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.

Are you feeling incredibly stressed out when you sit down to study for the GMAT? (Or maybe I should ask, who isn’t?) Do you find it hard to concentrate on the task at hand?

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara recently published the results of a study following 48 undergrads seeking to boost cognitive performance. Jan Hoffman details the research in a blog post over at the New York Times; here’s a summary. Read more

Recently, I published an article challenging those going for a 750+ to answer a certain Quant question in 30 seconds. I received a lot of positive feedback about that article—and requests for more of the same.

I’m happy to oblige: here’s a GMATPrep CR problem. The normal timeframe is about 2 minutes—but if you’re going for a 750+, you’d need to be able to answer something like this much more quickly. Read more

When was the last time you thought that? For me, it was sometime within the past week. I knew that this problem was not beyond my reach! Meanwhile, the clock was ticking away and all I could focus on was the fact that I couldn’t remember something that I should have been able to remember.

That horrible, sinking feeling is universal: we’ve all felt it before and—unfortunately—we’re all going to feel it again. How can we deal with 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.

Has this happened to you? You’re reviewing a practice test, and you look at a question you got wrong. “That was just a stupid mistake,” you say, “I should have gotten that one right. I’ll get it next time.” 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’ve been wanting to do this problem with you for a while, but I’ve been delaying because well, you’ll see when you get to the table. It takes a lot of work to recreate that in a blog post. ? But that ridiculously large table is also the reason why I want to talk about this one—so let’s test it out! 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.

For every five hours of studying combinatorics-type questions, the average GMAT student increases their chances of being able to correctly answer a question type that is found only on the very difficult end of the GMAT spectrum. Meanwhile, the same student will have to compute hundreds of basic computations without the aid of a calculator. For students who know how to quickly do these computations, they are rewarded with extra minutes that can be spent double-checking their work and critically thinking about whether their answers make sense. As BenGMAT Franklin might say, a second saved is a second earned on the GMAT, but it doesn’t matter if those extra seconds come from being faster at doing combinatorics questions or quicker at computations. So check out these five math tricks, learn the ones that you like, and practice them daily to give yourself some extra time to finish off that 37th and final Quant question.

Note: like everything else on the GMAT, being able to do something and being able to do something QUICKLY are two different tasks. If you like any of the following math tricks, make sure you know it inside and out before you try using it during your test. Read more

I’ve spoken with multiple students lately who received a disappointing (lower than they were expecting) score on the Quant section and who all said that the Quant felt relatively easy or straightforward. How is that possible?

First of all, thinking that a test like the GMAT is easy is actually a warning sign: things probably are not going very well. If the test was going very well, then you’d be seeing some seriously hard—next to impossible—problems.

Second, the test writers are phenomenal at writing questions that don’t seem all that complicated but are in fact your worst nightmare. My worst nightmare is not an impossible question—I know I can’t do it, so I just pick and move on. My worst nightmare is a question that I think I can do, and I spend a decent chunk of time doing it, and then I get it wrong anyway—even though I’m sure I got it 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.

How do you study? More importantly, how do you know that the way in which you’re studying is effective—that is, that you’re learning what you need to learn to improve your GMAT score? Read on!

In the first part of this series, we discussed how to get started with your GMAT study plan: setting up your timeframe, picking out your materials, and so on. (If you haven’t read it yet, please do so before you continue here!) In today’s installment, we’ll talk about how to study and make progress over the actual length of your study timeframe. 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.

Just starting out? Or maybe you’ve been studying for weeks already? Perhaps you’ve already taken the official test once but want another crack at it? Whatever stage you’re at, you need a GMAT study plan, so that’s what we’re going to talk about this week: how to develop your own personalized GMAT study plan. (Note: this is an update from the original article about 2.5 years ago. If you run across the older version, ignore it; use this newer one instead!) 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.

Take a look at the following problems.

Data Sufficiency: What was Company X’s percentage profit in 2011?

1) The ratio of costs to profits for Company X was 3 to 1 in 2011.

2) Company X’s costs in 2011 were $360,000.

A recipe for punch calls for 4 parts seltzer to one part juice. If John wants to make 5 gallons of punch, how many 8 ounce cans of juice does he need (1 gallon = 128 ounces)?

A) 32

B) 20

C) 16

D) 10

E) 8

Read more