I’ve been speaking with a lot of students in this position recently “ welcome to December. Most second round deadlines are rapidly approaching and some students, unfortunately, don’t yet have the score they want in order to apply. What to do?

What you CAN’T do

There are some things you can do “ but we can’t expect miracles either. If you tell me that your test is in less than 2 weeks and you need to improve your score by 100 or more points, I’m going to (gently) tell you that such a goal is unrealistic. I’m not going to discourage you from going for it (it doesn’t hurt to try), but you should also start examining your other options are. These could include accepting your lower score, changing the schools to which you apply, or postponing your candidacy to a later round or a later year. Some people, thinking through this, actually end up deciding that they’d rather wait a year anyway and take their time with the whole application process.
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Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week. There are only a few, due to the holiday. All times listed are local unless otherwise specified. Happy Thanksgiving!

11/19/12 – London, England – Free Trial Class – 7:00-10:00 PM

11/19/12 – New York (Wall Street), NY – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

11/19/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 9:00 PM – 12:00 AM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Image via xkcd.com

Over the past several days, Nate Silver has gone from baseball and political forecasting guru to full-blown media darling. Since correctly forecasting the winning presidential candidate in 49 and 50 states in the last two elections, Silver has been seen everywhere from NBC to Comedy Central. All of this culminated Wednesday when Silver won the ultimate modern-day achievement: trending Twitter topic. And while #DrunkNateSilver has already predicted the next two presidential elections and the ending to Star Wars 7, his sober counterpart has lessons that we can apply to our GMAT studying.

The PECOTA System- Finding historical similarities

Nate Silver first became famous outside of his consulting job when he developed PECOTA, which sought to predict the statistics and career arc of major league baseball players, as well as projected team win totals. PECOTA wasn’t the first projection system for baseball, but it was the first to use other players’ previous performances instead of that player’s trends. By comparing each player with 20,000+ player’s seasons since World War II, Silver was able to make a probabilistic distribution for individual players and their teams.
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Remember those times when you were sure you got the answer right, only to find out that you got it wrong? For a moment, you even think that there must be a mistake in the answer key. Then, you take a look at the problem again, you check your work, and you say, I can’t believe I did that! You knew exactly how to do this problem and you should have gotten it right, but you made a careless mistake.

What’s a Careless Error?

By definition, a careless mistake occurs when we did actually know all of the necessary info and we did actually possess all of the necessary skills, but we made a mistake anyway. We all make careless mistakes (yes, even the experts!); over 3.5 hours, it’s not reasonable to assume that we can completely avoid making careless mistakes. Our goal is to learn how to minimize careless mistakes as much as possible.

How Can We Minimize Careless Errors?

Isn’t the whole point of a careless error that we don’t know when we’re going to make them? They just happen randomly and we can’t control that!
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I had a student write me an e-mail earlier this year complaining about a lack of improvement on his last few practice tests. On three consecutive tests, he scored a 580, 560, & 580. Frustrating for him. But when I looked at the dates of those tests, I wasn’t surprised by his lack of improvement” he had taken the tests on three consecutive days. If students were able to improve by doing as many test questions as they could possibly find, then every student would do better on the verbal section than on the quant section because he or she has already spent  two and a half hours studying before the verbal section begins.

Tests are not good learning tools. Tests are good for assessing what you would likely score on a real GMAT if you took the test with similar problem solving abilities and timing strategies.

This doesn’t mean that tests aren’t important for improving your GMAT score. I’d argue that they are the single most important tool that everyone (yes, everyone) can use to (eventually) improve his or her GMAT score. But think back to the last practice GMAT that you took: by the time that you finished a two and a half hour test that included 78 quant and verbal questions, how many questions did you remember? Probably not a lot.

When that student scored a 580 on his first practice test, he wasn’t satisfied with his score, but he didn’t do anything differently the next time he sat down and took another test. If insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results, then the GMAT was making this student insane. So I pointed out two areas for improvement that every student can look for after finishing a practice test: timing and weaknesses. Let’s take a look at one such practice test to see how you might be able to improve your overall GMAT score:
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Recently, a new student asked me what he could do to get the most out of our class and his study time over the next several months. He’s not the first person to ask me this, but when I was responding to him, I realized that I really needed to write this down and share it with all of you. Many of you have heard me say these things in various forms in articles, blog posts, or forum responses over the years—but here they are in one place.

