Last year, Chris Ryan, our GMAT instructor and Vice President of Academics, realized that helping our students through the GMAT just wasn’t enough. When I had students come up to me and tell me their GMAT score, I was thrilled, said Chris, but I wanted to help them with their next step and set them up for success in business school.

Although Chris considers the two years he spent at Duke Fuqua to be some of the most incredible of his life, the beginning was nothing short of overwhelming.  Considered to have a non-traditional b-school background (pretty much anything besides investment banking and consulting!), Chris was immediately surrounded by terms like NPV, puts and calls, and game theory.  In thinking back, Chris knew that, had he had a leg up when he had arrived, he would felt more comfortable in business school.

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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:

The 4 sticks in a complete bag of Pick-Up Sticks are all straight-line segments of negligible width, but each has a different length: 1 inch, 2 inches, 3 inches, and 4 inches, respectively. If Tommy picks a stick from each of 3 different complete bags of Pick-Up Sticks, what is the probability that Tommy CANNOT form a triangle from the 3 sticks?

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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. = )

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I have never met anyone who is better at algebra than he or she is at arithmetic. As good as a person may be with algebra, that person’s going to be even better with real numbers (arithmetic). How can we use that to our advantage on the test?

Algebra and arithmetic are very similar, but algebra uses variables where arithmetic would use real numbers. On certain GMAT problems, we can taken a problem in which we were given variables and use real numbers instead “ we’re turning algebra into arithmetic!

Note: a lot of my students will complain that this method takes too much time. Of course it does when you first start studying it. You’ve been doing algebra for years, but most of you are just learning how to turn algebra into arithmetic. Think how slow you were when you first started learning algebra. Put in the practice and you’ll pick up the speed!

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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:

Z is the set of the first n positive odd numbers, where n is a positive integer. Given that n> k, where k is also a positive integer, x is the maximum value of the sum of k distinct members of Z, and y is the minimum value of the sum of k distinct members of Z, what isx + y?

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When do you leave the house without directions? Or perhaps the more modern reference, is when do you start on your way without plugging in your destination into a GPS device? I expect the answer for most of you is when I know where I am going.

Conversely, when you have no idea when you are going, your solution is most likely not to get in your car (or on your bike or public transit) and just start randomly driving around hoping you run into your desired destination. Ideally, you probably look up where you are going and plan out a route. Alternatively, you might know a nearby destination and start heading there (e.g. I know the bike store is near that place I get coffee). Finally, on occasion you may just head to an area where you expect to find a type of business (e.g. Gas stations are usually close to freeway entrances).

Now, all this talk about directions has been fun, but let’s bring the analogy around to GMAT quant problems. Sometimes when you see a GMAT problem, you may understand what the question is asking and see the path to the solution. In these cases, dive right in. Start driving and you are likely to reach your destination because you know “ or at least have a good sense “ of where you are going. Read more

This week, we’re going to discuss one of the most common critical reasoning problem types: Strengthen the Conclusion. Strengthen questions belong to the Assumption Family of questions; we’ll talk more about that later.

If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!

In many corporations, employees are being replaced by automated equipment in order to save money. However, many workers who lose their jobs to automation will need government assistance to survive, and the same corporations that are laying people off will eventually pay for that assistance through increased taxes and unemployment insurance payments.

Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the author’s argument?

(A) Many workers who have already lost their jobs to automation have been unable to find new jobs.

(B) Many corporations that have failed to automate have seen their profits decline.

(C) Taxes and unemployment insurance are paid also by corporations that are not automating.

(D) Most of the new jobs created by automation pay less than the jobs eliminated by automation did.

(E) The initial investment in machinery for automation is often greater than the short-term savings in labor costs.

Okay, now that you’ve got an answer, let’s use our 4-step CR process.

Step 1: Identify the Question

First, we read the question stem: Read more

We have another installment of our immensely popular free Integrated Reasoning workshops.  Due to even more overwhelming student demand, we’ve added three more, which you can now register for.

Sign up fast before they sell out!

Saturday, June 9th (1:00 “ 3:00pm EST)
Instructor: Stephanie Moyerman

Monday, June 18th 81:00 “ 10:00pm EST)
Instructor: Liz Ghini

Saturday, June 30th (1:00 “ 3:00pm EST)
Instructor: Stephanie Moyerman

Recently, I gave you a GMATPrep question and started out by asking What is this thing, anyway? I’ve got another one (along similar lines) for you this week (also a GMATPrep problem).

By the way, I love this problem. Yes, I know I’m a complete dork. But it does such an amazing job of disguising what’s going on, and it looks deceptively simple, but then it’s hard to figure out an efficient way to tackle it. There’s so much to learn on this one “ that’s why I love it.

Try it out (2 minutes!):

Are x and y both positive?

(1) 2x “ 2y = 1

(2) x/y > 1

It can’t be that hard, right? It’s just asking whether they’re positive, and the equation and inequality look pretty simple, and well, let’s see how we do.

This is a theory question, first of all. How do we know that? Because they’re asking whether something is true, that thing is a characteristic (in this case, positive), and the information they give us is clearly not enough to determine a single value for x and y. Therefore, those statements are actually disguising other characteristics that can help us to tell whether these variables are always positive. Read more

GMAT topics generally fall into one of two categories: things that people know and things that people don’t. When the average adult doesn’t know much about a topic, it’s easy to make a GMAT question. Exponents, triangles inscribed in circles, proper usage of the present perfect tense, and pretty much every Data Sufficiency question fall into this category. These questions don’t have to be especially tricky to be difficult.

But when the GMAT takes a topic that people do have some familiarity with- basic algebra or subject-verb agreement, for example- the GMAT needs a way to complicate the problem, oftentimes by preying upon the simple mistakes we all make. This is exactly what I see with Critical Reasoning questions. We make illogical arguments in our daily lives and refute other people’s illogical arguments with illogical rebuttals. I went to Notre Dame and therefore know that the University of Southern California will not win a national championship in football this year. Why? Because I hate USC. Is this logic sound? Probably not. My liking for USC’s football team doesn’t mean much when it comes to whether or not they will be successful this year. In the real world, we look for whether a fellow football fan likes or dislikes our favorite team before deciding whether they make a good argument. We look for a (D) or an (R) at the bottom of CSPAN before deciding whether a politician sounds intelligent. But if we can ignore these irrelevant items and focus on the point an argument is trying to make, we will be much more likely to spot bad answer choices in Critical Reasoning arguments and be able to quickly eliminate them on the GMAT. Read more