GMAT Quant Tips: Mental Math – Part 2
In my last blog post, I had a chat with my dad, a math teacher, about the importance of mental math. Today, I want to get more specific: I want to give you some things to memorize before you take the GMAT or GRE, along with a few tips about how to practice memorizing them.
How to Get a Perfect GMAT Quant Score
How can you get the elusive Q51 on the GMAT? To start, let’s be clear that this question is mostly a matter of curiosity. You don’t need a 51 on Quant to score a 700 on the GMAT: technically, with a perfect Verbal score, you would only need a 36! You don’t need a 51 on Quant to get into HBS: the median score last year was 48. You don’t even need a 51 to be a test prep teacher (although if you want to work for MPrep, you do need to be in the 99th percentile)!
And this is a good thing, because as you’re about to learn, getting a 51 on Quant involves at least a little bit of luck.
GMAT Quant Tips: Mental Math
If your goal is to take some time pressure off of the quantitative section of the GMAT, you should ask yourself: what are the skills I will need over and over during that section, and what are the skills I will only need once or twice? Too often I see my own students spending hours to get incrementally faster at, for example, weighted averages; that’s an area where understanding the basic concept is probably sufficient. Instead, invest the most time in the thing you’ll be doing the most often: calculation!
GMAT Rate Problems
If this post is 1500 words long, and you can process 120 words per minute, then how long will it take you to read this whole post? If you could read 20% faster, then what effect would that have on how long it takes you to read the whole thing? If I were adding 80 words per minute to the blog post, then how long (at your original speed) would it take for you to reach the end?
Those questions were a taste of the often daunting world of GMAT Rate problems. Before we get any deeper, we should acknowledge that Rate problems do not seem to be tested as frequently on GMAT Quant nowadays as they once were. So while you’ll see plenty of Rate problems in the Official Guides and on Manhattan Prep’s practice GMATs (take a free one), you might not see many or any of these on your real GMAT.
Two Minutes of GMAT Quant: A Breakdown – Part 2
Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.
If you read the first post in this series, then you already know how to get the most you can out of the first 5 seconds of a GMAT Quant problem. But what about the other 1:55? Let’s continue to delve. Read more
The Top 6 GMAT Quant Mistakes That You Don’t know You’re Making
Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.
Sometimes, as you solve a GMAT Problem Solving problem, everything seems to go smoothly. You get an answer that matches one of the choices perfectly, so you select it and move on to the next problem. But much later, when you’re reviewing the problem, you realize that you picked the wrong answer entirely. Why does this happen, and how can you stop it?
Decoding Divisibility and Primes on the GMAT – Part 1
Most of my students are driven crazy by GMAT Number Properties. On the face of it, the topic seems straightforward: I know what positive and negative, odd and even are. Divisibility stuff is a little more complicated, but come on: this was taught in school when we were 10! How hard can it be? Read more
Here’s Why You May Be Misinterpreting Your GMAT Score
Here’s a scenario that might seem familiar to many of you: you take your first GMAT practice test, then you see the score. Ouch! Probably lower than you were hoping for, right? Read more
Two Minutes of GMAT Quant: A Breakdown – Part 1
Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.
Two minutes is not a huge amount of time. Yet if you want to finish the entire GMAT Quant section in 75 minutes, two minutes is about all you have to solve each problem. Don’t interpret that to mean you just have to go quickly or skip important steps like checking your work. Instead, seek out a more efficient process for dealing with GMAT problems.
Better yet, read along as I detail an efficient process for dealing with your two minutes. Read more
Here’s What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do on the GMAT
You’re staring at a GMAT problem that you just don’t understand. There’s a minute left on the clock. What do you do? Read more