So, without further ado, the 2 biggest mistakes that people make when studying for the GMAT:

#1 Doing instead of Analyzing

Most people try to study for the GMAT in the same way they studied for school—and, for most people, that isn’t going to lead to a 700+. The GMAT is not a math test or a grammar test—really, it isn’t! It’s a reasoning test—and I’m not just referring to critical reasoning. The GMAT is really a test of how we think. If that’s not your primary focus when studying, you won’t get the best score you could get.
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Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week.

10/8/12 – Boston, MA – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

10/8/12 – Santa Clara, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

10/9/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 8:00-11:00 PM

10/10/12 – Chicago, IL – Free Trial Class –  6:30-9:30 PM

10/11/12 – Online – Thursdays with Ron GMAT Study Hall – 7:00-8:30 PM

10/13/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 2:00 – 5:00 PM

10/14/12 – Boston, MA – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

10/14/12 – Santa Monica, CA – Free Trial Class – 5:30-8:30 PM

10/14/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 7:00 – 10:00 AM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

How do you feel when you see a sentence correction with a very substantial underlined section? Overwhelmed, anxious, perhaps even a little bit angry.  Maybe at this point you move to freak out mode thinking I am never going to complete this problem in 1 minute and 15 seconds (recommended average time for sentence correction problems).  I have found that freaking out is never the optimal approach to any GMAT questions, so let’s identify some alternate approaches we can use to our advantage when facing a sentence correction problem with a lot underlined.

1) Lots underlined usually means lots of mistakes.  When a large portion is underlined, there are almost always several mistakes in the sentence, and thus several different ways to get to the answer.  Don’t feel like you have to comprehend everything that is going on in the sentence right away, but rather start with the grammatical principle with which you are most comfortable.  I actually dislike problems with only a few words underlined because these problems often involve only a single issue “ and if I don’t know that particular rule I am in trouble.

2) Use your initial read of the sentence as a jumping off point. Often you may spot an error in the initial sentence.  Instead of trying to completely scan all the answer choices, immediately go to this particular area in each answer choice to see if the problem still exists and eliminate accordingly.
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Here’s a fairly straightforward GMATPrep question that I’ve seen many-a-student answer incorrectly. See if you can answer the question without writing anything down:

Of the 3,600 employees of Company X, 1/3 are clerical. If the clerical staff were to be reduced by 1/3, what percent of the total number of the remaining employees would then be clerical?

 

A)  25%

B)  22.2%

C) 20%

D) 12.5%

E)  11.1%

Classic GMAT question. Straightforward. Easy to understand. Simple to equate” 1/3 of 3,600 is 1,200 and 1/3 of that is 400. So we’d only have 800 remaining clerical staff and 800/3600 = 2/9, answer B. And like so(oooooooo) many other GMAT questions, we’d have answered incorrectly.

If have some paper in front of you, try to solve the question again by writing down each step along the way. Maybe even include what each of those numbers that you write down mean in the context of the question. Don’t cheat- see if you answer the question differently when you’re forced to write down more than just a simple computation or two.

…

Here’s what I wrote down first on my scrap paper:
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I’ve been speaking with a lot of students recently who are really struggling with translation problems “ even when they can figure out how to translate, they end up taking way too much time on the problem.

So let’s try this GMATPrep problem; set your timer for 2 minutes and GO!

If Bob produces 36 or fewer items in a week, he is paid x dollars per item. If Bob produces more than 36 items in a week, he is paid x dollars per item for the first 36 items and [latex]1frac{1}{2}[/latex] times that amount for each additional item. How many items did Bob produce last week?

(1) Last week Bob was paid a total of $480 for the items that he produced that week.

(2) This week Bob produced 2 more items than last week and was paid a total of $510 for the items that he produced this week.

Ugh. Okay, obviously we’re going to have to translate, because we’ve got a story going on here. It also looks like there’s going to be some algebra involved. Let’s dig in.

I’m now Bob. (Put yourself in the story; that’ll make things a little bit easier.) I can make either 36 or fewer items in one week or more than 36 items. How am I going to get paid? For the first scenario, I can figure out my pay by multiplying the number of items by x. If I make exactly 36 items, I’ll get paid 36x. If I make 33 items, I’ll get paid 33x. Hmm. I guess I should assign a variable for the number of items I make; let’s call that N.

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