Whether you’re counting your bracket money from March Madness or looking forward to this week’s NBA Playoffs, basketball is in the air these days, and it offers a great opportunity for you to look at what good GMAT strategy looks like. You can see it particularly in kids or other pickup players – the NBA guys are all too good at it but you can pick it out there, too – the more aggressive the player, the more rebounds he collects. Many players are content to do what the coaches advised, to box out the opponent next to them and get in position for the rebound…but then they sit back and wait for the ball to fall in their hands. The elite players, really at any level, are those who have that extra instinct to GO GET THE BALL. They attack aggressively, not sit back passively. They get the rebound. And they’d be able to put that same technique to use on GMAT critical reasoning.

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Perhaps it started on a January day in Chicago when elementary school students greeted teacher Frankie Beecroft, recently named Veritas Prep’s Worldwide Instructor of the Year, with an enthusiastic “Good Morning, Teacher of the World!” But maybe it started well before that, in classrooms and at dinner tables in Missouri and Michigan, New Jersey and Norway as the students who would become the leaders of Veritas Prep were inspired by teachers. Whatever the genesis, our lifelong appreciation of teachers and our firm belief that they deserve recognition for their yeoman efforts has led us here.

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On the GMAT, an exam about reasoning and logic, there are few things more frustrating than long sentences punctuated by a host of modifiers, particularly prepositional phrases, participial phrases and appositive phrases, to say nothing of relative clauses. Sentence correction questions are about making sure there are no mistakes in a given sentence, and the more commas and modifiers a sentence has, the more difficult it is to ascertain whether or not it is structured correctly (hint: ~80% of the time, it’s not).

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Is anyone else as obsessed with the BBC’s Sherlock as I am? In addition to the amazingly well-plotted stories and the awesome performances in this latest carnation, Sherlock Holmes is a character we can’t seem to get enough of. From the prime-time CBS version “Elementary” to the Guy Richie movies starring Robert Downey Jr., the deer-stalker-wearing sleuth is everywhere! So how can we apply his powers of deduction to even the most dreaded GMAT Critical Reasoning question? By following this famous Sherlock quote:

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Hey there College Bound student,

Look, I get it, talking about money is boring with a capital BORING, but it’s just one of those under analyzed aspects of the college preparation and college decision process. For many people, the cost of college gets put off by spreading that lump sum into student loans meaning the full cost of college will not be defrayed until well into a career.  So what does college cost?  And what do you get for it?  And what should you do about it?  We will cover all of that! Just take a breath, and lets start with cost.

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GMAT students often get CR problems that use words like “EXCEPT” or “NOT” in their question-stems wrong, and it definitely makes sense why. If we can’t really understand what a question is asking, how can we even begin to solve it? Let’s break down a tough one together.

A greater number of sports magazine subscriptions are sold in Town A than are sold in Town B. Therefore, the citizens of Town A are better informed about international sporting competitions than are the citizens of Town B.

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Click here to read the intro to this blog series! Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com!
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Dear Trav,
What is the reputation of Berkeley Haas?
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The new GMAT Integrated Reasoning section contain four question-types, several of which require the interpretation of data given in graphs and tables. Data analysis is not a skill required on the GMAT Quant section, so this is new to many students. What skills can we bring to these 12 questions? Here are some hot tips!

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Another issue of assumption questions that merits discussion is the inference vs assumption confusion. On some questions, people find it hard to type the question as inference or assumption. Such questions often have the words ‘must be true’. Let’s discuss the two different cases:

The sports news story du jour is an amazing one – 14 year old Tianlang Guan spent yesterday not doing math homework (like you presumably are) or household chores like a normal 14-year old on a Thursday.  He spent it shooting an incredibly impressive round at the Masters, arguably the world’s most prestigious golf tournament.  His score of 73 beat the defending champion by two strokes and kept him in the hunt for another day.  And it should also have taught you a lesson about the GMAT:

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That’s right.  I just called the MBA admissions process a Game.  And like all games, there are winners and there are losers.   Baseball Hall of Famers with the highest batting averages still strike out sometimes, and MVP Quarterbacks do fumble the ball and throw pick sixes now and again.   But they are experienced, they are trusted, and they are generally really darn good at what they do.

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I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about the GMAT. It’s a very interesting exam that can be thought of from multiple angles. Most people see it as an obstacle to be surmounted in an effort to get into the business school of their choice. Some people see it as an unfortunate barrier to their future plans. Personally, I like to think of it as an opportunity to test your reasoning skills against an unseen test maker (who you can think of as the Wizard Oz from the namesake movie). Your goal is to stay one step ahead of the test and predict the traps that will be laid out for you as you answer questions.

