Archive : GMAT

One of the more-dreaded types of GMAT Problem Solving questions is the “must be true” question with three statements; these questions often look like:

If 20x = 49y, which of the following must be true?

I.      x > y
II.    x²  > y²
III.  x/7 is an integer

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.

Merry Christmas, and happy holidays from our Veritas Prep family to yours! We thank you all for such a wonderful year, and we cannot wait to see what 2013 has in store for us. Many thanks to all of our loyal readers, students, instructors, and consultants for being a part of our team this year.

Sometimes students come up looking for explanations of concepts they come across in books. Actually, in Quant, you can establish innumerable inferences from the theory of any topic. The point is that you should be comfortable with the theory. You should be able to deduce your own inferences from your understanding of the topic. If you come across some so-called rules, you should be able to say why they hold. Let’s discuss a couple of such rules from number properties regarding GCF (greatest common factor). Many of you might read them for the first time. Stop and think why they must hold.

So here we are. December 21, 2012. If the Mayans are right, you’re absolutely wasting your time reading this, as if this really is the end of the world then b-schools will cease to exist, too, so why are you thinking about applications and GMAT scores?

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.

For the past few weeks, we have been discussing conditional statements. Let’s switch back to Quant today. I have been meaning to discuss a question for a while. We can easily solve it by plugging in the right values. The only issue is in figuring out the right values quickly. The point we are going to discuss is that there has to be a plan.

For many GMAT test-takers, one of the most challenging tasks on the exam is that of weeding through the clutter on Sentence Correction questions to arrive at an actionable decision point. So many Sentence Correction questions involve a lot of dense language and not-altogether-enjoyable subject matter, and as a result students spend a lot of time spinning their wheels trying to even get going.

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.

Last week we discussed a very tricky CR question based on conditional statements. This week, we would like to discuss another CR question based on necessary conditions. Note that you don’t need to be given ‘only if’ or ‘only when’ to mark a necessary condition. The wording of the statement could imply it. You need to keep a keen eye to figure out necessary and sufficient conditions.

Many test-takers lament the very presence of Sentence Correction questions, feeling overwhelmed as they study grammar rules and still overwhelmed as they look at practice questions and cannot determine where to start. Sentence Correction can be daunting – the English language is far from binary in its usage (“I before E except after C”…and even that has a bunch of extra caveats), and the questions themselves are specifically designed to make finding your Decision Points difficult.

We hope that you have understood conditional sentences we discussed in the last post. The concept is very important and you will come across questions using this concept often. Now, let’s discuss the GMAT question we gave you last week.

Question: A newborn kangaroo, or joey, is born after a short gestation period of only 39 days. At this stage, the joey’s hind limbs are not well developed, but its forelimbs are well developed, so that it can climb from the cloaca into its mother’s pouch for further development. The recent discovery that ancient marsupial lions were also born with only their forelimbs developed supports the hypothesis that newborn marsupial lions must also have needed to climb into their mothers’ pouches.

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!

Baby, it’s cold outside. Pretty much no matter where you are while you read this, it’s cold right now (even here in Los Angeles), and whether it’s by blankets, Starbucks holiday drinks, or thermal underwear, you’re probably hoping to warm up. Which is actually good advice for the GMAT, too, just in a slightly different way.

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?”

Last week we discussed a Critical Reasoning question in detail. Today, I want to discuss a very important concept of CR — analyzing a conditional statement. You will often encounter these even though they may not be in the exact same format as the one we will discuss below. We will discuss the basic framework and then we will look at questions where this concept will be very helpful. Mind you, without this framework, it can get a little tricky to wrap your head around these questions.

Statement 1:

If you trouble your teacher, you will be punished.

What does this imply? It implies that ‘troubling your teacher’ is a sufficient condition to get punished. If you trouble, you will get punished.

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.

At the risk of generalizing from a relatively small sample, let me say that people who are good at Quant, tend to be good at Critical Reasoning in Verbal. I certainly cannot comment about their SC and RC prowess but they are either good at CR right from the start or improve dramatically after just a couple of our sessions. The reason for this is very simple – CR is more like Quant than like Verbal. CR is very mathematical. You need to keep in mind some basic rules and based on those, you can easily crack the most difficult of problems. There is only one catch – don’t get distracted by options put there to distract you!

