Guess what? 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.

A while back, we started a series on Fast Math for the GMAT—here’s the link if you want to start from the beginning.

In our last installment, I gave you two problems to try. We’ve already discussed the first one; here’s the second one again (from the free problem set on mba.com).
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Guess what? 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 6th installment of our Fast Math for the GMAT series!

On these two new problems, we’re going to employ some broader principles than the ones you saw in the earlier installments of this series. I won’t say any more yet—try the two problems from the free problem set available on mba.com and then we’ll talk.

Set your timer for 4 minutes and go! 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 fifth installment of our Fast Math series. (Miss any earlier ones? Start here.)

Make your life easier on the GMAT: Do less Math. (Yes, with a capital-M. ☺) I use Math-with-a-capital-M to mean formal, textbook math. 

Sure, you’re going to have to do some textbook math on the GMAT, but it’s really not a math test. Business schools don’t expect you to have to do paper math in b-school or the real world. Rather, they’re testing how you think about math. And thinking about math in the real world is a lot different than textbook, school-based math.

For one thing, the correct answer on the GMAT is never actually a number or a math term. The correct answer is just (A), (B), (C), (D), or (E). How you get to that correct letter doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Okay let’s dive into our 5th Principle for Fast Math!

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Guess what? 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.

We’re up to part 4 of our series on Fast Math for the GMAT. If you’re seeing this for the first time, start with part 1 and work your way back here.

Let’s dive right in.

Principle #4: Estimate…and not just when they tell you to

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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.

Welcome to the third installment of our Fast Math series. (Miss the earlier installments? Start here.)

Here’s the basic premise: I’m always on the lookout for ways to get out of doing tedious paper calculations on the GMAT.

The awesome part: The test writers actually set this up for me! They know we’re not going to have to do a bunch of paper math in b-school or the real world, so they construct problems that allow us to take advantage of all sorts of shortcuts…if we’re paying attention.
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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.

Welcome to part 2 of our Fast Math series! In Part 1, I acquainted you with the fact that I’m a lazy math person: I don’t want to do any more than I have to in order to answer the question. And this series shows you how! ☺

Principle #2: Learn shortcuts for when you do have to do the math.

You already saw the first example of this in Principle #1:

Shortcut #1: When multiplying a string of numbers, pair off the 5’s and 2’s and multiply them first.

What if that last problem in part 1 hadn’t had a 20 in it? If you had to multiply 5 and 81…how would you do that? Read more

Guess what? 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.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty lazy when it comes to doing math on paper. Blame constant access to Excel and the calculator on my phone…but I’m completely over doing math on paper.

If you give me a problem that’s going to require half a page of calculations…well, I’m not going to want to do that problem. But on the GMAT Quant section, I don’t get a calculator, so how can I still get a 99th percentile score while staying true to my lazy-math desires?

Let’s do some Fast Math! Read more