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.

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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.

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Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com.
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Dear Trav,

I want to apply for a full time MBA program, but I am 32 years old. Am I too old for this type of program?
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Deciding whether your age will be a damaging factor to your b-school application is an important question!

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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?

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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.

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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:

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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.

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The people behind The Common Application have just released the new essay prompts (PDF link) for college applicants who apply in the 2013-2014 admissions season. As noted in The Common Application Board of Directors’ announcement, these new prompts are the result of two years of discussion about where essays fit in the overall college admissions process. This is the first big change to the essays in years (including to the word counts!), and it’s clear that the Common Application Board didn’t take the task of reworking these essays lightly.

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Click here to read the intro to this new blog series! Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com.
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Dear Trav,

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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?

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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”.

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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:

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Here’s a big secret about the SAT Writing Multiple-Choice section: the word “being” is almost always incorrect! There are certain phrases on the SAT that are typically unacceptable on the SAT Writing multiple-choice section. “Being” is one of these, and is almost always incorrect on the SAT.

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Click here to read the intro to this new blog series! Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com.
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Dear Trav,

I had a 2.9 GPA in undergrad, although I had some extenuating circumstances. Do you think I have any chance of getting into a top-10 school?

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My Harvard Business School interview was one of the most challenging obstacles I’ve ever faced in my life.  Perhaps more challenging than attending HBS itself.  It was by phone (very unusual) because I was based in Mexico and was frequently traveling to rural parts of the country.  It was timed – exactly the 30 minutes that was allotted to me.  My interviewer must have cut me off 4 or 5 times – she’d ask me a question and if she felt that she had either gotten the sufficient information or I was going in the wrong direction, she’d just stop me.  But by the end of it, I felt I’d made a good impression.  Not too good, but hopefully good enough.  There’s no way to know for sure, but it must not have gone too badly, as I was accepted first round to HBS.

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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

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Earlier this week The Financial Times released its new global MBA rankings for 2013. For the first time in eight years, Harvard Business School sits atop FT’s rankings, ousting last year’s #1, Stanford GSB. Harvard’s return to #1 marks the fourth time the school has topped the FT rankings since they were first launched in 1999. In fact only three other schools have ever topped the Financial Times rankings: Stanford, Wharton, and London Business School.

One driver of Harvard’s rise is its improvement in FT’s diversity measure, which rewards schools for having a greater percentage of female and international students. While 34% of Harvard’s Class of 2013 comes from overseas, 43% of the Class of 2014 are international. This surely is a reflection of Dean Nitin Nohria’s goal to boost Harvard’s international influence and outlook.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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“What do you mean you didn’t even apply to Stanford?” folks would ask me when I told them I was going to business school to learn about technology, start-ups  and entrepreneurship.  It’s a fair question – in 2012, Stanford graduated 13% entrepreneurs versus HBS’s 7%. And this doesn’t even take into account the Stanford MBA’s who drop out to start business.  So why didn’t I apply to Stanford?  Wasn’t that the clear choice for tech entrepreneurship?  What was I thinking, going to HBS to start a company?

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The University of Pennsylvania is a great school – an Ivy League – and I could not be more proud to attend. But, when I first got in, I was dismayed.

I had decided to transfer from Vassar College, a liberal arts school, which is both liberal and artsy.  If you have heard of Vassar, you may know this to be its reputation. And it is not exaggerated. With some affection and only slight exaggeration, I can say that there are professors who make Bill Maher seem like Rush Limbaugh and students beside whom Lady GaGa would appear prim and proper. I had made good friends in my first year, but by third semester, I felt claustrophobic.  It was too small and culturally extreme for me, and I told my parents I wanted to change schools.

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Click here to read last week’s intro to this new MBA admissions series! Send your admissions questions to timeout@veritasprep.com.
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Dear Trav,

I’m thinking about applying to B-schools in the fall of 2013, but most deadlines are 9 or 10 months away. What should I be doing between now and then?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Yesterday the Financial Times reported that Dipak Jain will step down as dean of INSEAD effective March 1, ending a two-year tenure as the school’s leader. INSEAD announced that Jain will stay with the school as a marketing professor. This news comes after Jain took an extended medical leave in 2012 to undergo extensive testing after complaining of exhaustion.

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When I got accepted into MIT, I referred to the Institute as “Disneyland for nerds.” I knew it had ridiculously innovative and brilliant people and the resources to cultivate genius. I knew that it was a breeding ground for discoveries, start-up companies, and Nobel prizes.

But I also thought that MIT was really, really, soul-crushingly hard. Despite all of the absolutely wonderful things I had heard about the school, I admit that it had me a little scared.

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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.

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Hello aspiring MBA friends! Trav here. I’m the Director of Admissions Consulting for Veritas Prep and I’m excited to launch this new series on the Veritas Prep blog called “Timeout with Trav.”  Each week, I’ll take time out to answer your questions about MBA admissions, B-school life, and any other fun topics you may decide to throw my way! (Feel free to be creative!)  To ask me a question, simply email it to timeout@veritasprep.com.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Every January, two seemingly-different sets of lofty goals converge around the tale of one man; whether you’re applying to a top ten business school or trying to win the NFL’s Super Bowl, you need to remember that there’s only one Trent Dilfer.

Trent Dilfer, of course, is widely accepted as the (and we say this with admiration) worst (or maybe “least best”?) quarterback to win a modern Super Bowl, the most glaring exception to the commonly-held notion that a team needs an elite quarterback to win the NFL’s championship. Sure, teams with marginal quarterbacks say, most Super Bowls have been won by Montana, Brady, Elway, Aikman, Manning, Bradshaw, etc., but Trent Dilfer did win a Super Bowl, so we have a chance with our guy. But here’s the flaw in that reasoning — it’s easy to remember Dilfer’s name because he’s really the only one who fits that category. He’s surrounded in history by the all-time greats at the position, quarterbacks who won multiple Super Bowls and in other years nearly always had their teams in the hunt. Dilfer is the glaring exception, so we remember his name because he was so rare. There’s only one Trent Dilfer, so if he’s your guiding hope that your team can win with a lackluster quarterback, you’re grasping at incredibly thin odds.

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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.

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Today we feature a guest post from Veritas Prep SAT instructor Courtney Tran. Courtney is a student at UC Berkeley, studying Political Economy and Rhetoric. In high school, she was named a National Merit Finalist and National AP Scholar, and she represented her district two years in a row in Public Forum Debate at the National Forensics League National Tournament. She was always active in local politics, including speaking against budget cuts in and closings of Oakland Public Libraries.

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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!

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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!

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