A quick note: this is a pretty deep dive into a single GMAT Critical Reasoning question type. If you’re just beginning to learn CR strategy, check out The GMAT Critical Reasoning Mindset or How to Master Every GMAT Critical Reasoning Question Type

Inference questions are not super common on GMAT Critical Reasoning, usually only accounting for 1 of your 10 CR questions. However, it tends to be a question type that students miss more frequently, in both CR and Reading Comprehension. Some of this stems from the inherent difficulty, but much of it can result from students’ possessing an incorrect or incomplete sense of what they’re supposed to be doing on these problems.

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If this post is 1500 words long, and you can process 120 words per minute, then how long will it take you to read this whole post? If you could read 20% faster, then what effect would that have on how long it takes you to read the whole thing? If I were adding 80 words per minute to the blog post, then how long (at your original speed) would it take for you to reach the end?

Those questions were a taste of the often daunting world of GMAT Rate problems. Before we get any deeper, we should acknowledge that Rate problems do not seem to be tested as frequently on GMAT Quant nowadays as they once were. So while you’ll see plenty of Rate problems in the Official Guides and on Manhattan Prep’s practice GMATs (take a free one), you might not see many or any of these on your real GMAT.

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Reports vary about how many perfect 800’s are achieved each year, but out of 200,000 people taking the GMAT each year, we think there are somewhere between zero and 30 perfect scores. You have a better chance of being hit by lightning as you’re winning a Powerball lottery!  (That’s not true, but calculating the probability of getting hit by lightning as you’re winning the Powerball does sound like an 800-level GMAT probability problem). There were ZERO scores of 800 in last year’s crop of students admitted to Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc.

Keep reading for why it’s (nearly) impossible to get a perfect score on the GMAT and for strategies for getting a score in the 99th percentile.  Read more

Haaaappy Halloweeeeen, dear reader. What’s that? You’re already annoyed by the trite conceit of this conveniently-timed piece about trick-or-treating? Read more

Even though there’s no “new math” on GMAT Quant, there is still a ton of content to keep on our radar. And just like the tragic studying for a vocab test, we’ll have to learn 200 different things, even though the test is going to only ask us 31 of those things (because we don’t know which 31 things we’ll get asked on our test day). Read more

“Life hacks” is a weird term that’s only been around for the last decade, brought to us by purveyors of clickbait. Most life hacks involve some resourceful repurposing of something (e.g. Got a tomato? Hollow it out and now you have a perfect ashtray!) The term itself mystifies me—how are these clever, janky solutions anything like hacking into a computer? I’ve never tried to penetrate the NSA’s mainframe, but I’m assuming it doesn’t involve saving up all your bottle tops in order to make a lower water usage toilet. Read more

Grab your Official Guide as we walk through 3 GMAT Quant problems (Problem Solving), hoping to drink every drop of knowledge from the problem before we say, “Yo, that keg is kicked.”

In part 1, we discussed the process of maxing out the value of the GMAT Quant problems you do.

As you review them, classify your current level of mastery for that problem. Read more

Remember how you’d finish off a Capri Sun pouch by twisting it up, trying to get out every precious drop of those 6 ounces of happiness? Capri Sun always left you wanting more… something never said about a Judd Apatow movie.

Let’s do the same thing with OG GMAT Quant problems. In order to extract all the potential value from doing an OG problem, you’re going to need to deeply review it, and then (in the vast majority of cases), you’re going to need to redo it once or twice a later date. Why? 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.

GIVEN THAT I’m awesome, HOW COME I’m not awesome at GMAT Critical Reasoning?

Do you know what cognitive dissonance is? It’s a concept that usually only comes up when someone is smugly implying that you’re a hypocrite: “So you believe that abortion is wrong because we don’t have the right to take away someone else’s right to life …but you believe in the death penalty?”

Wipe that look of “checkmate” off your face, bub: 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.

Our Founding Fathers are routinely lionized for their heroic war for independence and their ingenious creation of our Constitutional democracy.

But these boys also knew how to spit some verse. Read more