Archive : GMAT Tips

Vivian Kerr is a regular contributor to several GMAT and SAT websites, allowing her to flex her intellectual muscle while she is in between film and stage projects as an actress.

Pronoun-agreement is a concept we see quite often on GMAT Sentence Correction. Pronouns must have clear antecedents, meaning they can only refer to one noun in the sentence, and they must agree with their antecedents in number. Relative pronouns are special pronouns often used to link a dependent clause back to the main independent clause in a sentence. Relative pronouns include “that,” “who,” “whom,” “which,” “where,” “when,” and “why.” Luckily, you won’t need to identify them by name, but there are two rules that you should remember to help you use relative pronouns correctly, and eliminate Sentence Correction options using them incorrectly.

Vivian Kerr is a regular contributor to several GMAT and SAT websites, allowing her to flex her intellectual muscle while she is in between film and stage project as an actress.

Studying for the GMAT in the next few months would be a lot easier if we let go of some bad study habits, misconceptions about the exam, and kicked our study plan into high gear. It’s a New Year, so start 2013 off right with some GMAT resolutions to take your 500-600 score to a 700+.

Today’s guest post comes from New England-based instructor David Newland. David has been teaching for Veritas Prep since 2006, and he won the Veritas Prep Instructor of the Year award in 2008. Students’ friends often call in asking when he will be teaching next because he really is a Veritas Prep and a GMAT rock star!

Vivian Kerr is a regular contributor to several GMAT and SAT websites, allowing her to flex her intellectual muscle while she is in between film and stage project as an actress.

Geometry is essential to GMAT Quantitative success, and knowing the special right triangles are a fundamental “you-will-definitely-see-it” type of concept. The special right triangles are so called because their side-ratio never changes. If we know the value of one side, we can find the values of all the other sides. The first is a 30-60-90 triangle. Its sides will always be in a ratio of x: x√3 : 2x. The other special triangle is the 45-45-90 triangle. Its sides will always be in a ratio of x: x: x√2.

Today’s guest post comes from New England-based instructor David Newland. David has been teaching for Veritas Prep since 2006, and he won the Veritas Prep Instructor of the Year award in 2008. Students’ friends often call in asking when he will be teaching next because he really is a Veritas Prep and a GMAT rock star!

Vivian Kerr is a regular contributor to several GMAT and SAT websites, allowing her to flex her intellectual muscle while she is in between film and stage project as an actress.

Advanced Geometry questions on the GMAT will involve concepts such as surface area and volume of three-dimensional shapes. Occasionally (just to make things more difficult), the GMAT will require you to visualize a two-dimensional shape inside a three-dimensional shape. To get these questions correct you will need to 1) draw the shape/s cleanly and carefully, and 2) look for ways to transfer information from one shape to another. Let’s look at an example!

Today’s post comes from Seckin Kara, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor from Turkey. Before reading, be sure to check out Part I from last week!

So how can we train ourselves to master the Sentence Correction section of the GMAT? Lesson materials are not enough to make up for the natural speed disadvantage non-natives have against native English speakers. Here is a relatively understated fact: In order to create homogenous sentence correction questions in their data bank, GMAC is in general putting similar incorrect sentence structures into all SC questions. Therefore, if you practice solving many questions it could give you the edge you are missing. I will be bold here and suggest tackling 350 to 500 SC practice questions before exam day if you think you really need to improve your SC. The more the better, but don’t overkill yourself, after 300+ questions you should check your performance and decide at some point that you improved enough.

Vivian Kerr is a regular contributor to several GMAT and SAT websites, allowing her to flex her intellectual muscle while she is in between film and stage project as an actress.

The best thing about Sentence Correction on the GMAT is that it’s easy to improve quickly by memorizing and reviewing certain grammar fundamentals we know the GMAT loves to test. The more familiar you are with the concept of singular/plural, parallelism, pronouns and their antecedents, etc. the better you’ll do! One of the most fundamental concepts you’ll need to understand about English grammar is what makes a complete sentence (i.e. an independent clause).

Today, we introduce a new guest contributor. Seckin Kara has been a GMAT instructor for Veritas Prep since 2006. He began teaching in Providence, RI when he was a student at Brown and upon graduating, he went on to teach for us in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. After years of finance and banking, he left that career to pursue his passion of education forged largely from his interactions with Veritas Prep students, and can soon be found teaching GMAT classes in his homeland of Turkey.

This blog post is one in a series of lessons that come from the free Veritas Prep GMAT Question Bank and the statistics gathered from its user base. For each question, the data behind correct and incorrect answers tell a story, and many of these stories hold in them great value for you as you prepare to take the GMAT. In each of these posts, we’ll take a question from the GMAT Question Bank and show you what you can learn from the trend in correct/incorrect answers submitted by other students.

