This article is an update from Stacey Koprince’s Monday article.

I received a reply from Larry (Dr. Rudner – whom I quote in the article). He’s traveling right now, so can’t check specific details of problems and what is or isn’t included idiom-wise, but he did have this to say (quotes from him):

“I had no idea that students were studying idioms in preparation for the GMAT and that this is a big deal.”

–>So it’s good that we told him! I think this is a to-be-expected disconnect between the publicly-released – and by definition older – materials that we all see, such as the OG, and the new materials – but super-secret and not released – that he works with now. We have to go by the older stuff, of course, but he and his team are working exclusively with the newer stuff and don’t necessarily realize what we don’t know. Read more

by Stacey Koprince, Manhattan GMAT Instructor

I just got back from the biennial GMAC Test Prep Summit. (Quick: what does biennial mean? Just in case you see the word in a question!) We discussed a number of very interesting things. Don’t worry “ I won’t totally geek out on you “ but some of what we discussed will be useful for you even if you don’t make your career in test prep. 🙂

In this article, we’re going to discuss information from the conference that is relevant to everyone taking the test right now (or soon). Most of the key bits were gleaned from the presentations of Dr. Lawrence M. Rudner, Chief Psychometrician of GMAC. All quotes and statistics throughout this article are courtesy of Larry. Keep an eye out for a future article in which we’ll dive a bit more deeply into the Next Generation GMAT, which will launch in June of 2012. (Oh “ and biennial means every 2 years.) Read more

Yesterday was the 4th GMAC Test Prep Summit (GMAC is the organization that makes the GMAT) and we’ve got all sorts of interesting things to tell you. We’ll share a couple of highlights with you today; check back on Monday for a longer post.

Many students have been reporting that Sentence Correction on the real test has been feeling… different this year. We had some theories as to what was changing, and we were able to get confirmation yesterday from Dr. Larry Rudner, who is in charge of psychometrics for GMAC (or, in less fancy language, he’s the one who’s responsible for the overall development and construction of the test).

They’ve been writing more Sentence Corrections that emphasize issues surrounding meaning. There are more questions now in which two or more answers are grammatically correct, but only one maintains the meaning of the original question stem. There are already some examples of this in the existing, released materials (more about this on Monday), but these didn’t used to be as common. According to Larry, these are becoming more and more common – so those who are focusing primarily on grammar without paying much attention to meaning are going to find the real test a lot harder.

Larry also told us that they are moving towards completely phasing out idioms! They don’t want to penalize non-native speakers for things that don’t really interfere with comprehension and communication, so they are moving away from idioms entirely. When we asked how common idioms still are right now and when they would be gone completely, he said that “ideally” he hopes they’re all gone already, but there may still be some in the pool – it takes time to scrub the questions completely. So that’s big news – we really shouldn’t be worrying about idioms any longer!

We’re still poring through all of the material we heard and were given yesterday, so we’ll have more for you on Monday, but we wanted to get these tidbits out ASAP because they’ll definitely impact how we study going forward. Check back again on Monday for the rest of our news and analysis from the GMAC Summit.

For a more detailed article on this topic, check here.

When I make an error, I get excited. Seriously “ you should be excited when you make errors, too. I know that I’m about to learn something and get better, and that’s definitely worth getting excited!

Errors can come in several different forms: careless errors, content errors, and technique errors. We’re going to discuss something critical today: how to learn from your errors so that you don’t continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. First, let’s define these different error types.
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Have you ever experienced the panic stare? That’s when you stare at a problem for way too long without really doing anything besides thinking that you don’t know what to do. Or you sit down to study, but you’re not sure where to begin, and so you take way too long to get started, while you shuffle your papers aimlessly.

The more decisions we need to make, or the more options we have, the harder it is to act, or the more likely we are to act rashly or make snap decisions. The New York Times recently published an article on this topic entitled Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

What is decision fatigue?

The basic theory is this: the more decisions we make, the more our mental energy suffers, though we’re not necessarily aware of this fatigue in the same way that we’re aware when we’re physically tired. According to the article, we tend to deal with this mental fatigue in one of two ways: either we start making very quick, snap decisions without necessarily thinking everything through, or we just refuse to make a decision at all “ we do nothing.

What are the consequences?

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In this post, we’re going to analyze a challenging GMATPrep Critical Reasoning question.

First, set your timer for 2 minutes and try the problem!

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We’ve got another GMATPrep word problem on tap for today, but this one’s in the area of divisibility (number properties). These kinds of problems often include a lot of math vocab; we need to make sure both that we understand the precise words used and concepts being described and that we don’t forget or overlook any of the pieces.

Set your timer for 2 minutes and GO!

If m is a positive odd integer between 2 and 30, then m is divisible by how many different positive prime numbers?
(1) m is not divisible by 3.
(2) m is not divisible by 5.

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In this article, we’re going to tackle a challenging GMATPrep problem solving question from the topic of Percents.  (The GMATPrep software can be downloaded for free at MBA.com)

Let’s start with the problem.

Set your timer for 2 minutes… and… GO!

*Before being simplified, the instructions for computing income tax in country R were to add 2 percent of one’s annual income to the average (arithmetic mean) of 100 units of country R’s currency and 1 percent of one’s annual income. Which of the following represents the simplified formula for computing the income tax, in country R’s currency, for a person in that country whose annual income is I?

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Last week, a student asked me to write an article on finding The Point in a reading comprehension passage “ specifically, what is The Point and how do we find it? I thought it was a great idea; a lot of people struggle with this.

Note: this article doesn’t address how to answer reading comprehension questions; it focuses on the initial read-through in order to understand the main point of the passage. If you do that well, though, then that should help you answer any kind of question.

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Last year, the New York Times published an interesting article: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits. At Manhattan Prep, we’ve been discussing it since it came out and I wanted to share this discussion with you.

Get up and move

According to the article, multiple studies support the hypothesis that altering our physical study environment helps us to retain material better. Our brains are apparently making connections based on what we see and hear while we study, even when the sights and sounds are unrelated to the subject matter and noticed only subconsciously. The more connections your brain makes with regard to a specific piece of knowledge, the easier it is for you to retrieve that information when you need it.

What this means for you: Read more