How To Make The Best Memories: Tips To Optimize Your Memory Abilities
How much did you study for the GMAT this past week-end? For how many hours? Over how many sittings? What did you study and how did you study it?
Most importantly: how many breaks did you take and how long were they?
Time Magazine just published a fascinating little article: To Boost Memory, Shut Your Eyes and Relax. Go take a look at it. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. : )
Has this happened to you? You have ambitious plans to study a ton of things this week-end. You get tired, but you’re determined to push through, so you keep studying. You begin to get a bit anxious because you feel you aren’t learning well (and you’re not!), so you study even more. You get even more tired, and that makes it even harder to learn. By the end of the week-end, you’re exhausted, frustrated, and demoralized.
You may have already heard me say this (many times on various forums or in blog posts!), but I’m saying it again because it’s so important: your brain makes better memories when it’s not tired.
How to Analyze a GMAT Integrated Reasoning Table Question
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 Table prompt category. The GMATPrep problem we’re using this week is one that we’ve already discussed how to solve in a previous article; click here to read that article and try the problem first.
After trying the problem, checking the answer, and reading and understanding the solution (which you can do via the original article, linked above), I try to answer these questions:
1. Did I know WHAT they were trying to test?
– Was I able to CATEGORIZE this question by topic and subtopic? By process / technique? If I had to look something up in my books, would I know exactly where to go?
4 Common Types of Data Sufficiency Traps
If the GMAT were a sport, it would definitely be baseball, and not just because it’s three and a half hours long. In baseball, you might dominate the minor league by hitting fastballs, but once you reach the show you’ll have to hit some change-ups and curveballs too. Not only is the GMAT going to throw you some hard problems, but once you start to do well, the GMAT will throw you something different. That’s why learning the types of trap answers can help you from falling for them. Here’s four types of curveballs that you want to be mindful of on test day.
If you test it, they will come.
Are You Taking Too Many Practice GMATs?
My GMAT students are often surprised when I advise them not to take a practice test.
I don’t advise this for every student on every occasion; there are some legitimate uses for practice tests. In general though, I find that my students take too many practice tests at the expense of other more beneficial forms of study for a given circumstance.
Think of the GMAT like a Mozart sonata. Let’s say you are a pianist, and you want to learn the sonata. Would you begin by playing the whole piece from start to finish? No, instead you would work in small sections. You would identify the sections that are easy, and you would work on those sections just enough to maintain your ability. Mainly, you would be concerned with the difficult sections of the piece, which you would practice slowly and intently. Not until you had mastered those sections would you move on.
After you have put in all that practice time, you want to make sure that you can maintain your ability within the context of the larger piece. That’s when you want to play the whole piece: when you want to check to see whether your prior work is ingrained or whether you forget it when you are distracted by the other demands of the piece.
GMAT Lessons from Detective Shows
When not providing insight into the fascinating world of the GMAT, I enjoy watching detective shows on television. In many episodes, one of the detectives must delve into the mind of the perpetrator “ actually try to think as the perpetrator does. In so doing, the seemingly random clues come together (often via a slow motion or black and white flashback scene) leading to an insight that breaks the case.
I am going to advocate taking on this television detective mentality in approaching GMAT problems. Perhaps there is a further parallel as the mind of the GMAT question writer may seem to be just as scary a place as the mind of a criminal. But the ability to think like a GMAT test writer can provide multiple benefits including enabling you to get more questions right and allowing you to have more confidence in your answers.
So let’s try think about three lessons we can take from our favorite crime dramas and apply to the GMAT.
The Most Important GMAT Question I Ever Studied
Every Manhattan instructor is probably able to fondly recall the Official Guide book that they used to ace their GMAT. Or at least that’s what I would have used to say. Now I know that every Manhattan instructor is probably able to fondly recall the Official Guide book that he or she used to ace his or her GMAT. For me it was the school bus-yellow 11th edition that included the most important question I ever studied. If you have the 12th edition of the Official Guide, it’s question #124. The answer choices on this question began with the following split:
sloths hang from trees…
vs
the sloth hangs from trees…
Winning Ugly on the GMAT
[Editor’s Note: This is the first post by Manhattan GMAT Instructor Ryan Jacobs! Welcome him in the comments.]
