GMAC, the organization that makes the GMAT, has just announced some great news regarding the GMAT Online!

Beginning April 8th, we’ll gain a bunch of features that currently exist only for the testing center-based GMAT:

• You’ll be able to choose one of three section orders for the exam (Quant first, Verbal first, or Essay first); currently, you’re locked into the Quant-first testing order.
• You’ll get two 8-minute breaks (placed at the usual times that we get our breaks in the testing center); currently, there’s only one 5-minute break.
• You’ll see your scores on screen at the end of the exam (for everything but the essay); currently, you have to wait several business days to get your scores for the GMAT Online.

You might have noticed one other change that I snuck into that list without making it explicit: You will have to write the Essay section. (Currently, that section doesn’t appear on the GMAT Online.) This is a tiny drawback, really, compared to the goodness of all of the other updates.

So, starting April 8th, the test center GMAT and the GMAT Online will be almost identical. The only substantive difference will be the scratch paper. It’s still the case that you’ll get the laminated yellow pad in the testing center, but when you take the test at home, you’ll use your own dry erase whiteboard and have access to an online whiteboard.

I’m really excited about this news because it means that your preparation for either version of the exam is basically the same. So you can just get down to the business of studying and decide later whether you’ll take the exam in the testing center or at home (or both!).

We still have a few questions for GMAC about some other implications of this update—we’ll update this post as we learn the answers.

“I’m just not a math person” is probably the most common thing GMAT students tell me about themselves on the first day of class. I’m here to tell you the same thing I tell each of those students: Odds are, you’re totally wrong.

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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

Note: The pilot project has now gone live as “Select Section Order”—however, the details are a bit different. Read this post for all the info you need on the new Select Section Order feature.

You may have heard that, on Monday, some GMAT students started receiving emails inviting them to take part in a Select Section Order Pilot program that GMAC (the organization that makes the GMAT) is holding in late February/early March.

This pilot is to test an awesome potential new feature: the ability to select the order in which you do the various sections of the GMAT!

Below, I’ve laid out all of the important details and I also talk about how to decide whether to join, if you were one of the lucky students invited to take part.

How does the pilot work? What are they testing?

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In the past month, I’ve spoken to more than a few students who were aiming for round 1 deadlines but hadn’t yet gotten the GMAT scores they thought they needed for “their” schools. If you’re in this boat, too, let’s talk about your various options. Read more

You’ve heard a million times that you’re supposed to create Official Guide (OG) problem sets in order to practice for the test. But how do you actually do so in a way that will help you get the most out of your study?

Fear not! This article is coming to your rescue.

Initially, when you’re studying a new topic or problem type, you won’t do sets of problems; instead, you’ll just try one problem at a time. As you gain experience, though, you’re going to want to do 3 problems in a row, or 5, or 10.

Why?

Because the real test will never give you just one problem!

The GMAT will give you many questions in a row and they’ll be all jumbled up—an SC, then a couple of CRs, then back to another SC (that tests different grammar rules than the first one), and so on.

You want to practice two things:

(1) Jumping around among question types and topics

(2) Managing your timing and mental energy among a group of questions

When do I start doing problem sets?

You’re going to use problem sets to test your skills, so you’ve got to develop some of those skills first. If you’re using our Strategy Guides to study, then at the end of one chapter, you’ll do only two or three OG problems to make sure that you understood the material in the chapter.

Later, though, when you finish the Guide, do a set of problems that mix topics (and question types) from that entire book. Make sure you can distinguish between the similar-but-not-quite-the-same topics in that book, and also practice your skills on both problem solving and data sufficiency. As you finish subsequent Guides, your sets can include problems from everything you’ve done so far. Keep mixing it up!

How do I make the sets?

You’ll need to balance three things when you create a problem set:

(1) Number of problems. Initially, start out with about 3 to 5 problems. As you gain experience and add topics, you’ll increase the size of the sets—we’ll talk more about this a little later.

(2) Type of problem and content.
(a) For quant, always do a mix of Problem Solving (PS) and Data Sufficiency (DS). For verbal, mix at least two of the three types; you can include all three types in larger sets.
(b) Do not do a set of 3 or more questions all from the same chapter or content area—for example, don’t do 3 exponents questions in a row. You know exactly what you’re about to get and the real test will never be this nice to you.

