Archive : GMAT

It’s Oscar weekend here in Los Angeles, and that can only mean one thing:

The winner is…your GMAT verbal score.

How can this year’s Academy Awards improve your performance on GMAT Sentence Correction? Let’s look at the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture, Argo. The title alone, Argo, brings up two important points about GMAT Sentence Correction:

“How can I improve my Critical Reasoning ability?” is a common question for any GMAT instructor, but particularly for our own David Newland, who owns a 99^th percentile LSAT score in addition to several 99ths on the GMAT.  As an expert on both GMAT Critical Reasoning and its LSAT counterpart, Logical Reasoning, David is regularly sought out by those seeking advice on CR questions.  Here’s his most common reply:

In the four months since we launched the Veritas Prep GMAT Question Bank, we have collected nearly 300,000 responses and helped thousands of users get ready for the GMAT. Students’ responses have been nothing short of terrific, sharing success stories with us and giving us some great ideas for how to make the GMAT Question Bank even better.

The pope’s recent announcement that he would be leaving the papacy came as a surprise to millions of people around the world last month. After all, election as pope carries a lifetime mandate by definition, and no sitting pope has resigned in the past 600 years. This string of some 60 popes serving their full mandate has now been broken, and the news brings up the topic of abdicating in the scope of the GMAT exam.

This week, let’s look at some work-rate questions which use joint variation. Check out the last three posts of QWQW series if you are not comfortable with joint variation.

Question 1: A contractor undertakes to do a job within 100 days and hires 10 people to do it. After 20 days, he realizes that one fourth of the work is done so he fires 2 people. In how many more days will the work get over?

Set theory is no one’s favorite GMAT concept (unless you’re a masochist), but since nearly all test-takers will see at least one overlapping-sets question on the Quantitative section of the GMAT, it’s certainly important.  And take solace in this – becoming confident with this challenging type of word problem can be as simple as learning how to rock a Venn diagram.

In a Valentine’s Day surprise yesterday, the standard Thursday Veritas Prep staff meeting was crashed by a lovable intruder. Cookie Monster – yes, the one-track-minded carnivore from Sesame Street – barreled into the meeting with a singing telegram for our Director of Admissions Consulting and Worldwide GMAT Instructor of the Year, Travis Morgan. Bearing a message of love and his standard message of “me want cookie”, he also reminded the GMAT staff of why Cookie Monster would fail miserably at the GMAT:

The first time I took the GMAT, I got stuck on a geometry problem. It required a knowledge of the rules of arc angles (Page 33 in the new Veritas Prep Geometry book) and I, at the time, had no idea such rules existed. But I’ve always been best at Geometry – I’m very visually oriented so I often see how to slice a shape into triangles, rectangles, and circles, even if it’s not immediately apparent how to do so. So I figured I should be able to slice the circle in such a way that I could find the arc angle. Suddenly, without my realizing it, over 6 minutes had gone by, and since this was a particularly hard problem, I was at the end of the test. I had 5 minutes to finish 4 questions, and I only answered one (incorrectly) and left the rest blank. My percentile ranking plummeted from somewhere around 90% to 70% when I finished the test.

Now that we have discussed direct and inverse variation, joint variation will be quite intuitive. We use joint variation when a variable varies with (is proportional to) two or more variables.

Say, x varies directly with y and inversely with z. If y doubles and z becomes half, what happens to x?

As we’ve reached the midpoint between buzzing over Beyonce’s “Crazy In Love” intro over the weekend and Valentine’s Day next week, love is in the air. Which is a good thing in most respects, but can be a dangerous one on the GMAT. You might well say that one of the most common mistakes that test-takers make on verbal questions is “love at first sight”.

During your preparation for the GMAT, you will learn myriad techniques, shortcuts, rules, exceptions and strategies. Unfortunately, even the best of us tend to draw a blank once or twice under test day pressure, so sometimes you may have to solve questions using deduction and strategic thinking more than with known mathematical identities and theorems. Consider the following question:

As promised, we will discuss inverse variation today. The concept of inverse variation is very simple – two quantities x and y vary inversely if increasing one decreases the other proportionally.

