionally, participants gain experience using Excel to analyze, summarize, and leverage spreadsheets—a critical skill for any business career.

Key topics covered include Descriptive Statistics, Randomization, Sampling and Experiments, and Probability Theory. 

Through these sections, students learn the basics of data analysis, how to display data to guide business decisions, and how to employ appropriate sampling techniques. Additionally, Statistics Fundamentals gives future business school students insights into probability theory and the normal distribution model, as well as experience working with randomness in statistical calculations while evaluating and critiquing business case studies using statistical tools.

2. Accounting Fundamentals

The Accounting course introduces students to the language of business, equipping them to describe and assess a company’s finances. This course covers the purpose and process of analyzing financial statements, which help tell the story and history of a business. By analyzing these statements, students build a comprehensive understanding of accounting, learn the steps involved in accounting record keeping, and determine a company’s financial strength. 

The course is comprised of assessments, written material, rich media, and application-based practice, all designed to enhance students' skills in the field of accounting.

By the end of the course, students will be able to identify the purpose of the four financial statements and understand how decisions are derived from them.

3. Finance Fundamentals

In the Finance course, students are introduced to the world of corporate finance. Participants explore essential concepts such as the time value of money, measuring business performance, and understanding debt and equity, all while learning how managers value businesses. 

This course provides a comprehensive overview of managerial finance in the corporate landscape, covering everything from financial analysis of business performance to how businesses raise capital, manage debt, and build equity. The combination of high-quality assessments builds students' intuition and comfort with corporate finance.

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Business Fundamentals will help you gain a competitive edge and set yourself up for success in business school.