If you’ve read my previous post you know I got married very recently. When I asked my new wife the other day to name her favorite celebrity, she said Ryan Gosling; unfortunately I look nothing like him “ so I’m not quite sure where that leaves me. As a form of revenge I’ve decided to use Mr. Gosling to demonstrate some key insights in the commonly misunderstood topic of Weighted Average. Ryan will never forgive me!

For the purpose of this blog post let’s assume that Ryan Gosling made $10M per movie in 80% of his movies and $20M per movie in 20% of his movies. His average paycheck would have been $15M if his salary were distributed evenly between $10M and $20M “ but an 80-20 distribution means we’ll have to put a little more thought into the situation. If we want to know how much Mr. Gosling made on average per movie, we have no choice but to calculate the weighted average.

Some math lovers might use an algebraic formula to calculate the weighted average, but I believe using a visual approach for this calculation will drive a deeper level of understanding for us regular folks.

Use your intuition and try a visual approach

If I asked you for a range of the weighted average of Ryan Gosling’s paychecks, your intuition would probably suggest between $10M and $20M. You might even propose that the weighted average be closer to $10M than to $20M (since $10M has a heavier weight “ 80% vs. 20%). You would be absolutely correct!

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Our good friends at mbaMission have released their 2012 Essay Analyses for MIT’s Sloan School of Business, the Johnson School of Management at Cornell, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. We’ve compiled these five analyses into one handy 2012 Essay Analysis Resource for you. Enjoy!

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Essay Analysis, 2012“2013

The MIT Sloan School of Management has tweaked all of its essay questions this year and has dropped one question entirely, going with what appears to be a trend this application season toward giving business school candidates less opportunity to provide qualitative information about themselves. Many applicants will be disappointed to see that Sloan’s quirky cover letter essay prompt remains. We will start our analysis there

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In honor of Gabby Douglas’ gold medal win, as well as the U.S. women’s gymnastics team’s all-around gold medal win, here is an Olympics-inspired Data Sufficiency problem.

A particular gymnastics tournament awards a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal in each of four events: Floor, Beam, Bars, and Vault. A platinum Best All-Around medal is awarded to the competitor who gains the most points from winning the other medals: 3 points for gold, 2 points for silver, 1 point for bronze. If McKenzie won the Best All-Around medal, and no one can win more than one medal in any of the four events, did she win at least one gold medal?

1. All of the gold, silver, and bronze medals were won by fewer than six competitors, including McKenzie
2. Another competitor in the tournament has 8 points.

(A) Statement (1) ALONE is sufficient, but statement (2) alone is not sufficient.

(B) Statement (2) ALONE is sufficient, but statement (1) alone is not sufficient.

(C) BOTH statements TOGETHER are sufficient, but NEITHER statement ALONE is sufficient.

(D) EACH statement ALONE is sufficient.

(E) Statements (1) and (2) TOGETHER are NOT sufficient.

Choose your answer before proceeding!

First, you may ask, How could someone win the All-Around without winning a single gold medal?

Easy “ just imagine that McKenzie won ALL of the silver medals (8 points), and that no one else won more than one medal (the other medals are won by 8 separate people), so each person who has a gold has just 3 points, and each person who has a bronze has just 1 point.

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

Jean puts N identical cubes, the sides of which are 1 inch long, inside a rectangular box, each side of which is longer than 1 inch, such that the box is completely filled with no gaps and no cubes left over. What is N?

(1) 56 < N < 63 (2) N is a multiple of 3.

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A colleague here at Manhattan GMAT forwarded me this infographic about the value (or lack thereof) of an MBA. Though the author doesn’t explicitly say so, the statistics she chose to display indicate that she believes an MBA is by and large overvalued.

The great irony here, of course, is that the training you get as an MBA is exactly the training that sharpens your ability to think critically about arguments like this one. In fact, that’s what the GMAT actually tests with its Critical Reasoning section. Just to demonstrate, I’d like to break down this infographic from top to bottom, using the same strategy I teach my students: pointing out the (flawed) assumptions necessary to conclude that an MBA is overvalued.

Premise: The cost of an MBA program including expenses is $120,000.

Assumption #1: Students actually pay all of that $120,000.

Attack: I’d estimate that around half of my MBA classmates had some scholarship or corporate support that significantly defrayed their cost. This, by the way, is probably the most underrated reason to ace your GMAT “ a high GMAT score can open the door to many merit-based scholarships.

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Last month, Manhattan Prep created a Penny War Challenge in order to raise money for UNICEF, an organization dedicated to child survival and well being. Staff members and instructors were divided into departmental teams, assigned corresponding team jars and provided the following rules: 1) Pennies count for +1 point, 2) All silver coins and dollars count as negative points based on their face value (example: $1 = -100pts), and 3) The team with the most points wins!

The competition jumped off to a frenzied start with teams strategically putting loose silver change in rival department’s jars. The activity heightened as employees began to bring in their saved pennies from home, slowly growing their team totals. After four weeks of displaying tallied team totals to help spur the competition, we entered the final countdown! Kim Moy, a member of the winning HR/Tech department team exclaimed, It was coming down to the wire with departments neck and neck. The underdogs darted to the finish line, while we battled it out on the penny field! It was a close call, but we all came out winners in the name of charity.

Thanks in part to both our dedicated employees as well as our company’s matching gift program, we raised a grand total of $616.74! Oh, what a difference a little friendly competition can make!

This is the latest in a series of How To Analyze articles that began with the general How To Analyze A Practice Problem article (click on the link to read the original article). This week, we’re going to analyze a specific IR question from the Table prompt category. The GMATPrep problem we’re using this week is one that we’ve already discussed how to solve in a previous article; click here to read that article and try the problem first.

After trying the problem, checking the answer, and reading and understanding the solution (which you can do via the original article, linked above), I try to answer these questions:

1. Did I know WHAT they were trying to test?

– Was I able to CATEGORIZE this question by topic and subtopic? By process / technique? If I had to look something up in my books, would I know exactly where to go?

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Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Take a look at the following problems.

Data Sufficiency: What was Company X’s percentage profit in 2011?

1) The ratio of costs to profits for Company X was 3 to 1 in 2011.

2) Company X’s costs in 2011 were $360,000.

A recipe for punch calls for 4 parts seltzer to one part juice. If John wants to make 5 gallons of punch, how many 8 ounce cans of juice does he need (1 gallon = 128 ounces)?

A) 32

B) 20

C) 16

D) 10

E) 8

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If the GMAT were a sport, it would definitely be baseball, and not just because it’s three and a half hours long. In baseball, you might dominate the minor league by hitting fastballs, but once you reach the show you’ll have to hit some change-ups and curveballs too. Not only is the GMAT going to throw you some hard problems, but once you start to do well, the GMAT will throw you something different. That’s why learning the types of trap answers can help you from falling for them. Here’s four types of curveballs that you want to be mindful of on test day.

If you test it, they will come.

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

In the country of Celebria, the Q-score of a politician is computed from the following formula:
Q = 41ab²c³/d², in which the variables a, b, c, and d represent various perceived attributes of the politician, all of which are measured with positive numbers. Mayor Flower’s Q-score is 150% higher than that of Councilor Plant; moreover, the values of a, b, and c are 60% higher, 40% higher, and 20% lower, respectively, for Mayor Flower than for Councilor Plant. By approximately what percent higher or lower than the value of d for Councilor Plant is the corresponding value for Mayor Flower?

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