While we discuss GMAT question difficulty, let’s start by mentioning this: it’s often quite difficult to convince GMAT students of what on the GMAT is truly difficult. Students overestimate the difficulty of the “math” on the GMAT quant section, studying and discussing in forums the various rules, shortcuts, and properties that they can cram from flashcards or highlight in notebooks. In doing so, they underestimate the capacity of their competitors to do the same – remember, every single competitor of yours on the GMAT has been to college. Every single competitor “knows how to study,” and theoretically every single competitor of yours has passed year-long classes on the content of the GMAT (largely algebra, geometry, and arithmetic). Mastering high school math skills is necessary for success on the GMAT, or at least a very good idea, but when you’re competing with a pool of test-takers who have all demonstrated the ability to do the same, it’s not sufficient for you to separate yourself!

This blog post is one in a series of lessons that come from the free Veritas Prep GMAT Question Bank and the statistics gathered from its user base. For each question, the data behind correct and incorrect answers tell a story, and many of these stories hold in them great value for you as you prepare to take the GMAT. In each of these posts, we’ll take a question from the GMAT Question Bank and show you what you can learn from the trend in correct/incorrect answers submitted by other students.

One of the more fascinating themes surrounding the GMAT is that the math concepts that tend to drive adults crazy are those that they mastered as kids – the grad school level test in many ways flummoxes students with middle school and even elementary school math. Many a GMAT student has even joked that the GMAT is similar to the TV game show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”

This blog post is one in a series of lessons that come from the free Veritas Prep GMAT Question Bank and the statistics gathered from its user base. For each question, the data behind correct and incorrect answers tell a story, and many of these stories hold in them great value for you as you prepare to take the GMAT. In each of these posts, we’ll take a question from the GMAT Question Bank and show you what you can learn from the trend in correct/incorrect answers submitted by other students.

One of Veritas Prep’s most-beloved employees is Scott Shrum, co-author of the book Your MBA Game Plan and our resident “scientist” (given that designation because of his BS from MIT; he doesn’t wear a labcoat but when you ask him a science question he pretty much always nails it even after the disclaimer “You know that not everyone who went to MIT is actually a scientist”). Scott is a natural to test out hard GMAT problems –- he scored 770 on the GMAT and was admitted to Kellogg and HBS — and one of our favorite internal barometers for determining question difficulty is when we find what we call a “Shrumbuster” — a question that Scott Shrum gets wrong.

Today’s post comes from Antony Ritz, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Washington, D.C. Before you read this post, be sure to read Part I and Part II!

And now for the exciting conclusion — the correlation/causation issue in actual GMAT questions! Let’s try one:

A researcher discovered that people who have low levels of immune-system activity tend to score much lower on tests of mental health than do people with normal or high immune-system activity. The researcher concluded from this experiment that the immune system protects against mental illness as well as against physical disease.

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This new series brings some of their best insights to you. Today we have our next installment from John Chismody, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Pittsburgh.

Having been involved in the GMAT test prep arena for quite some time, I have taught a variety of students who have different ways of thinking through scenarios. Just like there are many ways to build a house, there is not one correct way to solve a problem. What I have discovered is that those who are masters in engineering and finance are not necessarily the higher scoring candidates on the math sections of the GMAT.

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. Today we feature another post from Jen Begasse, a GMAT instructor in New Brunswick.

My GMAT students tend to be busy people juggling a lot of responsibilities and activities, and so I am always looking for ways to help them be hyperefficient… especially on GMAT problems! So with efficiency on my mind, I’d love to be able to figure out a way to help my students shortcut their way through Sentence Correction. For example, if we read a Sentence Correction passage and the underlined portion of it sounds reasonable enough, can’t we avoid reading the four other possible answer choices, select “A” (the original answer choice), bank a couple of minutes to save for the next tricky Critical Reasoning problem, and move on with our lives?

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam.

What does it take to be successful on the GMAT? What habits do successful test takers employ? Well, we asked Veritas Prep instructors worldwide to see what they had to say.

Jill Witty – San Francisco, CA
“Sometimes I’ll encounter a question that makes me angry or that riles me up in some way. For instance, I’ll read a Sentence Correction problem in which I believe all of the choices are poorly worded. In those situations, I have to remind myself to take a deep breath. The GMAT is a completely rational exercise, and allowing your emotions to interfere will only inhibit your ability to find the right answer. Even if I don’t like any of the answer choices, one of them has to be the most right (or least wrong) among them, and it’s my job to find that one answer. My getting angry at the writers of the test is not going to change that!”

