I recently tutored a student “ let’s call her Jane “ who came to me two weeks before her test. Here’s the discussion we had:

Jane: Right now, I’m doing well on the verbal section, consistently scoring in the 80^th to 90^th percentile on my practice tests. However, my math isn’t as good “ the highest I’ve scored is 48^th percentile. I got a 630 on my most recent practice test, but I’d really like to score a 720. My GMAT date is two weeks from today.

Ryan: Why a 720?

Jane: I don’t know, I just heard that’s what you need to get into a top school.

Ryan: Well, let’s assume that you score in the 85^th percentile on the verbal section, an average performance for you. To get a 720, you’d need to hit the 90^th percentile on the quant section. Did you know that?

Jane: OH MY GOD NO! WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?

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

When I was a little boy, I didn’t want to be a fireman when I grew up.  I wanted to be a riverboat gambler.  Unfortunately, I didn’t because of a bad upbringing—utility stocks were too risky for my father. . .I do play poker and blackjack some though.  And I don’t try to fill inside straights.  On the other hand, I don’t play baccarat because I don’t understand the rules well enough.  The same principles apply to the GMAT.  The first part of this series—-Heart of Darkness—A Holistic Guide to GMAT Scoring —- highlights why test takers don’t score as well as they should because they don’t understand the rules of the game and thus often try to fill inside straights.  And, like a Greek tragedy, that post ends by lamenting how even test takers who know how to play baccarat are corrupted by the siren song of the ticking clock.  Yes, the clock.

Folks fail to understand that all their good work will be undone if they do not finish the sections in good order.  Leaving the last five blank will lower your score by as much as sixty points.  Roughly speaking, doing so in both sections will magically turn a 660 into a 550.  And you must not only finish, but also finish in good order.  If you blind guess the last five in each section, with average karma, your score will still drop sixty points.   Run the assessment reports on your practice exams—if your score is lower than the average difficulty of the questions that you missed, you have timing problems, even if you are finishing the sections.

How can you avoid this penalty?  Well, the easiest way is to have an angel on your shoulder and always guess right.  However, if you can’t count on that angel full time, you have to control the clock. In the first half of a section, the CAT computer is roughly approximating your ability level.  Thus, what is unforgiveable there is missing questions that you know how to do.  But test takers misunderstand—that is NOT the same as getting them ALL right.  If I take a GMAT, I’ll get ten of the first fifteen quants correct.  Maybe eleven.  Or maybe nine.  It doesn’t matter.  For me, after about the fourth one, they are all 800 level questions and, as part one discussed, you only need to be about 50% accurate at the score level that you want.  Trying to get them all right is a trap.  First off, as I implied a second ago, even if you are scoring 790, the computer will give you problems that you don’t know how to do.  So it’s hopeless on the face of it.  Equally importantly, attempting to do so uses up too much time.  The Catch-22 here is that you must answer those that you know correctly without disproportionally using the time.  Or you’ll turn your 660 into a 550.  What is the solution to this dialectic?  The envelope, please. . .

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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

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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Students ask this all the time “ they’ve heard that the scoring penalizes us for getting a lot of questions wrong in a row.

That’s true, to some extent “ there is something of a penalty built in if we get 4+ questions wrong in a row. The test writers don’t want us to spend, for example, 65 minutes doing the first 2/3 of the questions really carefully (in hopes of boosting our score very high) and then blowing the remaining questions. They prioritize steady performance over the length of the entire test, so they’ve built safeguards into the algorithm to ensure that we can’t game the test, essentially.

So how do I avoid getting a bunch of questions wrong in a row?

Here’s the thing. You can’t avoid that “ not in the way that you mean.

The only real way to avoid getting a bunch of questions wrong in a row is to make sure you don’t mess up your timing so badly that you get other questions wrong just because you’re rushing.

But that’s not what people mean when they ask me about this. Instead, they mean something like, I’m pretty sure I got the last two wrong “ I just outright guessed on the last one. Now, how do I make sure I get the next one right?

You can’t. You can never make sure that you get any particular question right. If you could well, then you wouldn’t need any help, right? : ) Nobody on the planet, not even the best test takers, can guarantee that they’re going to answer any particular question correctly.

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When was the last time you thought that? For me, it was sometime within the past week. I knew that this problem was not beyond my reach! Meanwhile, the clock was ticking away and all I could focus on was the fact that I couldn’t remember something that I should have been able to remember.

That horrible, sinking feeling is universal: we’ve all felt it before and—unfortunately—we’re all going to feel it again. How can we deal with this? 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.

I’ve been wanting to do this problem with you for a while, but I’ve been delaying because well, you’ll see when you get to the table. It takes a lot of work to recreate that in a blog post. ? But that ridiculously large table is also the reason why I want to talk about this one—so let’s test it out! Read more

This is probably the shortest—and most important—article I’ve written in a year. It’s just a little story, but it’s the story of a crucial epiphany one of my students (and I) just had.

Last night, at the end of a class I was teaching, one of my students began asking questions about timing and guessing on the GMAT. He’s really struggling with the idea that he has to let some questions go and that he’s going to get a decent number of questions wrong. I told him he’s not alone; most students have significant difficulty accepting this idea—and those who can’t accept it almost never reach their goal scores.

As we discussed the boring details of how the GMAT works, he acknowledged that he knew he had to do what I said (because I’m the expert ?), but he was having a tough time because, normally, he’s in it to win it.

(For those who aren’t familiar with that expression, it means that, if you’re playing a game, you’re always going for it and trying to win.)

When he said that, a light bulb went off in my head, and I then said something to him that made a light bulb go off in his head. I said:

Yes, but are you playing the right game?

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