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.

The problem we’re going to talk about today is a work of art. (Yes, I’m a geek. Did you not know that already? )

But I’m serious: it’s a thing of beauty. It looks super easy. It’s not—there are traps all over the place. The GMAT test writers have a genius for tying us into knots! 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.

It’s become a bit of a running joke in my classes that I say, “The GMAT is a game of [a thing].” Every time I say it, I make it sound like I’ve revealed the hidden key to GMAT mastery: 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.

In the previous three installments of this series, I summarized some of the big messages and discussed some of the interesting problems I spotted in the GMAT Official Guide 2018. (If you’d like, you can start with the first installment and work your way back here.)

Today, I’ve got lists for you—the problems that are new to the GMAT Official Guide 2018 (by chapter and problem number). 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.

The new GMAT Official Guide 2018 books have landed and I’ve got the scoop for you! (If you’d like, you can start with the first installment of this article series.) Today’s post focuses on Data Sufficiency. 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.

Do you remember that feeling of being in math class and the teacher asks a question that you really should know, but you don’t, and then you hear your name called to answer the question? Maybe your heart starts racing, your mind blanks even more, and in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, you just start talking, desperately hoping you land somewhere close to the answer.

As a high school teacher, I saw this all the time from the teacher side. And I would smile and thank the student for trying, but usually while thinking “just go ahead and admit that you don’t know!” 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.

GMAT Data Sufficiency questions can seem a little mysterious. (If you’re just getting started, or if you need a refresher, here’s a great article on the basics of Data Sufficiency.) These problems are more like logic puzzles than math questions. That makes Data Sufficiency a good opportunity for those of us who want to score well on Quant, but don’t like doing math! However, you might have some questions about Data Sufficiency as you start to understand the problem type a little better. Here’s one of them: why do we categorize Data Sufficiency questions into “yes/no” and “value”? 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.

Here’s a phrase that might bring back some memories from middle school math class: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, or PEMDAS. (If you went to school outside of the U.S., you may have learned the acronym BEDMAS or BODMAS, instead.) You use this phrase to decide what order to do mathematical operations in: Parentheses first (from inside to outside), then Exponents, then Multiplication and Division (left to right), then Addition and Subtraction (also left to right).

PEMDAS isn’t terribly fancy stuff. It’s just a useful little tool that helps us communicate clearly—it’s what tells us, for instance, that “2x(3+4)” means something different from “2×3 + 4.” But if there’s one thing the GMAT loves, it’s making things look more complicated than they really are. 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.

As any good GMAT student knows, you can’t possibly answer every question correctly. In fact, if you get the first couple questions right, you will rapidly get into territory where most people can hardly figure out what the questions mean. And if you take extra time to dig into those questions and try to figure them out, it bites you in a big way when you run out of time toward the end. So we quickly learn that if you can’t figure out a good plan to solve a problem, you need to go ahead and take an educated guess.

Sounds great, but it’s not actually that simple, is it? 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.

That’s a good question! Do you really need to solve all the GMAT problems in the Official Guide to the GMAT in order to score a 700? What about the other side of the issue: is it possible that there aren’t enough problems in the Official Guide? How many GMAT problems should you solve before taking the official GMAT?  

Before I share my answer, let’s get some facts on the table. 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.

Here’s one of the most common math questions my students ask: “What’s up with negative numbers and square roots on the GMAT?” Luckily, the answer doesn’t involve a lot of complex rules. In this quick article, I’ll lay out the issues surrounding square roots and negative numbers, and share everything you need to know to handle them confidently.

If you’ve been studying for a while, or if you’ve worked your way through Foundations of Math, you probably know that there’s a strange interaction between negative numbers and exponents. If you square a negative number, the result is positive. If you square a positive number, the result is also positive. Squaring a number makes the negative sign ‘go away.’ This is where the problem with square roots comes in.

Suppose you’re looking at an equation that looks like this: Read more