(3) Difficulty level.
(a) Include a mix of easier, medium, and harder questions in your set. For all types except Reading Comprehension, the OG places problems in roughly increasing order of difficulty. On average, aroblem 3 is easier than a problem 50, which is easier than a problem 102. (This does not mean that problem 5 is necessarily harder than problem 3. In general, higher question numbers represent harder questions, but the increase is not linear from problem to problem.)
(b) Note: your personal strengths and weaknesses will affect how you perceive the problems—you might think a lower-numbered problem is hard or a higher-numbered problem is easy. They are… for you! Expect that kind of outcome sometimes.

Timing!

Next, calculate how much time to give yourself to do the problem set.
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When under pressure, do you tend to sit back and assess the situation in a thoughtful way, or do you instead recall everything you know and start jotting down formulae such as W=RT on your scratch paper? If you have a tendency for the latter, this blog post is for you.

I’ve recently had a few tutoring students who all suffered from the same issue: they try a problem in a relaxed state and can easily solve it, sometimes without even putting pen to paper… But when they are in the midst of a practice test (and even more so in a real test) they can see the same problem and spend 4 minutes on it, with a lot of messy algebra, and often times they just give up and move on (the right thing to do under that circumstance!).

The Quant section of the GMAT may feel like a math test, but I assure you it is not. It is a cleverly designed assessment of your thinking faculties, and if you turn on ‘autopilot’ you are no longer thinking. In order to succeed on this test, you have to think your way through each problem.

When I take the GMAT, I imagine that I’m hanging out with my buddies at the bar – we’re telling each other jokes and sharing brain teasers. Here’s how it works:  you’re all just out having a good time, there’s no pressure, maybe you’ve had a couple of drinks so you only try to solve those brain teasers that you think you can solve in 2-3 minutes or less. If the brain teaser seems too hard, you just give up (and no-one will think less of you!)

I suspect that your approach to the following problem would be completely different if your mindset is a ‘bar’ mindset vs. an ‘autopilot’ mindset:

I’m driving at a constant speed and it took me 4 hours to finish the first 1/3 of my trip. How long will it take me to complete the rest of the trip if I double my speed?

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

When I was a little boy, I didn’t want to be a fireman when I grew up.  I wanted to be a riverboat gambler.  Unfortunately, I didn’t because of a bad upbringing—utility stocks were too risky for my father. . .I do play poker and blackjack some though.  And I don’t try to fill inside straights.  On the other hand, I don’t play baccarat because I don’t understand the rules well enough.  The same principles apply to the GMAT.  The first part of this series—-Heart of Darkness—A Holistic Guide to GMAT Scoring —- highlights why test takers don’t score as well as they should because they don’t understand the rules of the game and thus often try to fill inside straights.  And, like a Greek tragedy, that post ends by lamenting how even test takers who know how to play baccarat are corrupted by the siren song of the ticking clock.  Yes, the clock.

Folks fail to understand that all their good work will be undone if they do not finish the sections in good order.  Leaving the last five blank will lower your score by as much as sixty points.  Roughly speaking, doing so in both sections will magically turn a 660 into a 550.  And you must not only finish, but also finish in good order.  If you blind guess the last five in each section, with average karma, your score will still drop sixty points.   Run the assessment reports on your practice exams—if your score is lower than the average difficulty of the questions that you missed, you have timing problems, even if you are finishing the sections.

How can you avoid this penalty?  Well, the easiest way is to have an angel on your shoulder and always guess right.  However, if you can’t count on that angel full time, you have to control the clock. In the first half of a section, the CAT computer is roughly approximating your ability level.  Thus, what is unforgiveable there is missing questions that you know how to do.  But test takers misunderstand—that is NOT the same as getting them ALL right.  If I take a GMAT, I’ll get ten of the first fifteen quants correct.  Maybe eleven.  Or maybe nine.  It doesn’t matter.  For me, after about the fourth one, they are all 800 level questions and, as part one discussed, you only need to be about 50% accurate at the score level that you want.  Trying to get them all right is a trap.  First off, as I implied a second ago, even if you are scoring 790, the computer will give you problems that you don’t know how to do.  So it’s hopeless on the face of it.  Equally importantly, attempting to do so uses up too much time.  The Catch-22 here is that you must answer those that you know correctly without disproportionally using the time.  Or you’ll turn your 660 into a 550.  What is the solution to this dialectic?  The envelope, please. . .

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