MAX - Jiggling objects with Maxscript
Offsetting hundreds of objects within a certain range can be hard work, or it can take you less than 10 seconds with Maxscript...

MAX/Photoshop - Compositing Render Elements
Rendering elements can save you time, allows for finer tuning and can make things a lot easier.

MAX - Making a Pool
Work with Mental Ray's architectural materials and final gather to make a realistic pool area - very very quickly.

MAX - Lighting with Textures
Sometimes Omni's and Spots just aren't cutting it, what if you want to do some real lights emitting from real surfaces? This will show you how with Mental Ray.
Difficulty 3/5.

MAX - Controlling the Ambient Occlusion Mix With Sliders
There's more to ambient occlusion than using it purely as your main source of lighting, you can dynamically control it to add a tiny bit of ambience to your scene, and control the amount of samples from your view port without the need to go through and change the settings on each individual texture.
Difficulty 3/5.

MAX/Shake/Photoshop (Theory) - Post Depth of Field
There are a variety of ways to fake DOF in scenes, and they aren't all obscenely expensive on render time.
Difficulty 2/5.

MAX - Wiring Turbo/Mesh Smoothing Iterations
Sometimes the View port and Rendering Iteration control isn't enough, what if you have forty objects that are all heavily smoothed at render time, but you've got 30 seconds to produce a test? This will show you how to control multiple objects render iterations with an on-screen slider.
Difficulty 2/5.

MAX - Lighting Your First Spaceship (With Rig)
In order to keep rendering at an optimal pace, sometimes its quite wise to limit your "Good" lighting only to your spaceship. This can often pose a problem when your ship is flying around a lot. This teaches you basic positional constraining and some fairly nice lighting techniques.
Difficulty 2/5.