Once upon a time, in an America of long, long ago and far, far away, corporate executives often spent their careers with one employer, with little threat of termination, and then a fixed benefit pension.  Think of the client company guys on Mad Men.  And the living was easy.  Let me point out that even though I’m old and cranky, this was way before my time—my father was one of the last to get away with it.  Anyway, back then there were still books about how to succeed in business.  You know, books——-primitive information delivery systems that people used during their time off the butter churn.  One of these books was called The Peter Principle.  The Peter Principle suggested that executives were promoted until they reached their level of incompetence; once they achieved a position beyond their abilities, they would stagnate there for the rest of their careers.  As fascinating and amusing as this is, why should you care?  Because, in essence, that’s how the GMAT is scored.

The GMAT computer is searching for the difficulty level at which the test taker is about 50% accurate.  The test taker’s level of incompetence.  Simply put, to achieve whatever score you want, don’t screw up very many questions below that level and run 50/50 at that level.  The questions harder than your percentile goal don’t matter.  Many test takers sabotage their scores by rising to the bait and overinvesting in difficult questions, while too glibly dispensing with easier ones.  This is backwards.  The hard ones don’t matter, the easy ones matter.  If you don’t answer the easy ones correctly, the computer will peg your level of incompetence there and not let you near the harder ones.  Understand the Peter Principle.

Actually, folks do understand the Peter Principle.  At the first class, students intellectually understand what I say—that whether a test taker scores 540 or 740, that test taker will miss more than a third of the questions.  However, when students take a CAT, they strive for 80 or 90% accuracy and lock themselves in death spirals with top level questions, and that ruins their scores.  Why do people do so?  Because people, after years of living under the high school/college rubric of 90% accuracy, cannot emotionally accept the scoring system.  Furthermore, folks, at least subliminally, want to demonstrate their brilliance by nailing the hard ones.  But you can’t win any game if you ignore how it’s scored!  Not Monopoly, not Scrabble, and not the GMAT.

Time for an attitude adjustment.  In life, most people find it relatively easy to excuse failures caused by circumstances beyond their control.  Far more galling are disasters that are entirely one’s own fault.  I think I broke a toe last Sunday, and I resent it—since the only cause was that I’m a clumsy dumb ass.  Try to feel the way that you feel about your performance in life when you evaluate your performance on a CAT.  When you review it, suffer most when you say, Of course that answer is correct and the one I picked is insane.  Those are the mistakes that are unforgiveable.  Because those are the questions that you have to get right.  Not the ones that you don’t know how to do.  Don’t cut yourself slack for silly mistakes.  Think of it as a sport—you’d never give a coach these lame excuses:

Test taker: I knew how to do it.

Coach CAT:  You lost.

Test taker: I could have done it.

Coach CAT:  You lost.

Test taker: It was a stupid mistake.

Coach CAT:  You lost.

What?  You never played sports?  Oh.  I see.  Well. . .there’s a great old movie in which Jimmy Stewart is flying a third rate passenger plane across the North African desert and has to crash land during a sand storm.  He writes in the flight log that the radio had broken, so he received no warning and the engine air filters hadn’t been cleaned, so he didn’t have a chance.  Then he violently crosses it all out and writes, Cause of crash: pilot error.  That’s how you have to feel about the questions that you should have gotten right.  Don’t cut yourself slack.

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I’ve talked to a ton of students recently who were surprised by some detail of test day”and that detail affected their performance. In most of these cases, the surprising detail was actually exactly what should have happened, according to the official rules. So let’s talk about what’s going to happen when you finally get in there to take the test.

When you arrive

There will be some kind of outer waiting area, followed by an inner office containing the biometric equipment and finally the inner sanctum: the testing room.

When you first arrive, you’ll be asked to read (and digitally sign) a bunch of legalese. Basically, you’ll promise not to share anything that you see with anyone else and you affirm that you’re only taking the test for the purposes of applying to business school. You have to sign this document or you won’t be allowed to take the test.

You’ll also be asked for your ID. Check the guidelines to determine what kind of ID you must bring. Further, when you’re registering for the test, make sure that the name and birthdate you enter into the registration system match exactly what’s written on the piece of ID you’ll use to enter the test center.