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Fans of the “Harry Potter” franchise know that the Sorting Hat magically determines which of the four school houses each new student is to be assigned at Hogwarts. This Hat has to take into account data on every new Hogwarts student, and somehow be able to tell a Gryffindor from a Slytherin! Similarly, on the “Table Analysis” questions in the Integrated Reasoning section on the GMAT, you are required to sift through data and draw conclusions. We may not have magic to help us, but sorting data isn’t as complicated as it sounds.

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Welcome to the final segment of a 4-part Veritas Prep College Readiness Series! Each segment will cover what students can do to prepare for college. Today’s blog post will give 12th graders advice on what they can do to make sure they have a stellar college application. Check out our high school freshman, sophomore, and junior readiness articles too!

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Application questions are a very specific type of Inference question. They ask us to go one step further; we must apply what we have read in the passage to a new or hypothetical situation. For these tougher Inference questions, it’s important to ignore the answer choices until you’ve effectively broken down and made sense of the relevant parts of the passage.

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Click here to read the intro to this blog series! Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com!
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Dear Trav,
What happens if I bombed my HBS interview?
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In Critical Reasoning questions, we know we have to understand the “author’s argument” – essentially his point of view that is expressed in the given paragraph, but it’s also important to narrow in on the “how” of the argument: the reasoning itself. The reasoning gives us the full “because.” For example, Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey might both agree an American Idol contestant shouldn’t move on to the finals, but their reasoning could be very different. Maybe Mariah Carey doesn’t think the singer can hit the high notes, while Nicki Minaj may not think their outfits have enough pink feathers. Let’s look at a CR questions where the reasoning helps us find the correct answer:


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There is a particular issue in assumption questions that I would like to discuss today. We discussed in our previous posts that assumptions are ‘necessary missing premises’. Many students get stuck between two options in assumption questions. The correct option is the necessary premise. The incorrect one is often a sufficient premise. Due to the sufficiency, they believe that that particular option is a stronger assumption. But the point to remember is that an assumption is only necessary for the conclusion to be true. It may not actually lead to the conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt. You only have to answer what has been asked (which is an assumption), not what you think is better to make the conclusion true.

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It’s the first week of the Major League Baseball season, a sure sign of springtime and a massive celebration in most MLB cities as fans begin the season with new hope and a spirit of outdoor community. And if you’re watching, it can provide you with valuable insight to your forthcoming GMAT appointment. Because like most elite pitchers, the GMAT has a nasty curveball.

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Can’t make it to campus?  No time, no money, no problem!   While it’s not an ideal situation to be in, some people have virtual interviews instead of meeting with their admissions committee face to face. Here are some tips on making the virtual (Skype) interview work for you.

Have you taken the time to really read the Directions for AWA Analysis of an Argument? The directions read like a list of critical reasoning question types! Anything that you can do in critical reasoning you are seemingly encouraged to do on the AWA.

Here are the directions. Can you spot the references to various critical reasoning question types?

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The topics on the GMAT quantitative section are chosen because most test takers have some experience solving questions on these topics in high school. Subjects like algebra and geometry have given high school students white hairs and craned necks for generations (what? I was stretching, not copying off of her exam, honest!).

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Struggling a bit with Plane Geometry? Here are all the formulas you’ll need to know to solve for area on the GMAT! You’ll see several shapes, but the most common is the triangle.

Triangle
To find its area, we use the formula A = ½ bh, where b = base and h = height. The base and the height of the triangle must always form a 90 degree angle. Keep in mind that the height can be inside or outside the triangle.

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Welcome to the third segment of a 4-part Veritas Prep College Readiness Series! Each segment will cover what students can do to prepare for college. Today’s blog post will give 11th graders advice on what they can do now to make sure they have a stellar college application. Check out our high school freshman and sophomore readiness articles too!

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Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com!
–
Dear Trav,
How can you best determine which school or program is right for you?
–

While we provide services on everything from resume reviews to essay feedback to mock interviews, perhaps the most important thing you can do to improve your chances of being admitted to your target MBA program is to select the right schools. This is probably the most valuable advice we can provide, and yet most candidates completely ignore it and simply apply to the top 5 schools of their rating publication of choice. This is a huge mistake!

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An official GMAT score report consists of five parts: a Verbal Scaled Score (on a scale from 0 to 60), a Quantitative Scaled Score (on a scale from 0 to 60), an Integrated Reasoning Scaled Score (on a scale from 1 to 8), a Total Scaled Score (on a scale from 200 to 800) and an Analytical Writing Assessment Score (on a scale from 0 to 6). For each of these five scores, you will receive a percentile rank. Each rank shows the percentage of test-takers who scored below you based on the scores for the most recent three-year period. To see how the score report looks, you can download a sample score report at www.mba.org.