Today I would like to discuss a great CR question from our book. It upsets a lot of students even though it is simple – just like a GMAT question is supposed to be. Here is the question:

According to research by the Graduate Management Admission Council, the most common complaint among GMAT test-takers is that it’s difficult to find good written solutions to GMAT practice problems. And while, in a way, this blog is offended (how could you read our pop culture and political commentary laden solutions here and not find them great?!), we’d also like to say this:

The lack of high-quality solutions to GMAT problems could be a very good thing for you as you study.

Now, let’s first admit that it’s completely understandable that many students are frustrated with written solutions. Written solutions have natural limitations to them – they have to start with a first word and end with a last word and therefore don’t lend themselves well to tangents or mini-lessons within. They generally need to fit in a relatively-fixed space (or your Official Guide for GMAT Review wouldn’t fit inside any kind of carry-on luggage), and so they typically pick one method to solve a problem and go with that. And in the interest of time and space they’ll often focus on “what to do” and not as much on “why you’d do that.”

Last month we created a bit of a splash when we launched the Veritas Prep GMAT Question Bank, an entirely source of hundreds of realistic GMAT questions that allows you to practice with any number of questions, review your accuracy vs. that of other students, and even track your pacing vs. worldwide averages. In less than a month, thousands of students have logged tens of thousands of responses in the Question Bank. We’re swimming in data!

When we launched, we said, “We will add Integrated Reasoning shortly,” and now we make good on that promise. On Friday we turned on the ability for students to select and answer dozens of Integrated Reasoning problems. Students can then review their results, see a detailed solution for each problem, and use the feedback to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses.

People often complain about getting stuck in work-rate problems. Hence, I would like to take some 700+ level questions on rate today. I have discussed the basic concepts of work-rate (using ratios) in a previous post:

Cracking the Work Rate Problems

You  might want to go through that post before you set out to work on these problems. Ensure that you are very comfortable with the relation: Work = Rate*Time and its implications: If rate doubles, work done doubles too if the time remains constant; if one work is done, rate = 1/time etc. Thorough understanding of these implications is fundamental to ‘reasoning out’ the answer.

As Twitter has confirmed, the real winner in this week’s U.S. Elections was Nate Silver, the statistician behind fivethirtyeight.com and the prognosticator who called nearly every national race correctly, save for one senate race in North Dakota. Famously, he predicted each state’s presidential race correctly and he’s risen to prominence with a role on the New York Times and with his new book “The Signal and the Noise.” So with Nate Silver taking statistical analysis to heights that Moneyball only hoped to, it’s only fitting that we close this week by summoning our inner Silver and taking a statistical dive at GMAT questions.

Polling isn’t new, nor is statistical analysis. So why is Nate Silver so much more successful than others when it comes to using statistics to project outcomes? If we understood completely, we’d be writing a different article for a lot more money on a more-heavily-trafficked blog, but the layman’s answer is largely that he takes time to determine which statistics are most relevant to the outcome, and focuses his energy on those. And that’s what you should do when you analyze your GMAT practice tests and consume information about the GMAT – cut to the most meaningful statistics and focus your energy there.

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.

When Veritas Prep hosts its free seminars online — 1.5 hour sessions that introduce prospective students to the GMAT and to several strategies for succeeding on the test, as well as introducing them to the Veritas Prep program — one of the first items that the presenter covers is a Data Sufficiency question that highlights the GMAT “penalty” for making assumptions about numbers. Through that demonstration, students quickly realize their own propensity for thinking in terms of positive integers, and are taught to write down a quick checklist to ensure that they consider both negative numbers and nonintegers.

Last week we discussed factorials – how we can take something common when we have factorials in some equations. Today let’s discuss a couple of questions based on factorials. They look intimidating but they are pretty simple. Factorial is all about multiplication and hence there is a high probability that you will be able to take something common and cancel something. These techniques reduce our work significantly. Hence, seeing a factorial in a question should bring a smile to your face!

Question 1: Given that x, y and z are positive integers, is y!/x! an integer?

Statement 1: (x + y)(x – y) = z! + 1

Statement 2: x + y = 121

So it is upon us. The much-anticipated final Jobs Report before the 2012 Presidential Election has been released, and its results will fuel debates all weekend and can have a significant impact on your GMAT verbal score if you pay attention to the arguments that surround it.

