Guess what? 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.

In today’s latest installment of our Know the Code series, we’re going to talk about the most efficient way to tackle Table problems in the Integrated Reasoning (IR) section of the GMAT.

First, try out this IR Table problem from the GMATPrep® free practice exams. A timing note: If you’re planning to guess on 3 questions in the IR section, then you can give yourself 3 minutes and 20 seconds to do this problem.

And a logistics note: On the real test, you’ll be able to sort by the different columns in the table. That’s not possible in a blog article, so just do your best as is, but note that a question like this one can be done in much less time than 3 minutes and 20 seconds if you’re taking advantage of the ability to sort the data. Read more

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.

Here’s a phrase that might bring back some memories from middle school math class: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, or PEMDAS. (If you went to school outside of the U.S., you may have learned the acronym BEDMAS or BODMAS, instead.) You use this phrase to decide what order to do mathematical operations in: Parentheses first (from inside to outside), then Exponents, then Multiplication and Division (left to right), then Addition and Subtraction (also left to right).

PEMDAS isn’t terribly fancy stuff. It’s just a useful little tool that helps us communicate clearly—it’s what tells us, for instance, that “2x(3+4)” means something different from “2×3 + 4.” But if there’s one thing the GMAT loves, it’s making things look more complicated than they really are. Read more

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.

As any good GMAT student knows, you can’t possibly answer every question correctly. In fact, if you get the first couple questions right, you will rapidly get into territory where most people can hardly figure out what the questions mean. And if you take extra time to dig into those questions and try to figure them out, it bites you in a big way when you run out of time toward the end. So we quickly learn that if you can’t figure out a good plan to solve a problem, you need to go ahead and take an educated guess.

Sounds great, but it’s not actually that simple, is it? Read more

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.

AKA – I don’t feel ready to take the GMAT, please help!

Let’s say you spent the last few months of your life enrolled in our GMAT class. You attended all the classes and you kept up with homework (mostly)—but you don’t feel ready to take the test yet. You’re starting to panic. What should you do? Read more

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.

That’s a good question! Do you really need to solve all the GMAT problems in the Official Guide to the GMAT in order to score a 700? What about the other side of the issue: is it possible that there aren’t enough problems in the Official Guide? How many GMAT problems should you solve before taking the official GMAT?  

Before I share my answer, let’s get some facts on the table. Read more

Guess what? 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.

Critical Reasoning. It’s not the easiest subject to teach, I tell ya. Or to study. On the one hand, it’s deceptively simple: ‘here are four sentences, answer a question about them.’ You might be glad there are no formulas, no little rules to memorize. Unlike geometry, in which you might not see a 5-12-13 triangle on the actual test but need to know about them just in case, GMAT Critical Reasoning is usually just a game of spotting a few parts of an argument and answering the question logically.

But while there are certain things that show up again and again—premise, conclusion, counterpoints, assumptions—there are a lot of different ways the GMAT can construct the logic, and a lot of different ways they can make wrong answers seem tempting. How many times have you been wrong but the answer just felt so right? Read more

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.

Here’s one of the most common math questions my students ask: “What’s up with negative numbers and square roots on the GMAT?” Luckily, the answer doesn’t involve a lot of complex rules. In this quick article, I’ll lay out the issues surrounding square roots and negative numbers, and share everything you need to know to handle them confidently.

If you’ve been studying for a while, or if you’ve worked your way through Foundations of Math, you probably know that there’s a strange interaction between negative numbers and exponents. If you square a negative number, the result is positive. If you square a positive number, the result is also positive. Squaring a number makes the negative sign ‘go away.’ This is where the problem with square roots comes in.

Suppose you’re looking at an equation that looks like this: Read more

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.

This is not hyperbole. I truly believe that the number one way to raise your score is to have a thorough error log. I have had a number of students who come to me after having gone through most of the Official Guide but who are still struggling to get the scores they want. When I ask, “What do you have to show for doing ALL of these problems?” the answer is often something along the lines of “I’m not sure.” That drives me bonkers! I want you to work smart, not hard. Read more

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.

I’m excited about the problem I have to share with you today in the latest installment of our Know the Code series. ☺ Interest rate GMAT problems can be extremely annoying—you might find yourself spending 4 minutes and still having to guess in the end. So your first decision is whether you even want to tackle these kinds of problems in the first place.

But there are some things you can learn that could make answering interest rate GMAT problems a lot less irritating. Try out this Integrated Reasoning (IR) Two-Part problem from the GMATPrep® free practice exams. (Note: This one is an IR question, but I could absolutely see them testing the same principle on a Quant problem.) Read more

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.

In the previous articles in this series, we developed a critical skill for GMAT probability and combinatorics problems: listing out cases. Let’s start by taking another look at the practice problem from the end of the last article. Read more