Today’s post comes from Antony Ritz, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Washington, D.C. Before you read this post, be sure to read Part I from last week!

In our last post on the topic, we discussed how to define correlation and causation in contrast to each other. Now, let’s take a look at how to pick the right answer on a GMAT question dealing with these concepts.

Today’s post comes from Antony Ritz, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Washington, D.C.!

Correlation vs. causation is a sticky and oft-overlooked topic that can lead to misunderstandings and wrong answers on the GMAT. However, once you can learn to contrast these two concepts, you will not only understand both, but be less likely to confuse them on the test.

What is Correlation?
To say that two items are correlated is to say that they vary together. A correlation between two items means that if one item is present then the other item is more likely to be present than it otherwise would be. The presence of one item does not have to guarantee the presence of the other or even make the presence of the other item likely in any absolute sense.

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This series brings some of their best insights to you. Today we have the followup to last week’s post from Ashley Newman-Owens, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Boston. If you haven’t already, be sure to read last week’s article first!

First of all, what does it mean precisely to be “more likely than not”? Well, since the probability OF something is 1 — the probability of NOT, these two quantities add up to 1. Something is “equally likely as not,” then, if the probability of its occurring and the probability of its not occurring are both 50% — and therefore something is “more likely than not” as soon as its probability climbs the slightest bit above 50%, forcing the probability of “not” to dip just below 50%. Now, is there a quantity can we seek directly as the “not”? Well, the alternative outcome is that no two people share a birthday… in other words, that each new person we look at in the room has a birthday we haven’t seen yet.

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This new series brings some of their best insights to you. Today we have another installment from Ashley Newman-Owens, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Boston.

Because Veritas Prep turned ten this summer (kids — they grow up so fast), and because there’s a 100% chance that you’re reading this right now, we bring you a post today on probability and birthdays.

Unless you’re stranger to the test, you already know that the biggest challenge of many a GMAT problem is translating a question whose phrasing makes it seem nearly unanswerable into a series of simple, eminently answerable questions. And probability questions are no exception, my friend.

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This new series brings some of their best insights to you. Today we have another installment from Valerie Browning, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Houston.

The easiest place to mess up a problem is in the “careless error” department. The more math we grind out on a page, the more opportunities we have to make a transposition error or an addition error or a basic math error of some other sort.

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This new series brings some of their best insights to you. Today we have another installment from John Chismody, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Pittsburgh.

Give this GMAT Sentence Correction question a try:

From studies of the bony house of the brain, which is the cranium, located in the back of the skull, come what scientists know about dinosaur brains.

We’re back with the next installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This new series brings some of their best insights to you. Our latest tip comes courtesy of Rich Zwelling, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in New York.

If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been preparing for the GMAT for a good while already. You’ve learned all the ins and outs of prime factorization. You’ve worked and re-worked participial modifiers until you’re ready to scream. You’ve agonized over this stupid Integrated Reasoning business and asked “Why now? Why me?”

One thing you likely haven’t been thinking about is how you’re going to feed yourself on test day. After all, that can wait. You obviously can’t devote precious brain power to thinking about food when you’re stressing out about your time management.

We’re back with the second installment in an occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This new series brings some of their best insights to you. Our second tip comes courtesy of Bobby Umar, a Veritas Prep GMAT prep instructor in Toronto.

“You got big dreams? You want Fame? Well Fame costs, and right here is where you start the pain…and sweat”
– Debbie Allen, Fame TV show

I came up with this model after having taught thousands of different GMAT students over the past decade. In every case, students who have had trouble with the GMAT have done so due to one of the following issues. If you want to succeed on the GMAT, you need to make sure that you covered your bases with each of the elements in the model.

Today we introduce a new occasional series on the Veritas Prep Blog, called “GMAT Gurus Speak Out.” Veritas Prep has dozens of experienced GMAT instructors around the world (all of whom have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT), and it’s amazing how much collective experience they have in preparing students for the exam. This new series brings some of their best insights to you. Our first tip comes courtesy of Brian Kalar, a Veritas Prep GMAT prep instructor in St. Louis.

On the GMAT, Sentence Correction can seem intimidating if you don’t approach it correctly. Each of us makes several mistakes each day in grammar and usage. In fact, I try to point out to my classes in the first meeting that it would be nearly impossible to speak with GMAT-perfect grammar and usage even in teaching the class! So, how then can we be expected to strive for perfection on test day?

