I had a student write me an e-mail earlier this year complaining about a lack of improvement on his last few practice tests. On three consecutive tests, he scored a 580, 560, & 580. Frustrating for him. But when I looked at the dates of those tests, I wasn’t surprised by his lack of improvement” he had taken the tests on three consecutive days. If students were able to improve by doing as many test questions as they could possibly find, then every student would do better on the verbal section than on the quant section because he or she has already spent  two and a half hours studying before the verbal section begins.

Tests are not good learning tools. Tests are good for assessing what you would likely score on a real GMAT if you took the test with similar problem solving abilities and timing strategies.

This doesn’t mean that tests aren’t important for improving your GMAT score. I’d argue that they are the single most important tool that everyone (yes, everyone) can use to (eventually) improve his or her GMAT score. But think back to the last practice GMAT that you took: by the time that you finished a two and a half hour test that included 78 quant and verbal questions, how many questions did you remember? Probably not a lot.

When that student scored a 580 on his first practice test, he wasn’t satisfied with his score, but he didn’t do anything differently the next time he sat down and took another test. If insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results, then the GMAT was making this student insane. So I pointed out two areas for improvement that every student can look for after finishing a practice test: timing and weaknesses. Let’s take a look at one such practice test to see how you might be able to improve your overall GMAT score:
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Note: This is the first of a two-part series on Probability. The baseball odds used in this article were true on the morning of October 11 and are definitely no longer true. Using this gambling advice will likely cost you money in the long run, as Joe will explain in Part 2.

In terms of excitement, the World Series of Coin Flipping would rate right next to solving Data Sufficiency problems in the general public’s mind. But any Vegas oddsmaker worth his weight in comped beverages would be able to calculate the odds for every coin flipping contest in the time it would take the coin to land. In an 8-team bracket-style tournament, every squad would have 1 in 8 odds to win it all because only 1 team out of the 8 could outguess their way to the championship. But what if each matchup of two teams was a 3 game series? It wouldn’t affect the odds at the beginning of each series (still a 50% probability for each team to win), but once the first outcome was decided, those Vegas oddsmakers would require some knowledge of And Probability to keep the odds fair.

Imagine we have two teams competing in the first round of our Coin Flipping Playoffs- let’s call them Baltimore & New York. In our three game series, New York happened to have some late flipping heroics to go up 1-0. What are the odds that Baltimore comes back in this series and what are the odds that Baltimore comes back and then wins the whole tournament? The key to this type of question is understanding that many things have to go right in order for Baltimore to win it all- first they need to win Game 2, then win the winner-takes-all Game 3, then win their semi-final series, and then still have enough thumb strength to flip the World Series in their favor. Four unique events need to happen, and every single one of those events must happen for Baltimore to emerge victorious. Since the odds of each game and each series going Baltimore’s way would be 1/2, we can solve this by finding the odds that Baltimore wins Game 2 (1/2) AND Game 3 (1/2) AND the next series (1/2) AND the championship (1/2). In probability, whenever we want X AND Y to occur, we need to multiply the respective odds together. The odds of Baltimore winning Game 2 and 3 would be 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4. The odds of winning all four events would be (1/2)⁴ = 1/16.
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Here’s a fairly straightforward GMATPrep question that I’ve seen many-a-student answer incorrectly. See if you can answer the question without writing anything down:

Of the 3,600 employees of Company X, 1/3 are clerical. If the clerical staff were to be reduced by 1/3, what percent of the total number of the remaining employees would then be clerical?

 

A)  25%

B)  22.2%

C) 20%

D) 12.5%

E)  11.1%

Classic GMAT question. Straightforward. Easy to understand. Simple to equate” 1/3 of 3,600 is 1,200 and 1/3 of that is 400. So we’d only have 800 remaining clerical staff and 800/3600 = 2/9, answer B. And like so(oooooooo) many other GMAT questions, we’d have answered incorrectly.

If have some paper in front of you, try to solve the question again by writing down each step along the way. Maybe even include what each of those numbers that you write down mean in the context of the question. Don’t cheat- see if you answer the question differently when you’re forced to write down more than just a simple computation or two.

…

Here’s what I wrote down first on my scrap paper:
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September is the greatest month of the year. At some point in the not-so-distant future, my AC-unit will be able to finally power off after five straight months of keeping me inside, away from the Texas heat and the West Nile carrying mosquitos that the heat brought with it. But more importantly, September means that football is finally back. So with that in mind, here’s four lessons from the college football season for those of you who need help rationalizing your Saturday afternoon absence from your GMAT study place.

1)  Schedule the Cupcake Sections Early

Oregon hasn’t been spending the last three months preparing to face Arkansas State. And when September 1 rolls around, Oregon would prefer to pull its starters sometime early in the second half. A loss to an early season opponents would definitely hurt their BCS chances, but if the Ducks play half-decent football at the start of the season, they can focus on playing their best once Pac-12 teams start traveling to Eugene in late September.

For you, walking away from the test with a 2 on your AWA or IR section could be a bad thing when it comes time to apply to business school. But running up the score on your AWA won’t help your 200-800 score and you don’t want to exhaust your brain during the first hour of your test. But if you’ve thoroughly prepared for the quant and verbal sections of the test, and have watched some tape (such as our IR recordings or AWA labs) on what you need to do for the two warmup sections, you’ll do just fine early and can focus on playing your best once the quant section shows up on your screen.