Here’s what happened – the American economy added 171,000 new jobs, beating economists’ predictions by a healthy margin (good news?) but the unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a point from last month’s figure (bad news?). And in full GMAT Critical Reasoning mode, pundits and political representatives immediately began using those statistics to draw unsupported conclusions. Check out these Critical Reasoning style Weaken questions you could make from today’s arguments:

A concept we have not yet covered in this series is factorials (though we used some factorials in the post Power in Factorials). Let’s first discuss the basics of factorials. Once we do, we will see that most factorial expressions can be easily solved using a single method: taking common!

First of all, what is (n!)?

n! = 1*2*3*4*5*6*…*(n – 2)*(n -1)*n

Let’s take some examples:

Happy Halloween Weekend, readers (and, yes, we do find it odd that for this generation Halloween now spans several days and seems to have more relevance for 20-somethings than does pretty much any other holiday, but we’re not complaining).

As you put the final touches on your Halloween costume for the weekend – our ever-on-the-pulse-of-costume-popularity coworker, Jason (2010 – Antoine Dodson; 2011- Angry Birds. Every year he’s ahead of the curve on “most popular costume”) is going as Gangam Style – it’s not a bad time to keep your eyes one one of the next hallmarks of the fall-winter calendar, Round Two Application Deadlines. And here’s where the two coincide:

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 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 interviewed a few instructors to learn more about their passion for education, and to show how this passion has translated into the Veritas Prep classroom experience. Our latest interview is with Brian Galvin, a Veritas Prep GMAT instructor in Los Angeles (and author of many of our best blog posts!).

We discussed divisibility and remainders many weeks ago. Today, we will use those concepts and discuss another type of question – successive division. But before we do, you need to go through the previous related posts on division if you haven’t read them already:

Divisibility Unraveled

Divisibility Applied on the GMAT

Divisibility Applied to Remainders

There’s a lot you can learn about your GMAT preparation everywhere you look… even in the cutthroat world of American politics. Yes, even watching two Harvard grads snarl at each other can help you become a better GMAT student and, ultimately, a higher score on the exam.

If you watched the U.S. Presidential Debate this week, you hopefully saw a lot of similarities between you and the candidates:

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.

Part of delivering the world’s best GMAT prep course is offering the best tools and resources for our students. For the past ten years we have offered more GMAT practice tests than any other major GMAT preparation provider in the world (15 tests, to be exact). But practice tests are not a “set it and forget it” affair… The real GMAT constantly evolves, adds new questions, retires others, and (as as the case in June, with Integrated Reasoning) even introduces entirely new question formats. So no company can sit back and let its practice tests collect dust — if the tests aren’t changing, then they’re not the best in the business.

As part of our ongoing commitment to build, maintain, and refine the best computer-adaptive GMAT practice tests available anywhere, earlier this month we launched our new GMAT Question Bank. This new resource contains hundreds of realistic, completely free GMAT practice questions.

Today, we will continue our discussion on why it is important to understand the workings behind seemingly miraculous shortcuts. We will use another example from probability.

Question 1: A bag contains 4 white balls, 2 black balls & 3 red balls. One by one three balls are drawn out with replacement (i.e. a ball is drawn and then put back. Thereafter, another ball is drawn). What is the probability that the third ball is red?

Within hours of the Detroit Tigers’ blown Game 4 lead against the Oakland A’s, ensuring a fifth and decisive game of the American League Divisional Series, devastated (and exhausted) Detroiters started watching their Facebook and Twitter feeds fill with an internet meme that would prove prophetic:

Justin Verlander the Game Five pitcher, with the slogan “Everybody Chill Out…I Got This”

And “got this” he did, pitching a complete and dominant game, shutting out the A’s and seemingly inspiring run support from what had been dead bats all series. And in doing so, Verlander showed you how to raise your game for the GMAT. He made it known loud and clear – not necessarily from his words but from his actions, demeanor, and commitment, that he was finishing the job no matter what — he wouldn’t hand the ball off to a relief pitcher if there were any way to avoid it.

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?

Let’s refer back to last week’s post. We discussed why it is important to fully understand what you are doing and why you are doing it, especially while using an innovative method. We talked about it using a combinatorics example.

Let’s revisit it here:

Question 1: What is the probability that you will get a sum of 8 when you throw three dice simultaneously?

We discussed the ways of obtaining various sums. The regular way of obtaining a sum of 8 is enumerating all the possibilities. An innovative way was using 7C2 (as discussed last week).