How To Make The Best Memories: Tips To Optimize Your Memory Abilities
How much did you study for the GMAT this past week-end? For how many hours? Over how many sittings? What did you study and how did you study it?
Most importantly: how many breaks did you take and how long were they?
Time Magazine just published a fascinating little article: To Boost Memory, Shut Your Eyes and Relax. Go take a look at it. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. : )
Has this happened to you? You have ambitious plans to study a ton of things this week-end. You get tired, but you’re determined to push through, so you keep studying. You begin to get a bit anxious because you feel you aren’t learning well (and you’re not!), so you study even more. You get even more tired, and that makes it even harder to learn. By the end of the week-end, you’re exhausted, frustrated, and demoralized.
You may have already heard me say this (many times on various forums or in blog posts!), but I’m saying it again because it’s so important: your brain makes better memories when it’s not tired.
Stanford Confirms that IR Doesn’t Matter (This Year)
We’ve been telling you for some time now that admissions officers have been indicating that Integrated Reasoning (IR) scores won’t factor much into admissions decisions this year. Now, Stanford has gone on the record on its own blog.
Stanford GSB Associate Director of MBA Admission Allison Davis confirms that the school will focus on the verbal, quantitative, AWA, and total scores this year and that they will use this year to determine how to evaluate them in our process for next year.
Note, though, that Stanford is figuring out how to bring IR into the admissions process starting next year “ so if you are taking the GMAT now but might want to use the score next year (or later), then you will likely need to prep more for the IR section than will this year’s candidates. While there may be a bit of leeway next year as well, it sounds like the IR score will be a factor “ assuming, of course, that GMAC has done its job and the IR section is a valid indicator of b-school success.
I see no reason to think that the IR section will turn out not to be valid, so I do expect this score to become an important part of the admission process longer term “ but if you’re applying this year, take Stanford’s announcement as one more strong piece of evidence that you don’t need to worry about IR for now!
How to Analyze a GMAT Integrated Reasoning Two-Part Question
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 Two-Part prompt category. First, give yourself up to 2.5 minutes to try the below GMATPrep problem.
An architect is planning to incorporate several stone spheres of different sizes into the landscaping of a public park, and workers who will be applying a finish to the exterior of the spheres need to know the surface area of each sphere. The finishing process costs $92 per square meter. The surface area of a sphere is equal to 4Ï€r2, where r is the radius of the sphere.
In the table, select the value that is closest to the cost of finishing a sphere with a 5.50-meter circumference as well as the cost of finishing a sphere with a 7.85-meter circumference. Make only two selections, one in each column.
Circumference 5.50 m Circumference 7.85 m Finishing cost $900 $1,200 $1,800 $2,800 $3,200 $4,500
After trying the problem, checking the answer, and reading the given solution (if any), I then try to answer the questions listed below. First, I’ll give you what I’ll call the standard solution (that is, one we might see in an Official Guide book if this were an official guide problem “ a correct solution but not necessarily one that shows us the easiest way to do the problem). Then we’ll get into the analysis.
Standard solution: The formula for circumference is C = 2Ï€r. We can use this to calculate the radii of the two spheres (note that the problem asks us to find the closest values, so we can estimate):
How to Analyze a GMAT Integrated Reasoning Table Question
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?
Flaw Questions on GMAT Critical Reasoning
We’ve talked about various types of Assumption Family questions in the past (find the assumption, strengthen, weaken, and evaluate the conclusion), but we haven’t yet tackled a Flaw question. This is the least frequently tested of the 5 Assumption Family question types, so you can ignore this type if you aren’t looking for an extra-high score. If you do want an 85th+ percentile verbal score, though, then you have to make sure you know how to tackle Flaw questions.
If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!
Decoding the Prime Disguise
How can the GMAT disguise a prime number (or any other) problem? I asked this question a couple of years ago at the start of a very important article entitled Disguising “ and Decoding “ Quant Problems. Go read that article right now, if you haven’t already. I’ll wait.
Towards the end of that article, I referenced two Official Guide problems. I was very excited today to see that one of these problems is part of the free practice problem set that now comes with the new GMATPrep 2.0 software “ so I can actually reproduce it here and we can try it out!
