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This is the first in what I hope will be many student-question inspired posts. Allyson from Philadelphia was wondering whether “nor” had to be paired with “neither” or whether it could be used on its own. The answer was far more complex than expected, so here it is. If you have an idea for a GMAT grammar blog post, or just have a question that you want answered, email me at emadan@manhattanprep.com.

To begin, you’ll need to understand the essentials of parallelism. You can get in-depth coverage of parallelism in our Sentence Correction Strategy Guide, but here are the basics. Two (or more) things in a list have to be both structural and logically parallel. Let’s start with the positive form: either/or. 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.

Most overlapping sets on the GMAT have two distinct groups. Students take French and/or Spanish (or neither), pianists play either classical and/or jazz (or neither), people like either QDoba and/or Baja Fresh (definitely neither. Chipotle, please)—and for these situations, the familiar, double-set matrix approach works best. Read more

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If you’re in college, business school might sound like a faraway, almost ominous concept. Do you have a dream business school that you want to attend one day? Do you know what it takes to get into a top b-school? Have you heard about the GMAT, or Graduate Management Admissions Test?

It can definitely be an overwhelming experience, but it doesn’t have to be. If you give yourself enough time to prep the right way, the test starts feeling less scary and easier to understand. You’ll stop breaking into a sweat at the sight of an exponent or a sentence with five commas, and you’ll feel your confidence building. 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.

Welcome to part 3 of our series! If you haven’t seen the earlier installments yet, please start with part 1 and work your way back to me here.

We’ve talked about how to create sets of GMAT problems and how to set your time limit. We haven’t yet discussed what you need to learn from one of these sets before you try another one. 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 article in this series, we introduced two big ideas about GMAT probability and combinatorics:

1. Most people find them counterintuitive.
2. The best way to get past that is to list the possibilities.

In this article, we’ll focus more on #2. How do you list out the possibilities in a GMAT probability or combinatorics problem? Let’s try it on a simple probability 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.

After working with thousands of students, I’ll admit: Reading Comprehension is my least favorite subject to teach. Why? Because unlike Quant or grammar, it doesn’t have concrete rules to apply, so it can be harder to find ways to help when students are struggling.

I have found, though, that many students who struggle with GMAT Reading Comprehension aren’t actually struggling with the “reading” or the “comprehension” part (unless they struggle with English skills generally). No, the passages – though dense and often boring – are mostly ok. It’s answering the questions that’s a struggle!

RC questions can seem vague, and the answer choices can feel like a sphinx’s riddle. Often 2 or 3 answers choices may seem equally right, or maybe none of them seem right! So what should you do? 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.

Last time, we talked about all of the basics of creating practice problem sets. Today, we’re going to talk about how to create larger sets that really mimic the GMAT testing experience. (If you haven’t read the first part yet, do start there.)

What are my goals for these larger sets of GMAT problems?

When you’ve made it through your primary review of all study materials (all question types and content areas), you’re ready to start doing larger problem sets: 8, 12, 16. (I’ll tell you later why these are all multiples of 4.)

Your goal is two-fold:

—Test (and continue to build) your skills on all this stuff you’ve been studying.

—Practice your overall business-decision-making skills (in other words, practice under conditions that mimic the real GMAT as closely as possible). Read more

Manhattan Prep is teaming up with our friends at mbaMission to cover every base in helping you prepare for the 2017-2018 MBA admissions season. Join us for a free, five-part webinar series, Your Dream MBA: 5 Steps to Getting In. Get expert advice from our test prep masters on how to approach your prep in order to maximize your score, learn all the nuances of MBA applications and admissions from mbaMission’s Senior Consultants, and participate in a Q&A session with admissions officers from Yale, Columbia, and other top b-schools.

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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.

There’s a classic brain teaser called the Monty Hall problem. It’s named after the host of an old-timey TV game show, who used it to confound contestants. He’d present each contestant with three closed doors. Behind one door was a new car, and behind the other two doors were goats.

Monty invited the player to pick one of the three doors. Whichever door the player chose, Monty would then open a different one, revealing a goat, not the car. Then, he would offer the player a choice. If the player wanted, he could switch doors, picking the other unopened door. Or, he could stick with the door he picked in the first place. Whichever decision he made, he would win the prize behind the door he chose. 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.

Subject-verb agreement is fundamental to correct sentence construction. It’s commonly tested on the GMAT, but is overlooked far too often. Today, we’re going to focus on the subject of the sentence in GMAT grammar.

The subject is the actor of the sentence. It performs the action described by the verb. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to use “subject” to mean the main subject of the sentence, used in an independent clause, though, of course, a sentence can contain multiple actors/subjects. For example: Read more