This article was written by our very own instructor, Stacey Koprince. If you’re looking for more great resources and advice, check out our free resources section.

A few weeks ago, we talked about how to make educated guesses on Quant (you can click here for that article). This article covers educated guesses on GMAT Verbal. Read more

This article was written by our very own instructor, Stacey Koprince. If you’re looking for more great resources and advice, check out our free resources section.

I’ve been getting lots of great article ideas from students lately, and this is one of them: how do we make educated guesses on GMAT Quant problems? (I wrote a separate article about Verbal here.)

Note: if you requested a different topic, don’t worry! I keep a list of all requests; I will get to your request eventually. I’m generally choosing the order based upon the number of requests I get from different people about the same topic. Read more

Lately, as I’ve been discussing test questions with people on the forums, I’ve realized that a lot of students aren’t using the GMAT forums to discuss those test questions in the optimal way. I’m defining the optimal way to mean the way in which students will learn in order to boost their scores the most. I’ll go out on a limb and assume that most people do have a goal of learning in the way that boosts their scores the most. ?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach in terms of the best way to learn; different things work best for different people. But there are certain principles that are universal—and we can use those principles to devise a best practice method for using the forums to maximize our learning.

Read more

This week, we have a follow-on article from Chris Ryan, Manhattan GMAT’s Director of Instructor and Product Development. Chris introduced the concept of layering to us in this article on Sentence Correction. Layering is a technique used by a test writer to make a question more difficult. Today, Chris is going to show us how layering works in data sufficiency questions.

Note: I’ve repeated the introduction from the first article below, in case some of you haven’t read that one. If you did read the first one, the first few paragraphs will be review for you.

We all know that the GMAT is a computer adaptive test, and computer adaptive tests give us questions based on the difficulty level that we earn as we take the test. How do the test writers at ACT (the organization that writes the GMAT) determine which questions are harder than others?

First, ACT engages in a process called “normalization,” wherein all freshly written questions are tested by actual test takers to determine what percentage answer the questions correctly (we know these questions as experimental questions). If too many people answer correctly, the question may need to be toughened up. If too few people answer correctly, the question may need to be dumbed down. ACT is looking to assemble a pool of questions that covers a range of difficulty, from cakewalk to mind-bending, and the test takers help them do so.

Read more

The 12th Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review is an awesome resource, likely the best available, and we heartily recommend it to all of our students. Indeed, the Official Guide and its supplements are included with all of our courses and form the core of our curriculum.

However, if there is one weakness that students often cite, it is that the Official Guide’s explanations are sometimes confusing and/or unhelpful, particularly on some of the math problems.

To address this need, we are very proud to announce the imminent publication of the Official Guide Companion! This book includes thorough, step-by-step explanations to every math problem in the Official Guide, using the principles of our curriculum for consistency. Problems that customarily give students headaches are flagged as part of ‘Horacio’s Hotlist,’ named after ace Instructor Horacio Quiroga. There is also an online version of the OGC for easy reference.

Note that all of the referenced questions appear in the Official Guide itself, which is necessary to make use of the Official Guide Companion (hence the name).

All of our course students will begin receiving the book May 17th, as part of their course materials free of charge. The online version will be active one week earlier, on May 10th. It’s good to be one of our students!

Thanks to Chris, Dave, Carrie, Graham, and all of the other Instructors that worked so hard to make the Official Guide Companion possible! Many students are about to have a problem solved (pun intended). 🙂

If you have ever downloaded our popular free GMAT flash cards, you might have been one of the many individuals who requested that we make this resource available as an iPhone/iPod Touch app. You also probably heard us tell you that we were working on developing this very app and were excited over the prospects of a mobile version of our flash cards. That apparently wasn’t good enough for you guys because you flooded our phone lines with requests to get the app out faster and with more features such as flagging cards right or wrong and shuffling the deck. We added those features to the docket, but it still didn’t prevent you from following us out of our office, clamoring over this flash cards iPhone app. “Create an interface that is enabled for gestures so you can flick the cards!” “Create an iPhone-friendly version of the Manhattan GMAT website!” “Build in functionality to cast spells, like Harry Potter!”

While we were baffled by the spell request, we implemented the other two suggestions and produced a flaggable, gesture-realistic, and self-contained version of our flash cards that is now available in the iTunes app store for free!

We hope this is finally enough for you guys because our email server is about to explode from all your flash cards requests. However, we know this isn’t the case and in a few months from now, you’ll probably be asking us to make a new version for the iPad. Well, we hope that these flash cards keep you busy for at least a little while.

Also, please remember to rate the cards in the app store!

Here at Manhattan GMAT, we spend a fair amount of time introducing our students to the ins and outs of the GMAT (e.g.  How are the essays weighed and scored?  What are the practical implications of the test being computer adaptive?).  The GMAT is a unique test that raises its own distinctive issues and challenges, and learning about the test (as opposed to simply practicing test questions) is itself a valuable component to achieving a high score.

In response to popular demand, we have compiled answers to many of the questions that most students have about the GMAT in this FREE guide – the GMAT Uncovered.  This guide is available electronically via download at our site.  We are confident that the GMAT Uncovered will address many of the questions you may have about the GMAT, including questions you didn’t even know you had!  It was written by Stacey Koprince, one of our extraordinary Instructors, so you know it’s good.  🙂

Happy reading!

Our 8 Strategy Guides, organized by topic, have been around for several years.  However, we were seeing some students who hadn’t looked at math in a LONG time and wanted a refresher.

So, after months of development, we are very happy and proud to announce the publication of our brand new Strategy Supplement, the Foundations of GMAT Math!  This book starts from the basics to give students those “Oh yeah, NOW I remember how to FOIL” moments.  We start with Order of Operations/PEMDAS and algebra, and go from there to fractions, geometry, exponents, divisibility and other flashback-inducing topics.  If you’re confident in your math skills, you may not need this book at all.  But otherwise, you may like it a great deal.  You know who you are . . .

All Manhattan GMAT Course Students will receive this book for free as part of their course materials.  If you’ve already started your course and want this book, contact studentservices@manhattanprep.com/gmat/ and they’ll hook you up (you may have to pay shipping depending on your location, but the book will be free).

Kudos to our curriculum wizards for their latest contribution to the best in GMAT Prep!

We have completed our analysis of the GMAT Official Guide Quant Review 2nd Edition.  Of the 300 questions, 74 (25%) are new to the 2nd edition.

These 74 problems did not break dramatic new ground in terms of tested material.  The bottom line is that the 2nd Edition is a nice add-on, but you should still feel fine about studying from the original Quant Review Guide if that’s what you’ve got handy.  For a complete list of the new problems and a detailed breakdown by topic, click here.

As promised, we now have a detailed write-up of the Official Guide for GMAT Review Verbal 2nd Edition.  The skinny is that there are 81 new problems (27%) that were not present in the 1st Edition.  None of the new problems is particularly groundbreaking, and some of them appeared in past released GMAC resources.  For a detailed problem list by topic, visit our write-up and select a topic to see precisely where the new problems lie.

The bottom line is that if you own the 1st Edition, spending an additional $17.95 for 81 problems would be helpful, but not vital.

The Quant Guide will be reviewed next week.  Also, in case you missed it, we did the same for the 12th Edition a little while back.