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 was hanging out with a friend of mine the other day. She is a graduate student, and she asked me a question that she had come across during her research: Read more

As we discussed in the first half of this series, Building Your Game Plan, during the last 7 to 14 days before you take the real test, your entire study focus changes. In this article, we’re going to discuss the second half of this process: how to review. (If you haven’t already read the first half, do so; then come back here and continue with the second part.)

What is a Game Plan?

The first half of the article, found at the link above, discusses how to build and implement your Game Plan. At the same time, you’re also going to be reviewing, so let’s talk about that!

What to Review

Part of the game planning process is determining your strengths and weaknesses (which is why I recommended that you read the Building Your Game Plan article first). You’ll then need to consider your list of strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of how frequently those topics or question types tend to be found on the real exam. Struggling with probabilities or evaluate the conclusion Critical Reasoning questions? Neither type is that common and you have just two weeks left; drop them from your list. Struggling with exponential or quadratic equations or inference Reading Comprehension questions? Those are much more common, so they need to be on the review list.

If you’re not sure how frequently a particular type of content or question appears on the exam, look on the forums. (I’m not providing a list in this article because these frequencies can change over time; I don’t want people reading this in future to be misled when things do change.)

How to Review

How you review is going to vary somewhat depending upon whether you’re reviewing a strength or a weakness. You do NOT want to do the same kind of review for everything, but you DO want to review both strengths and weaknesses. Below, I will discuss easier-for-you and harder-for-you questions, since we don’t actually know any difficulty levels when taking the test. Easier-for-you means that you find the question fairly straightforward and you expect to answer it correctly without needing extra time, though you may sometimes make a careless mistake. Harder-for-you means that this question is more of a struggle, though you still will answer some of these correctly.

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Are you aware that, during the last 7 to 14 days before you take the real test, your entire study focus changes? This is crucially important “ I cannot count the number of people who don’t realize what they need to do leading up to Real Test Day and so miss the chance to maximize their scores.

There are two levels to this discussion: (1) building a game plan and (2) reviewing. This post will cover the first topic and my next post will cover the second one.

Throughout both articles, I’m going to discuss the ideal scenario: the one in which you have a full 2 weeks to conduct your review. This review can be compressed into a 7 to 10 day period, if needed “ if so, just note that you are going to take only one practice test, not two, and you of course won’t be able to do as much review because you won’t have as much time.

Warning: please do not literally compress everything discussed into 7 days instead of 14. It’s a terrible idea to take the last week off of work and try to study for 6 to 8 hours a day. You’ll just burn yourself out.

Focus Shift

In the last two weeks before your test, you’re going to make a major focus shift. You’re going to stop trying to learn a bunch of new things in order to improve your score and instead acknowledge that your skills are what they are. They’re not going to change an enormous amount in the last two weeks; you can tweak some things, but now is not the time to change major strategies across an entire question type. Further, it would be a mistake to spend your last two weeks entirely focused on your weaknesses; if you do that, then you won’t be prepared to excel on your strengths.

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Most students who struggle with Reading Comprehension share a common issue: they focus equally on all words in the passage. Some words, however, are not as important as others, and in order to improve our comprehension we must first learn to identify which words we should focus our energy on. You may have noticed that the title of this blog post is difficult to follow; words such as unlike and not are important structural words, since they describe a 180 degree change in meaning. If we speed through the title we are likely to miss something important, and our comprehension level will drop! Instead, let’s come to a complete stop and hold off on the rest of the post until we have milked those structural words for all they’re worth.

The title first makes a comparison (actually an anti-comparison) between words and people, and then separately says that words are not all born equal (for a moment we can ignore the modifier trapped between the commas).

If words are not all born equal, and words are unlike people, one could infer that all people are born equal. Did you get that from the title when you first read it? If you didn’t, you read it too quickly

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After seeing quite a few Integrated Reasoning problems floating around out there, I’ve found that one of the toughest situations to deal with is when instead of providing a single solution, the GMAT constructs a world with multiple possible solutions and then asks you to pick something that works within those parameters. Let me show you an example:

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x, y and z are positive integers. The sum of x and y is 40. The positive difference between y and z is 20.

In the table below, identify values for x and z that are together consistent with the information. Make only one selection in each column.

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Found the answer yet? If not, I think I might know why: You’re trying to solve for y. The problem is, y could be almost any integer from 1 to 39, as long as you pick values for x and z that work. You could figure out x and z for every single value of y, but that’s a very time-consuming strategy! Without the answer choices, there are more than 50 different solutions to this problem. So what is a better strategy than trying to solve for y?

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This is the latest in a series of How To Analyze articles that began with the general How To Analyze A Practice Problem article (click on the link to read the original article). This week, we’re going to analyze a specific IR question from the Graph prompt category.

Let’s try out the question: here it is. Just in case that link changes, you can also click on this link to go to the mba.com website, and then, about halfway down the page, click on the Graphics Interpretation link. We’re going to try the 2nd of the 4 questions. If you’re going for an average IR score, give yourself 2.5 minutes; if you’re going for a really good score, give yourself between 1.5 and 2 minutes.

Note: when you are done, do NOT click the next button. Just leave it up on the screen and come back here.

First, read the complete solution to the problem. In that article, I discussed how I was able to answer one of the questions correctly even though I wasn’t 100% confident that I understood part of the description of the graph. I also talked about an important lesson I learned regarding how to read the questions.

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September is the greatest month of the year. At some point in the not-so-distant future, my AC-unit will be able to finally power off after five straight months of keeping me inside, away from the Texas heat and the West Nile carrying mosquitos that the heat brought with it. But more importantly, September means that football is finally back. So with that in mind, here’s four lessons from the college football season for those of you who need help rationalizing your Saturday afternoon absence from your GMAT study place.

1)  Schedule the Cupcake Sections Early

Oregon hasn’t been spending the last three months preparing to face Arkansas State. And when September 1 rolls around, Oregon would prefer to pull its starters sometime early in the second half. A loss to an early season opponents would definitely hurt their BCS chances, but if the Ducks play half-decent football at the start of the season, they can focus on playing their best once Pac-12 teams start traveling to Eugene in late September.

For you, walking away from the test with a 2 on your AWA or IR section could be a bad thing when it comes time to apply to business school. But running up the score on your AWA won’t help your 200-800 score and you don’t want to exhaust your brain during the first hour of your test. But if you’ve thoroughly prepared for the quant and verbal sections of the test, and have watched some tape (such as our IR recordings or AWA labs) on what you need to do for the two warmup sections, you’ll do just fine early and can focus on playing your best once the quant section shows up on your screen.

2) Focus on One Question at a Time

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Invariably when I ask a student what about their strengths and weaknesses related to the GMAT, his list focuses on topics or question types.

• I struggle with the quant section.
• Sentence correction is my best verbal question type.
• I hate data sufficiency.
• I’m good at rate problems, but I can’t figure out probability.
• Etc.

Now, the ability to generate this sort of inventory is important. You should generally devote more study time to those topics and question types where you are weaker. But along with this topic-based inventory, other aspects of your personality and approach will impact your GMAT experience. Understanding these underlying tendencies in yourself can be invaluable to improving your GMAT performance.

In each of the four cases below consider which statement sounds more like you.

1) To solve a challenging problem
A. Give me a formula. Give me an algorithm. As long as I know an approach I can crank through the math and get the problem done.
B. I like the chance to get creative. Drawing diagrams and recognizing patterns is what I do best.

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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.

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