2) Focus on One Question at a Time

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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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Every Manhattan instructor is probably able to fondly recall the Official Guide book that they used to ace their GMAT. Or at least that’s what I would have used to say. Now I know that every Manhattan instructor is probably able to fondly recall the Official Guide book that he or she used to ace his or her GMAT. For me it was the school bus-yellow 11th edition that included the most important question I ever studied. If you have the 12th edition of the Official Guide, it’s question #124. The answer choices on this question began with the following split:

sloths hang from trees…

vs

the sloth hangs from trees…

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Eliminating Bad Answer Choices will help to save you time and give you better odds at guessing, but bad answer choices are fewer and further between on the more difficult end of the GMAT. Even the correct answer might, at first glance, look irrelevant to the conclusion. Oftentimes on difficult CR questions, students can get down to two or three plausible answer choices, but are forced to guess because they aren’t 100% confident in their answer. And while this is often a good thing” remember the test is adaptive and tough questions often mean that you are doing well” it’s important to have a strategy to help better your chances when you are trying to make that final decision.

One of my favorite TV shows, Pardon the Interruption, used to have a regular feature called Good Cop, Bad Cop. The two hosts would choose an issue in sports and pick sides- will Tiger Woods win the golf tournament this weekend? The good cop would make arguments for why Tiger would win the tournament while the bad cop would make arguments for why he wouldn’t. The set-up was farcical and the hosts would choose sides arbitrarily, but I loved it because you would hear reasoning for both sides of an issue. Neither person argued for the side they truly believed in 100% of the time, but they pretended they cared deeply about one side of an issue, made a case for their side, and would preemptively rebut the argument that they knew the other host would make. That’s how I approach Critical Reasoning on the GMAT- on one question I’m the project manager for Hotco Oil Burners (OG #97) and the next I’m President of Country Z (#66). But no matter what role I’m playing, I am constantly asking myself what would help and hurt my argument. Let’s try a problem out to see how this works:

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GMAT topics generally fall into one of two categories: things that people know and things that people don’t. When the average adult doesn’t know much about a topic, it’s easy to make a GMAT question. Exponents, triangles inscribed in circles, proper usage of the present perfect tense, and pretty much every Data Sufficiency question fall into this category. These questions don’t have to be especially tricky to be difficult.

But when the GMAT takes a topic that people do have some familiarity with- basic algebra or subject-verb agreement, for example- the GMAT needs a way to complicate the problem, oftentimes by preying upon the simple mistakes we all make. This is exactly what I see with Critical Reasoning questions. We make illogical arguments in our daily lives and refute other people’s illogical arguments with illogical rebuttals. I went to Notre Dame and therefore know that the University of Southern California will not win a national championship in football this year. Why? Because I hate USC. Is this logic sound? Probably not. My liking for USC’s football team doesn’t mean much when it comes to whether or not they will be successful this year. In the real world, we look for whether a fellow football fan likes or dislikes our favorite team before deciding whether they make a good argument. We look for a (D) or an (R) at the bottom of CSPAN before deciding whether a politician sounds intelligent. But if we can ignore these irrelevant items and focus on the point an argument is trying to make, we will be much more likely to spot bad answer choices in Critical Reasoning arguments and be able to quickly eliminate them on the GMAT. Read more

Let me start off by saying that hard work and mastering each question topic is the best way to conquer the GMAT. There is no Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right B, A, Start cheat code that can replace months of intense studying. That said, getting a 700+ score on the GMAT sometimes means having a few tricks up your sleeves. Here’s a few strategies that I’ve found to be helpful with gaining a few extra points at the very top of the GMAT curve:

1) Know your PEMDAS and your SADMEP

 In other words, you have to know your parenthesis, exponents/roots, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction, backwards and forwards. For as many students as I have worked with, I have yet to come across a student who can barely work through a multiplication table, yet still manages to consistently finish the quant portion of the GMAT. Even though you only need to answer 37 quantitative questions, this will entail hundreds of math calculations- calculations that far too many of us have left to the machines (I for one welcome our new calculator overlords). If the average straightforward calculation takes five seconds and a student sees two hundred of these calculations over an average test, that’s sixteen minutes and forty seconds of just doing simple arithmetic. And if it takes you twice as long to do each of those calculations, that’s going to take, umm, well, it’s…. it’s going to take a lot longer.

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Editor’s Note: This is the first post by Manhattan GMAT instructor Joe Lucero. Give Joe a warm welcome in the comments section!

Talking to students and instructors over the years, I’ve heard my fair share of horror stories about the GMAT. The I ran out of time students are a dime a dozen, but there are several I was exhausted and couldn’t concentrate at the end of the test and even a few I didn’t realize how short the bathroom breaks are and had to run back to my computer which had already started the next section tales. But my favorites come from students who decided to drastically alter their routines the day of the test, from the student who decided a 5 mile run was going to be good for his nerves (but not for his tired legs, lungs, and brain) to the decaf drinker who decided a few five hour energies would help him stay focused (it didn’t).

Back when I used to coach middle school basketball, our team had a slogan- you play like you practice. When our kids would be goofing around, not paying attention, or being sluggish, they’d hear those words over and over again. And while it’s cliché in the gym, working with students who aren’t performing as high as they would like on the GMAT, I find myself repeating the same pieces of advice.
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