Disclaimer: this is a seriously challenging problem. Set your timer for 2 minutes, but practice your 1 minute timing here. If you don’t have a pretty good idea of what’s going on by the halfway mark, try to figure out how to make a guess. Pick an answer by the 2 minute mark (all right, I’ll let you go to 2 minutes 30 seconds if necessary “ but that’s all!).
Does the integer k have a factor p such that 1 < p < k?
(1) k > 4!
(2) 13! + 2 < k < 13! + 13
The Next-Gen GMAT: Table Analysis
I recently received a request to do more on Integrated Reasoning, so here you go: a Table Analysis problem. These problems will consist of some kind of complex table (sometimes with 20+ rows and / or 6 to 7 columns!) and one three-part question. We have to answer all three parts correctly in order to earn any points. The one we’re going to try has been released as a sample question on the mba.com website.
Try the problem
Let’s try out the question: here is the link to the problem. Just in case that link changes, you can also click on this link to go to the next-gen GMAT website, and then, toward the bottom of the page, click on the Table Analysis link. We’re going to try the second problem (with the table labeled Percentage of Population Visiting).
Note: when you are done, do NOT click the next button. Just leave it up on the screen and come back here. Also, I’m going to reproduce the table below, but you won’t be able to sort the data “ and that’s a key feature in answering these question types. So while you can technically do the problem below, I strongly recommend that you go look at the original using the link above.
Manhattan GMAT’s Analysis Of GMAC’s Newly Released Integrated Reasoning Percentile Rankings
We’ve been talking a lot lately about how to prep for IR, including the idea that we only need a good enough score for now because the section is so new that the schools aren’t going to place heavy emphasis on IR right away. One key piece of information, though, has been missing: what’s a good enough IR score?
GMAC has just released the first set of percentile rankings for the 1 to 8 IR scoring scale. Here it is:
Where are the Splits? Handling the New GMAT Sentence Correction
A lot of students have reported lately that the Sentence Correction questions on the official test were a lot harder than what they were expecting, or that they’ve been having trouble finding splits (differences) in the answers. Or they find the splits but don’t know how to process them / what to do with them. They narrow down to two answers but then don’t know how to pick between the two “ they can see the differences but aren’t sure of the significance of those differences.
The title of this article is a little bit misleading “ nothing about the SC section is technically new. The proportion of certain types of questions, though, has been changing, and so the section can feel very different (and challenging!) for someone who’s not prepared for that.
Before we dive into our discussion, I also want to mention another major reason why someone might feel that SC (and / or CR and RC) are much harder on the real test: if you’re suffering from mental fatigue late in the test, everything will feel harder. People are more prone to suffer from mental fatigue if they are not taking practice tests under 100% official conditions (including essay + IR, two 8-minute breaks, and so on).
How have things been changing?
Many people have heard by now that meaning is much more commonly tested than it used to be “ GMAC announced this about 9 months ago. Lots of students, though, don’t quite know what to do with that information. This changes what we study, of course, but it also changes what we expect to see when looking at the questions themselves, and it can change the process we use to answer an SC question.
GMATPrep Quant Question: What is this?
I don’t have a great title for you because I don’t have a really clean category for this question “ and that’s exactly why it caught my attention and why I’m sharing it with you today.
Try out this GMATPrep problem:
Did one of the 3 members of a certain team sell at least 2 raffle tickets yesterday?
(1) The 3 members sold a total of 6 raffle tickets yesterday.
(2) No 2 of the members sold the same number of raffle tickets yesterday.
This really does not look like a tough question does it? It looks easy! We can’t know for sure exactly how this question was rated, but consider this. I received this as the 15th question in my GMATPrep quant section. Up until that point, I had missed 2 questions, #6 and #14.
By the way, I took the test on a plane without scrap paper and the two I missed were both geometry questions for which I really needed to draw something out. Don’t try that at home! Write everything down. (After #14, I got a napkin from the flight attendant and started using that!)
So, yes, I’d missed the question right before (#14), but I had also gotten 12 of 14 questions right so far. In other words, the above question is at the upper end of the range.
So, the question is harder than it looks. Let’s talk about why. = )