If x takes values x1, x2, x3… and y takes values y1, y2, y3 … correspondingly, then x1*y1 = x2*y2 = x3*y3 = some constant value

If you’re like many this weekend, you’ll do some gambling on the Super Bowl. Whether it’s a squares pool at a Super Bowl party, some prop bets in Vegas, or a mayoral contest between the chief executives of Baltimore and San Francisco (Rice-a-Roni against some DVDs of The Wire?), you’ll have opportunities to either win or lose based on probability. So here’s a tip that can help you on both football bets and the GMAT:

Over the holiday season, you may have taken the time to go see the Hobbit, the much-hyped precursor to the Lord of the Rings movies which breathed life into the seminal Tolkien books published over a half century ago. After watching and reflecting on the movie, there are many parallels between it and the GMAT exam that can be drawn. Most glaringly, the amount of time that must be dedicated to each, the unfamiliar visual experience, the importance of wordplay, and the known subject matter prior to even entering the theater. For the purposes of this analogy, the Pearson center will double as a movie theater, except with the no cell phone rule enforced quite vigorously.

Aiming for a 700+ on the GMAT? You never know when a challenging combination or permutation question will pop up three-quarters of the way through your exam to wreck havoc on your score. This advanced concept is not as commonly tested as algebra fundamentals or number properties, but it’s definitely worth knowing the basics in case you do see it.

We can keep working on ‘pattern recognition’ questions for a long time and not run out of questions of different types on which it can be used. We hope you have understood the basic concepts involved. So let’s move on to another topic now: Variation.

Basically, variation describes the relation between two or more quantities. e.g. workers and work done, children and noise, entrepreneurs and start ups. More workers means more work done; more children means more noise; more entrepreneurs means more start ups and so on… These are examples of direct variation i.e. if one quantity increases, the other increases proportionally. Then there are quantities that have inverse variation between them e.g. workers and time taken. If there are more workers, time taken to complete a work will be less.

I have been doing GMAT test prep for a long time.  While I do score nicely, this was not always so.  In fact, the first practice GMAT I sat for was in the low 600s.  Having always aced my classroom courses, I was disappointed that my score was not aligned with my academic track record.

If you’re a regular reader of this corner of the Veritas Prep blog, you should know that we like to take Friday mornings to identify something newsworthy and relate it to the GMAT. But this week, the trivial-enough-to-blog news cycle has seemed to take a break. Manti Te’o is old news, the NFL playoffs are in their bye week before the Super Bowl… When the world takes a break, what’s a GMAT blogger to do?

Double negatives can often intimidate and confuse students on the GMAT. Let’s review some strategies to help you not dislike double negatives so much. Hopefully you don’t feel incapable of navigating these questions already, but if you do, here are some strategies to ensure that you don’t feel uneasy when faced with one on test day.

Today’s post comes from New England-based instructor, David Newland. Before reading, be sure to check out Part I from last week!

Last week, we mentioned a couple of good errors and explored how making mistakes can turn into opportunities for learning. This week, we’ll explore bad errors and how we can avoid them on test day.

It’s OK to be a little neurotic when taking your GMAT.  I am not encouraging you to freak out or anything like that.  What I am encouraging you to do is to write little notes to yourself.  Use your dry-erase board to write little reminders to yourself.  You may feel stupid or silly when you are doing it, but feeling silly while getting a problem correct is a way better feeling than not feeling silly while missing a problem you should have gotten right.

Continuing our quest to master ‘pattern recognition’, let’s discuss a tricky little question today. It is best done using divisibility and remainders logic we discussed in some previous posts. We suggest you check out these divisibility posts if you haven’t yet.

There is no shortage of opinion and points of view here at Veritas Prep. We’re an opinionated lot, and we’re also not afraid to stick out our necks and make a few predictions about how we see the worlds of test prep and admissions evolving in the coming year. The following are four trends and news items we expect to see emerge at some point in 2013:

At least one Top 20 MBA program will introduce an all-online MBA program.
Right now, Kenan-Flagler’s MBA@UNC is still the only game in town when it comes to top-tier business schools offering real, full-blown MBAs available online. The segment certainly still has a ways to go in terms of burnishing online education’s reputation, and UNC has tried to tackle this problem head-on with ads that go as far as to warn that you probably can’t get into its program. With most of the elite American universities making much more aggressive strides into online education (most frequently with MIT & Harvard’s edX or Stanford’s Coursera), it’s not hard to imagine that another top-ranked business school will soon move to offer a full MBA over the Internet in 2013.

As everyone is discussing this week, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o's girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, never existed. As of this morning, the debate rages as to whether Te’o was complicit in the hoax that launched him to Lance-Armstrongian mythic status in the sports entertainment world or whether he was the victim of a Catfish-style prank. But we do know that Lennay Kekua isn’t real.

And we also know that her memory and aura can help you succeed on the GMAT.

How?

