Articles tagged "gmat strategy"

What do you want to get wrong on the GMAT?

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gmat-test-prepRight now, you might be thinking, “Wait, what? I don’t actively want to get stuff wrong!”

In fact, yes, you do. Let me take you on what might seem like a tangent for a moment.

Would you agree that one of the marks of a strong business person is the ability to tell the difference between good opportunities and bad ones? And the ability to capitalize on those good opportunities while letting the bad ones go?

Yes, of course—that’s a basic definition of business. What does that have to do with the GMAT?

The GMAT is a test of your business skills. They don’t really care how great you are with geometry or whether you know every obscure grammar rule in the book. They care whether you can distinguish between good and bad opportunities and whether you can drop the bad ones without a backward glance.

If you want to maximize your score on the GMAT, then you will have a short-list of topics that you want to get wrong fast on the test. My top three in math are combinatorics, 3-D geometry, and anything with roman numerals.

How do you decide what your categories should be? Let’s talk.

But I don’t really want to get stuff wrong… that’s just a metaphor, right?

No, it’s not a metaphor. I really want you to plan how and what you’re going to get wrong! If you haven’t already, read my post about what the GMAT really tests. (You can go ahead and read it right now; I’ll wait.)

In a nutshell, the GMAT is set up to force us to get some of the questions wrong. No matter what you can do, they’ll just give you something harder.

Ultimately, they want to see whether you have the makings of a good business person. One way to test that is to force you into a situation where your choice is between spending extra time and mental energy on something that’s too hard—likely causing yourself to run out of time and energy before the test is over—and cutting yourself off when appropriate.

How do I cut myself off?

First of all, put yourself in this mindset:

You’re at the office, working on a group project.

A colleague of yours is the project manager.

The manager annoys you because he (or she) keeps assigning too many tasks, some of which are not all that important.

Sometimes, you’re rolling your eyes when your colleague tosses a certain piece of work at you; you’re thinking, “Seriously, the client meeting is in 3 days. This is NOT the best use of our remaining time.”

Got that? Okay, now during the test, put yourself in that mindset. The test itself is your annoying colleague. When he drops a roman numeral question in your lap, or a 4-line sentence correction with every last word underlined, you’re already rolling your eyes and thinking, “Are you serious? Come on.”

Here’s the key step: let yourself get just a little annoyed—but with the test, not yourself. You’re not feeling badly that you don’t like the problem; you don’t feel as though you’re falling short. No way! Instead, your colleague is trying to get you to do something that is clearly a waste of time. Roll your eyes. To appease your colleague, figure out whether there’s enough here for you to make an educated guess. Then pick something and move on to more important tasks.

How do I know when to cut myself off?

Quick: name your top three annoyances in quant. Now do the same in verbal. Here’s another one of mine: an RC detail EXCEPT question on a really technical topic with very long answer choices. (In other words, I have to find the four wrong answers in order to find the one right answer… and the topic area is very long and annoying.)

That’s your starting point: you already know you dread these areas. Back this up with data: make sure that these really are the worst ones for you. “Worst” is defined as “I rarely get these right and even when I do, I still use too much time and brain energy.”

Next, check to see how commonly tested the particular topic or question type is. You can’t afford to blow off algebra—that’s too broad a topic. You can, though, blow off sequences.

For some topics, you do want to try to be able to answer lower-level questions. For instance, if one of my students just hates polygons (triangles, squares, rectangles), he has my blessing to blow off harder questions—the ones that combine shapes, for example, or that move into the 3-D arena. He does need to learn the more basic formulas, though, so that he isn’t missing too many lower-level questions.

Your particular mix of pet peeves will almost certainly change over time. Initially, I had some other things at the top of my list, such as weighted averages. Then, I discovered a much better way to do those problems, so 3-D geometry took its place.

Some topics, though, will always be weaknesses. I’ve never liked combinatorics and doubt I ever will. That’s perfectly fine, particularly when the topic is not that commonly tested anyway!

Sound off in the comments below: what areas do you hate the most? Your new strategy is to get those wrong fast and redirect that time and mental energy elsewhere!

Games People Play…Or Don’t

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Many a true word is said in jest.—I don’t know, but I heard it from my mother.

I think that Critical Reasoning is my favorite part of the exam because it is the purest of the pure.  I’ve written before that the GMAT is an aptitude test rather than a knowledge test.  On the simplest level, in both the quant and the verbal, the exam tests a logic system: be specific, don’t assume, and don’t rationalize.  Nowhere is this more true than in Critical Reasoning—there is no mathematical foundation work nor are there grammar rules.  As Gertrude Stein used to say, There is no there, there.  Of course, she was talking about Oakland. . .fill in your own joke.  When I’m being* mean to students, I say, If you know what all the words mean, you should get them all right.

gmat gamesBut students don’t get them all right.  Even those who know what all the words mean.  Why is that?  Because people think.  They assume, they rationalize, and they inject opinions.  Why is this bad?  Because it’s a game.  Critical Reasoning doesn’t take place in reality.  Here’s an analogy I thought up all by myself, so it isn’t in the Strategy Guide: Critical Reasoning bears the same relationship to reality that Monopoly does.  When you play Monopoly, you don’t think about how reasonable free parking or building hotels is, you exploit the rules.  It’s the same thing.  A lot of OG arguments involve medical issues, but you hardly ever care whether people live or die because that’s usually not the conclusion.   Play the game.

As a by the way, if students struggle with the CR, it’s often half of their trouble in the quant.  Folks are not specific; they read the question or the given incorrectly.  And they don’t recognize the types and patterns.  In other words, they don’t play that game.  However, folks fail to notice these mistakes because they are too consumed with worry about their math foundations.  Conversely, engineers with strong foundations also suffer here, especially in the DS because they try to use brute mathematical force instead of playing the game.  It is a behavioral problem.  People don’t do; they think.  Don’t think—much like in life, it only gets you into trouble.
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In It to Win It

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This is probably the shortest—and most important—article I’ve written in a year. It’s just a little story, but it’s the story of a crucial epiphany one of my students (and I) just had.

Last night, at the end of a class I was teaching, one of my students began asking questions about timing and guessing on the GMAT. He’s really struggling with the idea that he has to let some questions go and that he’s going to get a decent number of questions wrong. I told him he’s not alone; most students have significant difficulty accepting this idea—and those who can’t accept it almost never reach their goal scores.

As we discussed the boring details of how the GMAT works, he acknowledged that he knew he had to do what I said (because I’m the expert ?), but he was having a tough time because, normally, he’s in it to win it.

(For those who aren’t familiar with that expression, it means that, if you’re playing a game, you’re always going for it and trying to win.)

When he said that, a light bulb went off in my head, and I then said something to him that made a light bulb go off in his head. I said:

Yes, but are you playing the right game?

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