Are you aware that, during the last 7 to 14 days before you take the real test, your entire study focus changes? This is crucially important “ I cannot count the number of people who don’t realize what they need to do leading up to Real Test Day and so miss the chance to maximize their scores.

There are two levels to this discussion: (1) building a game plan and (2) reviewing. This post will cover the first topic and my next post will cover the second one.

Throughout both articles, I’m going to discuss the ideal scenario: the one in which you have a full 2 weeks to conduct your review. This review can be compressed into a 7 to 10 day period, if needed “ if so, just note that you are going to take only one practice test, not two, and you of course won’t be able to do as much review because you won’t have as much time.

Warning: please do not literally compress everything discussed into 7 days instead of 14. It’s a terrible idea to take the last week off of work and try to study for 6 to 8 hours a day. You’ll just burn yourself out.

Focus Shift

In the last two weeks before your test, you’re going to make a major focus shift. You’re going to stop trying to learn a bunch of new things in order to improve your score and instead acknowledge 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.

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Most students who struggle with Reading Comprehension share a common issue: they focus equally on all words in the passage. Some words, however, are not as important as others, and in order to improve our comprehension we must first learn to identify which words we should focus our energy on. You may have noticed that the title of this blog post is difficult to follow; words such as unlike and not are important structural words, since they describe a 180 degree change in meaning. If we speed through the title we are likely to miss something important, and our comprehension level will drop! Instead, let’s come to a complete stop and hold off on the rest of the post until we have milked those structural words for all they’re worth.

The title first makes a comparison (actually an anti-comparison) between words and people, and then separately says that words are not all born equal (for a moment we can ignore the modifier trapped between the commas).

If words are not all born equal, and words are unlike people, one could infer that all people are born equal. Did you get that from the title when you first read it? If you didn’t, you read it too quickly

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There was a lot of confusion and anxiety regarding last week’s Challenge Problem Showdown. And for good reason; it was a difficult problem! In fact, only 15% of submitted answers were correct, making this the most difficult Challenge Problem Showdown in several years (by the way, you can purchase our complete Challenge Problem Showdown Archive here).

With this in mind, here is the solution to the Challenge Problem.

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After seeing quite a few Integrated Reasoning problems floating around out there, I’ve found that one of the toughest situations to deal with is when instead of providing a single solution, the GMAT constructs a world with multiple possible solutions and then asks you to pick something that works within those parameters. Let me show you an example:

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x, y and z are positive integers. The sum of x and y is 40. The positive difference between y and z is 20.

In the table below, identify values for x and z that are together consistent with the information. Make only one selection in each column.

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Found the answer yet? If not, I think I might know why: You’re trying to solve for y. The problem is, y could be almost any integer from 1 to 39, as long as you pick values for x and z that work. You could figure out x and z for every single value of y, but that’s a very time-consuming strategy! Without the answer choices, there are more than 50 different solutions to this problem. So what is a better strategy than trying to solve for y?

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!
Here is this week’s problem:

Given that a, b, c, and d all lie between 0 and “1 on the number line, and |a “ d| > |a “ c| > |a “ b|, does c lie between b and d on the number line?

(1) ab < ad < cd
(2) ac < bc < bd

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Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week.

9/10/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 8:00 – 11:00 PM

9/10/12 – Washington, D.C. – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/10/12 – San Francisco, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/10/12 – Bellevue, WA – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/11/12 – Durham, NC – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/11/12 – Chicago, IL – Free Trial Class – 6:30 -9:30 PM

9/11/12 – Online – Essay Writing Workshop – 9:00 – 10:30 PM

9/12/12 – Minneapolis, MN – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/12/12 – Santa Clara, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/12/12 – Glendale, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/13/12 – Boston, MA – Free Trial Class – 6:30 – 9:30 PM

9/13/12 – New York, NY – GMAT Preview – 6:30 – 8:30 PM

9/13/12 – Online – Thursdays with Ron – 7:00 – 8:30 PM

9/13/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 9:00 PM – 12:00 AM

9/15/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 1:00 – 4:00 PM

9/15/12 – Austin, TX – Free Trial Class – 1:00 – 4:00 PM

9/15/12 – Online – GMAT Preview – 2:00 – 3:30 PM

9/16/12 – Washington, D.C. – Free Trial Class – 2:00 – 5:00 PM

9/16/12 – Chicago, IL – Free Trial Class – 2:00 – 5:00 PM

9/16/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 4:00 – 7:00 PM

9/16/12 – Irvine, CA – Free Trial Class – 5:30 – 8:30 PM

9/16/12 – San Francisco, CA – Free Trial Class – 5:30 – 8:30 PM

9/16/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 7:00 – 10:00 AM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Exciting news for Indian students. Amazon.com has finally launched their India Kindle Store. Why is this good news? Because you can now purchase our acclaimed ebooks in India for your Kindle!

Here is a CNET article about the India Kindle Store launch. Here is our bookstore on Amazon.com.

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 Graph prompt category.

Let’s try out the question: here it is. Just in case that link changes, you can also click on this link to go to the mba.com website, and then, about halfway down the page, click on the Graphics Interpretation link. We’re going to try the 2nd of the 4 questions. If you’re going for an average IR score, give yourself 2.5 minutes; if you’re going for a really good score, give yourself between 1.5 and 2 minutes.

Note: when you are done, do NOT click the next button. Just leave it up on the screen and come back here.

First, read the complete solution to the problem. In that article, I discussed how I was able to answer one of the questions correctly even though I wasn’t 100% confident that I understood part of the description of the graph. I also talked about an important lesson I learned regarding how to read the questions.

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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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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

In quadrilateral ABCD, sides AB and BC each have length √2, while side CD has length 2. What is the area of quadrilateral ABCD?

(1) The length of side AD is 2.
(2) The angle between side AB and side BC is 90°.

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