But wait! You’re not done with security yet. They’ll take a digital photo of you. You’ll also have the veins in your palm digitally scanned”turns out our palm veins are even more unique than fingerprints. Who knew?

Finally, before you enter the inner sanctum, you’ll be asked to place all of your belongings (except for your ID) into a locker to which you will have the key. Everything goes in this locker: your wallet or purse, your money, your mobile phone, your keys, everything. Do not bring any study notes into the test center with you; your test will be cancelled immediately even if you simply leave these in your locker! Don’t use any electronic devices at any time”not your phone, not your iPod, nothing. Do not write anything down during the breaks, even if you’re just writing down your grocery list. Don’t give them any reason to think that you might be cheating.

Starting the test

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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

Last time, we took a look at the Meteor Stream passage from the free set of questions that comes with GMATPrep (not from the practice CATs). Click the link in the previous sentence and open up that passage in a separate window (I’m not going to show it here because it’s so long!).

Ready for the question? Give yourself about 1.5 to 2 minutes to answer.

The Question

The passage suggests that which of the following is a prediction concerning meteor streams that can be derived from both the conventional theories mentioned in the highlighted text and the new computer derived theory?

[Note: when this question is given during the test, the phrase Conventional theories is also suddenly highlighted in yellow in the passage. This text appears at the start of the second-to-last sentence of the first paragraph.]

(A) Dust particles in a meteor stream will usually be distributed evenly throughout any cross section of the stream.

(B) The orbits of most meteor streams should cross the orbit of the Earth at some point and give rise to a meteor shower.

(C) Over time the distribution of dust in a meteor stream will usually become denser at the outside edges of the stream than at the center.

(D) Meteor showers caused by older meteor streams should be, on average, longer in duration than those caused by very young meteor streams.

(E) The individual dust particles in older meteor streams should be, on average, smaller than those that compose younger meteor streams.

Solution

This is a detail question, so we’re going to use our notes and any clues in the question stem to know where to look. The question stem gives us one huge clue: it actually highlights a portion of a sentence in the first paragraph.

Next, the question says the passage suggests, so this is an inference question. Finally, the question is asking for a prediction that can be drawn from both the conventional theories and the new computer theory”in other words, where do these two theories agree?

Take a look at your notes. Mine are below, but everyone will have somewhat different notes.
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Even though the NCAA tournament finished up earlier this month, for the next ten months I will be thinking about college basketball whenever I see the first several powers of two. No matter what type of GMAT question you are dealing with, our minds are better able to work through topics that we are already familiar with. Probability problems make me think of gambling, weakening a GMAT argument becomes shooting down an argument from that crazy relative you only see at Thanksgiving, and anything dealing with the number 64 comes down to rounds in a basketball tournament. Here’s a few tricks on the GMAT where knowing your powers of two can save you some time and brainpower.

1.  64 = 2^6

Know how to translate larger numbers into their smaller factors

Since 1985, every team that has won the NCAA tournament has had to win six games. By multiplying two times itself, you can expand to each round of the NCAA tournament- 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. And because these numbers are all small and have a single prime factor, they commonly end up on the GMAT. Because of this, you should be able to recognize them and quickly put each one into its base of two: 2 = 2^1, 4 = 2^2, etc. Same for the powers of three- 3, 9, 27, 81. The number 81 is far more likely to show up on your GMAT than 83, because 81 is a power of 3 that can be broken down into small prime factors. Without a calculator, numbers that are easy to break down show up 2 x 5 times more often than they do in the real world.

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

I think that Critical Reasoning is my favorite part of the exam because it is the purest of the pure.  I’ve written before that the GMAT is an aptitude test rather than a knowledge test.  On the simplest level, in both the quant and the verbal, the exam tests a logic system: be specific, don’t assume, and don’t rationalize.  Nowhere is this more true than in Critical Reasoning—there is no mathematical foundation work nor are there grammar rules.  As Gertrude Stein used to say, There is no there, there.  Of course, she was talking about Oakland. . .fill in your own joke.  When I’m being* mean to students, I say, If you know what all the words mean, you should get them all right.