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!

We talked about the importance of test endurance and practice on the GMAT. Here are some practical, easy to apply tips for improving your test endurance and your final performance.

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.

Data Sufficiency: Value Questions Can Be Sufficient Without Values! That may sound confusing, but it’s true! We’re used to separating “yes or no” data sufficiency from “value” data sufficiency by what is required by each for sufficiency. For a “yes or no” data sufficiency, we need either an exclusive “yes” or an exclusive “no.” For a “value” data sufficiency, we need a single numerical answer. To get that numerical answer, however, you may not always need the values you think you need!

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!

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

Last week we saw how to use pattern recognition. Today, let’s take up another question in which this concept will help us. Mind you, there are various ways of solving a question. Most questions we solve using pattern recognition can be solved using another method. But pattern recognition is a method we can use in various cases. It is something that comes to our aid when we forget everything else. If you don’t know from where to start on a question, try to give some values to the variables. You might see a pattern. You may not ‘know’ something. Even then, you can ‘figure out’ the answer because GMAT is not a test of your knowledge; it is a test of your wits. It is a test of whether you can keep your cool when faced with the unknown and use whatever you know to solve the question.

Let’s look at a question now.

If, like many Americans, you plan on watching football this weekend, you’ll undoubtedly see the newest Aaron Rodgers / State Farm “Discount Double Check” ad a couple hundred times. And if you’re reading this post, the Career Day aspect of that ad may speak to you – you’re thinking about making a leap in your career via an MBA, and while the ad suggests that MVPs are for people with low self-esteem, we all know that MBAs are for folks with high aspirations.

When you watch the ad, though, you may not recognize that Mr. MVP is giving you some valuable GMAT advice. One of the most important moves you can make on the GMAT, after all, is the Discount Double Check.

How does that work?

Maybe some of you have been there: You didn’t quite break the score you were hoping to break; your quant or verbal is lower than you expected, or maybe your composite score falls below your target school’s range. Should you retake the GMAT?

For some, it may not be a tough decision. If your score is dramatically lower than you expected, and you’re very confident that you can do better, do not hesitate to take the test again. Schools commend applicants who boost their scores, and admissions officers do not penalize candidates who have taken the test more than once. They do, however, always prefer to see improvement. Think of your GMAT score as a data point. If there are two data points, and your second test score is higher than your first, admissions will conclude that you’re capable of that higher score. If they see two data points in descending order, then they may conclude that the first test score is a good indication of your best effort.

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.

And just like that, another year has already come and gone. It’s time to check in and see how we did with the six predictions we made 12 months ago. We love sticking out our necks and putting forward an opinion in this space; it’s even better when we can back up what we write with accountability. Fortunately, the world didn’t end in December, affording us the opportunity to look back and see just how well our crystal ball worked last January.

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.

If you are hoping for a 700+ in GMAT, you need to develop the ability to recognize patterns. GMAT does not test advanced concepts but you can certainly get advanced questions on simple concepts. For such questions, the ability to quickly observe patterns can come in quite handy. We will discuss a complicated question today which can be easily solved by observing the pattern.

Happy New Year! With a new year comes a new number – even if you’re still writing 2012 on checks for the next month or two (if you write checks at all…it is 2013 after all), the year is now 2013. And if 2013 is the year that you’re going to get serious about going to business school, the number 2013 gives you a great opportunity to learn to think in terms of GMAT math.

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!

We’re back with the next installment in our “Instructors with a Passion for Education series.” Veritas Prep not only has a number of experienced GMAT instructors worldwide, but many of those instructors have also pursued education as a lifelong career. The Veritas Prep faculty includes college professors, educational PhDs and Ed. Ds, schoolteachers and administrators, and many others for whom teaching is a passion and not a job. We asked Boston-based instructor Ashley Newman-Owens ‘Why Education?’ and here is what she said.

Last week we discussed some concepts of GCF. Today we will talk about GCF and LCM of fractions.

LCM of two or more fractions is given by: LCM of numerators/GCF of denominators

GCF of two or more fractions is given by: GCF of numerators/LCM of denominators

Why do we calculate LCM and GCF of fractions in this way? Let’s look at the algebraic explanation first. Then we will look at a more intuitive reason.

Believe it or not, 2012 is almost over. If you’re reading this, it means that the world hasn’t ended, and that at least some of us still have electricity and Internet access, so we’re ending on a good note! As we at Veritas Prep wind down the year, we thought we’d share some of our biggest news, best posts, and most interesting topics from the past 12 months.