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A common question among those preparing for the SAT: Is there a quick and easy way to learn vocabulary?  This is a bit of a tricky question because it is in fact TWO questions jammed into one:

       1.  Is there a QUICK way to learn vocabulary?
       2.  Is there an EASY way to learn vocabulary?

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Today, we again pay homage to the lazy bum within each one of us in our QWQW series. If you are wondering what we mean by ‘again’, check out our last two posts of the QWQW series. We have been discussing how to avoid calculations. Today let’s learn why it is advisable to avoid learning formulas too!

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It’s the last Friday in March, and all good things must come to an end, including Hip Hop Month in the GMAT Tip of the Week space. But if you’ve been reading along with us all month, hopefully your iPod or car stereo has become your best study partner. While you’re driving home from work and the Kanye/Good Music track “Clique” comes on, you might hear Jay Z’s verse and immediately start thinking about sequence problems:

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So you are late in the game, and you want to apply for Round 3 deadlines….   What have you got to lose other than a couple hundred dollars and some hours of your time, right?  WRONG.   Think carefully before applying and this doesn’t just apply to the last round, but all rounds of application deadlines.

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You’ve probably seen a GMAT question that looked like this:

The author’s tone in the passage can best be described as:

Questions that ask about tone and style may not be as common as Detail or Inference questions, but they often come up on the GMAT. The first step to tackling them is to make sure you did some solid note-taking on your first read of the passage. Unlike Detail questions, there are no line numbers to help you find the answer for tone/style questions. Only by paying attention to the author’s voice and style as you read will you be able to get these questions right.

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On the GMAT, the information provided to you will be factual, but it won’t necessarily be helpful. Once you have made peace with this unfortunate reality, the goal soon becomes to transform factual information into useful information in order to solve the question. This type of analysis is prevalent in the quantitative section of the exam, but also shows up in the verbal section. Statements provided will often contain implicit information that you must convert into explicit information. In essence, you need to get a handle on the assumptions being made.

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You already have the skills you need for most Critical Reasoning questions; chances are you’re pretty awesome at deconstructing arguments and isolating conclusions already, but the unique format of “complete the passage” questions requires a few extra tips to master them!

Tip #1 – Break down that argument.

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Here at Veritas Prep we never stop investing in making our GMAT prep courses and MBA admissions consulting services better. And, there’s nothing more rewarding than helping someone achieve a high score on the GMAT, and then also helping them perfect their applications and get into an MBA program they thought was only a dream. Today, we make all of our services even better. We’re excited to announce a new resource available to everyone in the Veritas Prep family.

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Welcome to the second segment of a 4-part Veritas Prep College Readiness Series! Each segment will cover what students can do to prepare for college. Today’s blog post will give high school sophomores advice on what they can do now to make sure they have a stellar college application.

Dear 10th Graders:

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We’ve all seen how the GMAT loves to throw sneaky absolute values into data sufficiency questions involving number properties. Here’s a quick refresher on the properties of those double-bars, and a quick practice question!

The absolute value represents the distance from zero on a number line. Since a distance can never be negative, absolute values are always positive. On the GMAT, most absolute values you will see will involve a variable.  Let’s consider |x|. If x is a positive number, such as 4, then |x| = x, because |4| = 4. However, if x is a negative number, such as negative 4, then |x| = -x. For any negative value of x, the sign would have to be changed.

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Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com!
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Dear Trav,
My job requires me to work 80 hours a week so I have no time for extracurricular activities. How will that affect my candidacy?
– 

With so many candidates coming from Investment Banking and other industries that are notorious for long working hours, you’re certainly not alone. It’s important to understand why top-tier MBA admissions committees (Adcoms) look for extracurricular activities to know how to address a lack of them in your application.

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A week ago today, few people outside of greater Fort Myers knew anything about Florida Gulf Coast University. What a difference a week makes. #FGCU has been consistently trending on Twitter for days, now, and the admissions website crashed shortly after the Eagles dispatched Georgetown in Friday’s match-up  FGCU is on the map now, joining Gonzaga, Virginia Commonwealth, George Mason, and several other schools that built a national reputation on the strength of an NCAA Tournament run.

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Data Sufficiency statements can’t be altered. Every so often when I am tutoring a student, he or she will change up the rules of data sufficiency. I’ve seen it before with misunderstanding a “yes/no” data sufficiency question (by erroneously thinking an answer of “always no” means “not sufficient.”)

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Last week we discussed how to solve equations with the variable in the denominator. We also said that the technique generally works for PS questions but you need to be careful while working on DS questions. Today, let’s look at the reason behind the caveat.

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