What’s the optimal way to spend your last 14 days before the real test? There are two levels to this discussion: what and how to review, and building a game plan. We’ll discuss the latter topic in this article. Once you’ve read this article, you may want to check out How To Review.

What is a Game Plan?

In the last two weeks before your test, your focus needs to shift from trying to learn new things to acknowledging that your skills are what they are. They’re not going to change an enormous amount in the last two weeks; you can tweak some things, but now is not the time to change major strategies across an entire question type. Further, it would be a mistake to spend your last two weeks entirely focused on your weaknesses; if you do that, then you won’t be prepared to excel on your strengths.

Your Game Plan will help you to make certain decisions quickly during the test. When is it a good idea to spend an extra 20 or 30 seconds on a problem? When should you decide to make an educated guess? When should you cut yourself off completely, guess immediately, and move on? What should you do if you find yourself ahead or behind on your timing? (We’ll discuss the answers to these questions later in the article.) Read more

It’s always disheartening when we have a score drop, whether it happens on a practice test or (worst case scenario) on the real test. If this happens to you, the most important thing to do next is figure out why this happened. If you can figure out why, then you may be able to do something to prevent a score drop from happening again.

This article contains the questions to ask yourself as you try to figure out why your score dropped.

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The long-awaited Foundations of Verbal Strategy Guide is finally here! We’re also launching an Advanced Quant book; click on the link to read about that one.

We published our first Foundations book, focused on quant, last year, and now Manhattan GMAT teacher extraordinaire Jen Dziura has gifted us with the equivalent verbal tome “ everything you ever wanted to know about parts of speech, sentence structure, reading comprehension, and all of the basics that most GMAT books (including Manhattan GMAT’s “regular” series of Strategy Guides) assume you already know.

Who should use this book? Great question. If you have taken a practice or real test and scored below the 50^th percentile, then this book may be for you. If you are a non-native English speaker (or even a native!) who didn’t learn much by way of formal grammar (what’s a noun and what different types of nouns are there?), or who never had much practice with reading comprehension tests in English, then this book may be for you.

To give you an idea of what to expect, excerpts from the new Foundations of Verbal are below. Read more

Exciting news “ our Advanced Quant Strategy Guide is finally ready for prime time! We’re also launching a Foundations of Verbal book; click on the link to read about that one.

Who should use this book? Great question. Are you already at the 70^th-plus percentile (minimum) on quant and you’re looking to push yourself well into the 90s? This book is for you. In addition, please note that this book assumes that you have already worked through our five regular Strategy Guides (or the equivalent material from another company).

To give you an idea of what to expect, excerpts from the new Advanced Quant guide are below. The main point I want to make is that this book covers both advanced concepts / mathematical material, and advanced problem solving processes. Both are critical for a 90th-plus percentile test-taker.

Okay, without further ado, here’s excerpt #1, an introduction to a methodical solving style inspired by mathematician George Polya. Read more

Just starting out? Or maybe you’ve been studying for weeks already? Perhaps you’ve already taken the official test once but want another crack at it? Whatever stage you’re at, you need a plan, so that’s what we’re going to talk about this week: how to develop your own personalized study plan. Get a notebook, open up a file on your computer, or start a blog. Record everything.

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Data sufficiency problems can be a lot of fun because we don’t actually have to solve all the way to the end of the problem. At the same time, data sufficiency problems can be maddening because of the way in which the information is worded. Often, especially on harder questions, the question stem or statements in a data sufficiency problem are worded in such a tricky way that we’re not sure of the significance of the information after we’ve read it.

This lesson is all about how to Rephrase the information in a more useful way. (For those who have taken or are planning to take our class, the Rephrasing lesson occurs during class 1, though I’ve changed the order in which the types are presented in this article.) Read more

After our article on how to read a Critical Reasoning problem, I received a request for a similar article addressing Sentence Correction (SC). So, here you go! We’re going to address what we should do on any and every sentence correction question, regardless of the particular grammar rules tested in that problem.
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Students often ask for non-GMAT reading sources that they can use to improve their reading skills in general, for comprehension and for speed. Recently, some students have asked for more: how should they read such material? Is it the same as reading for work or for pleasure? (Not entirely, no.)

Reading Passages on the GMAT

Several circumstances separate GMAT reading from real-world reading (whether for business or pleasure). Read more

This post is inspired by a question suggested by a student (keep the requests coming!), who recently asked me about various issues with pronoun case. I’m going to address the student’s specific question but also expand on the topic a bit. The issues discussed here are advanced issues; you likely don’t need to worry about these if your goal score is 650 or lower.

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This article was written by our very own instructor, Stacey Koprince. If you’re looking for more great resources and advice, check out our free resources section.

A few weeks ago, we talked about how to make educated guesses on Quant (you can click here for that article). This article covers educated guesses on GMAT Verbal. Read more