Have you ever heard of a guy named Brad Gilbert?
Brad Gilbert was a professional tennis player in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. He was not particularly skilled or highly ranked. Tennis champion Andre Agassi says, Every shot Brad hit, you were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ His shots aren’t pretty. The first time we played, I was convinced the guy couldn’t play tennis.” But Gilbert was known for his surprising victories over some of the best tennis players in the world, most notably John McEnroe. When Gilbert retired from tennis, he became Agassi’s coach and helped Agassi beat superstar talents such as Pete Sampras and Patrick Rafter. The way Gilbert won despite having less raw physical capability than his opponent, and the way he taught Agassi to do the same, is important to understand if you’re a tennis player.
It’s also important to understand if you’re a GMAT student.
Things to Do to Help Your Overall Test-Taking Skills
You don’t have to pore over a Strategy Guide in order to prepare for the GMAT. Here are some things you can do in “normal” life to improve your overall test-taking skills.
- Work out your brain. Learn to do Sudoku, simple crossword puzzles, or other brain-teasers (iPod applications, even). Do some brain exercise every day, especially in the morning. Choose word puzzles and logic games over action.
- Work out–period. Study after study has shown that regular exercise, especially aerobic, has a profound effect on your cognitive performance. See Brain Rules by John Medina for more about this.
- Beef up your analytical and logical skills. Read a good book about logical thinking (Being Logical by D.Q. McIreny).
- Buy a book. Read it!
More about this: Other than intensive study and practice of test-specific strategies, the best way to improve your overall score on standardized tests is to read more for fun. If you don’t read every day, start with something light and entertaining”Harry Potter, romance novels, science fiction, Tom Clancy, or anything interesting to you. Keep the book with you and read whenever you have a spare 5 minutes. Eventually, move on to good contemporary non-fiction, which is closer to what you’ll see on the test itself.
Recognizing Relative Numbers On The GMAT
Given the statement, the ratio of men to women in the room is 3 to 5, how many men are in the room?
You probably recognize pretty quickly that it is not possible to answer the question above. Just given a ratio, it is not possible to identify the actual number of men in the room. At this point we know the number of men in the room must be a multiple of 3, but the actual number could be 3 or 3,000 (although I am not sure I have been in a room that large).
Along with ratios in their traditional form (3 to 5 or 3:5), there are other types of numbers that are ratios, slightly disguised
a) Fractions: The container is 2/3 full.
This statement is expressing that there are 2 full parts for every 3 total parts of the container (a ratio of 2 to 3).
b) Percentages: 33% of company employees have Master’s degrees.
This statement is expressing for every 33 employees with Master’s degrees there are 100 total employees (a ratio of 33 to 100).
c) Percentage or fractional increase: The company’s profits increased 25% (or ¼) from 2010 to 2011.
Manhattan Prep’s Pre-MBA Boot Camps: Getting Ready for the Intensity that is Business School
Last year, Chris Ryan, our GMAT instructor and Vice President of Academics, realized that helping our students through the GMAT just wasn’t enough. When I had students come up to me and tell me their GMAT score, I was thrilled, said Chris, but I wanted to help them with their next step and set them up for success in business school.
Although Chris considers the two years he spent at Duke Fuqua to be some of the most incredible of his life, the beginning was nothing short of overwhelming. Considered to have a non-traditional b-school background (pretty much anything besides investment banking and consulting!), Chris was immediately surrounded by terms like NPV, puts and calls, and game theory. In thinking back, Chris knew that, had he had a leg up when he had arrived, he would felt more comfortable in business school.