But students don’t get them all right.  Even those who know what all the words mean.  Why is that?  Because people think.  They assume, they rationalize, and they inject opinions.  Why is this bad?  Because it’s a game.  Critical Reasoning doesn’t take place in reality.  Here’s an analogy I thought up all by myself, so it isn’t in the Strategy Guide: Critical Reasoning bears the same relationship to reality that Monopoly does.  When you play Monopoly, you don’t think about how reasonable free parking or building hotels is, you exploit the rules.  It’s the same thing.  A lot of OG arguments involve medical issues, but you hardly ever care whether people live or die because that’s usually not the conclusion.   Play the game.

As a by the way, if students struggle with the CR, it’s often half of their trouble in the quant.  Folks are not specific; they read the question or the given incorrectly.  And they don’t recognize the types and patterns.  In other words, they don’t play that game.  However, folks fail to notice these mistakes because they are too consumed with worry about their math foundations.  Conversely, engineers with strong foundations also suffer here, especially in the DS because they try to use brute mathematical force instead of playing the game.  It is a behavioral problem.  People don’t do; they think.  Don’t think—much like in life, it only gets you into trouble.
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I just read a really fascinating post on the New York Times’ Well blog. We’ve known for a long time that exercise has a whole host of good benefits, including benefits associated with memory. Two recent studies have delved even deeper into how this works.

How does exercise help memory?

In the blog post, New York Times journalist Gretchen Reynolds details the two new studies “ one conducted on humans and the other conducted on rats.

In the human study, elderly women who already had some mild cognitive impairment were split into three groups. One group lifted weights, the second group engaged in moderate aerobic exercise, and the third group did yoga-like activities.

The participants were tested at the beginning and end of the 6-month exercise period and the results were striking. First, bear in mind that, in general, we would expect elderly people who are already experiencing mental decline to continue down that path over time. Indeed, after 6 months, the yoga group (our control group) showed a mild decline in several aspects of verbal memory.

The weight-training and aerobic groups, by contrast, actually improved their performance on several tests (remember, this was 6 months later!). In particular, these groups were not losing as much of their older memories and they even became faster at some spatial memory tests involving memorizing the location of three items. In other words, the women were both better at making new memories and better at remembering / retrieving old ones!

Another group of researchers conducted a similar study, only this time rats were getting some cardio in or lifting weights. (The rats ran on wheels for the cardio exercise and, get this, for the weight lifting, the researchers tied little weights to the rats tails and had them climb tiny ladders!)

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Need to convert your Official Guide 12 problems to OG13 problems? Or visa versa? Check out our hand-dandy conversion guide for Quant problems, below. You can find our conversion guide for Quant problems here.

Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week. All times are local unless otherwise specified.

4/8/13– San Francisco, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

4/8/13– Online- Assessing Your MBA Profile presented by mbaMission– 12:00PM- 1:30PM

4/8/13– Santa Monica– Free Trial Class- 6:30PM-9:30AM

4/8/13– Online– Free Trial Class- 8:00PM- 11:00PM (EDT)

4/9/13– Salt Lake City, UT- Free Trial Class– 6:30PM-9:30PM

4/9/13– Chicago, IL – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

4/9/13– San Diego, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

4/10/13– Phoenix, AZ – Free Trial Class- 6:30PM- 9:30PM

4/10/13– Bellaire, TX – Free Trial Class- 6:30PM- 9:30PM

4/10/13– Ann Arbor, MI – Free Trial Class- 6:30PM- 9:30PM
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Catch up on some business school news and tips with a few of this week’s top stories:

6 Great Jobs for MBA Grads (U.S. News Education)

Trying to decide what to do after you’ve been accepted into an MBA program? Here are a few outstanding careers that may be a good fit.

Mistakes to Avoid During the MBA Admissions Process (Graduate Guide)

It’s important for prospective business students to be aware of the common admissions mistakes. Here is some helpful advice to avoid application pitfalls.

An Interview with Stanford Dean Garth Saloner (Poets and Quants)

The dean of the most expensive MBA program in the world talks about why business school is worth every penny.
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