We have good news and bad news for you: The Next Generation GMAT’s new Integrated Reasoning Section (debuting in June, 2012) will feature an onscreen calculator, marking the first time the GMAT will allow students to use a calculator on the exam. The good news is that, when you might need it, the calculator will be there to help you do some quick math, and you don’t need to waste valuable time “carrying the 1″ and that sort of thing.

So what’s the bad news? It’s the fact that the calculator’s very presence will likely tempt many test takers into using it when they don’t need to. While using a calculator is usually a quick exercise, it still represents time spent doing calculations that may be unnecessary. In today’s video, Brian Galvin explains how this may prove to be yet another trap for less savvy test takers:

Last week I wrote about the day I scored 780 on the GMAT. That post was purely about my experiences on test day — from what I ate in the morning to how I kept my mind sharp during short breaks in the exam. Today I’ll dig into some of the specific strategies I used to ace the GMAT.

Note that many of these strategies overlap heavily with Veritas Prep’s own GMAT prep philosophy — I do work for Veritas Prep, after all — so regular readers will probably see some overlap between this post and the advice they read on this blog on a regular basis. Here I describe how the “rubber met the road” for me as I put these strategies to work.

In today’s Video GMAT Tip, we discuss Data Sufficiency strategy and show you a key page from the testmaker’s playbook.  In a nod to this wild summer weather that Al Gore predicted, we call this tip “An Inconvenient Truth” – convenient timing for us to be able to use that title!

Set A consists of integers -9, 8, 3, 10, and J; Set B consists of integers -2, 5, 0, 7, -6, and T. If R is the median of Set A and W is the mode of set B, and R^W is a factor of 34, what is the value of T if J is negative?

It’s time again for another GMAT challenge question, and this one focuses on one of the quantitative section’s favorite themes: prime factors.

Please submit your answers in the comments field, and check back later today for the solution and a more-thorough explanation of prime factors!

It’s time again for another Veritas Prep Challenge Question. Once again you’ll find that exponents will play a fairly significant role in this question. Stay tuned to the GMAT Tip of the Week post tomorrow for an explanation of this question and a quick checklist for everything you need to know about GMAT exponents.

Right at this second it’s September 2nd, with 2 days until the college football season starts, once again with too many teams in the Big Ten. In honor of all of these twos and toos, we present you a GMAT problem that features too many twos:

Studying for the GMAT does not have to be a chore — it can certainly be made enjoyable through fun challenge problems! That’s why we try to keep things lighthearted (yet effective) when it comes to your GMAT preparation.

As you likely know, the GMAT is a computer-adaptive test (CAT), in which your score is calculated by an algorithm that provides you with harder questions (and higher score returns) when you answer previous questions correctly, and with easier questions (and lower returns) when you’ve answered previous questions incorrectly.

Who forms pyramids and raps circles around square lyricists?
Eminem, Cinderella Man.

Eminem’s latest (and greatest?) album, Recovery, has defied convention in many ways:

If you’ve used electricity in your life, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Thomas Edison, and likely pay your electric bills to a company named in his honor. (And if you’re reading this, you’re using an electronic device, so you are familiar with Edison. Q.E.D.) You may not, however, be as familiar with a man perhaps even more responsible for the electricity you’re using to view this blog post: Nikola Tesla.

One of the most compelling dramas in all of sports took place yesterday in the Tour de France, with Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador — the two leaders of the race, which ends Sunday — matching each other’s yeoman efforts pedal-for-pedal up one of the world’s most intimidating mountain roads, the Col de Tourmalet. Through the fog, up grades of over 10%, surrounded by fans waving flags and cowbells, and well ahead of every other rider in the race, the two riders — separated after two weeks and thousands of miles by only eight seconds — put on a battle for the ages.

Now that the World Cup is over and the majority of the world’s population has forgotten again about the Southern Hemisphere, it’s safe to say that most of us are enjoying the middle of summer. Summer is more than just a season between the solstice in June and the equinox in September; it’s a state of mind and a way of life. Close your eyes and just think of “summer” — just the notion of it implies to most of us a sense of happiness, relaxation, and comfort. Take Christmas carols out of the mix and summer is easily the most musically-written-about season of all. Admit it — you have DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime” in your head right now!

There are big decisions in life, and then there are BIG DECISIONS. You’ll make some pretty important decisions on the GMAT, so you should want to consider the methodology of how to best make these choices. And few of those BIG DECISIONS can compete with some of those made by one of the world’s most prominent figures of the last century, LBJ.

Admit it — as much fun as the World Cup has been, you’re looking forward to the return of sports in which American superathletes dominate. Landon Donovan’s 91st minute goal to win the pool was great, but nil-nil ties and inferiority to both -guays (Para- and Uru-) isn’t the kind of thing Americans can really get behind.