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.

In GMAT Sentence Correction, a “split” is a clear difference among the answer choices that allows you to identify and eliminate several incorrect answers. You can’t always find a perfect, straightforward answer choice split to work with in every Sentence Correction problem. Sometimes, most or all of the sentence is underlined, and the answer choices seem completely different from each other. When this happens, don’t fall back on bad habits. Even if you can’t find a great split, you can take a smart, fast approach to the problem. Let’s work through that approach using the following problem, from the GMAC’s GMAT Prep software. Read more

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.

Welcome to the 2^nd installment of our dive into Number Properties. If you haven’t yet tried the first problem, start with the first article in the series.

Let’s dive right into our second problem from the GMATPrep® free exams: Read more

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.

Have you been following our grammar tips series? We’ve already talked about opening modifiers and noun modifiers. We’re almost done with this much-feared topic. If you’re still having problems, it’s probably with adverbial modifiers.

These can be the most overwhelming, so let’s break them down now. Back to our favorite modifier-riddled sentence:

Barking ferociously, the dog, which was known to be vicious, ran down the street, chasing the boy who had been poking at it just moments before.

An adverbial modifier is something that describes almost anything in the world that is not a noun. There’s actually a one-word adverbial modifier in our ferocious dog sentence (or, put far more simply, an adverb). Go back and see if you can find it. Read more

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.

If you read the first post in this series, then you already know how to get the most you can out of the first 5 seconds of a GMAT Quant problem. But what about the other 1:55? Let’s continue to delve. Read more

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.

Halfway through a GMATPrep® free practice test, I hit the passage I’m going to discuss in this series—and I groaned aloud the second it appeared on the screen.

Why? Here’s what I saw (without really reading much of anything!): Read more

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.

Sometimes, as you solve a GMAT Problem Solving problem, everything seems to go smoothly. You get an answer that matches one of the choices perfectly, so you select it and move on to the next problem. But much later, when you’re reviewing the problem, you realize that you picked the wrong answer entirely. Why does this happen, and how can you stop it?

Read more

Most of my students are driven crazy by GMAT Number Properties. On the face of it, the topic seems straightforward: I know what positive and negative, odd and even are. Divisibility stuff is a little more complicated, but come on: this was taught in school when we were 10! How hard can it be? Read more

Here’s a scenario that might seem familiar to many of you: you take your first GMAT practice test, then you see the score. Ouch! Probably lower than you were hoping for, right? Read more

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.

Two minutes is not a huge amount of time. Yet if you want to finish the entire GMAT Quant section in 75 minutes, two minutes is about all you have to solve each problem. Don’t interpret that to mean you just have to go quickly or skip important steps like checking your work. Instead, seek out a more efficient process for dealing with GMAT problems.

Better yet, read along as I detail an efficient process for dealing with your two minutes. Read more

What have you been told about applying to business school?

With the advent of chat rooms, blogs, and forums, armchair “experts” often unintentionally propagate MBA admissions myths, which can linger and undermine an applicant’s confidence. Some applicants are led to believe that schools want a specific “type” of candidate and expect certain GMAT scores and GPAs, for example. Others are led to believe that they need to know alumni from their target schools and/or get a letter of reference from the CEO of their firm in order to get in. In this weekly series, mbaMission debunks these and other myths and strives to take the anxiety out of the MBA admissions process.

We at mbaMission know of a now 70-year-old man who graduated from a virtually unknown Canadian undergraduate school in 1963 and who, with no work experience at all, applied to Harvard Business School (HBS), Wharton, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), earning acceptance at all three (though the GSB deferred his entry for one year so he could earn a little more experience first). He ultimately studied at HBS and now runs a small grain-trading business. You could not meet a nicer man, and although he is certainly wise in many respects, one thing he knows nothing about is MBA admissions. “I attended so long ago, things must have changed since then,” he says. “I did not have any work experience at all. I had studied four years of commerce, and that was it!” Read more