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.

On Verbal, we’re asked for the “best” answer—not the “objectively correct” answer that we need to find on Quant—so it can be really easy to fall for tempting traps, especially on Critical Reasoning (CR) and Reading Comprehension (RC).

Learn to work super-systematically, though, and you’ll navigate through those tempting traps to land on the right answer. (Well…most of the time, anyway. ?) Here’s what to do. 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.

Welcome to the fourth installment of our series on the new Official Guides for GMAT® Review (2017 edition). If you haven’t seen the earlier installments yet, start here and work your way back to me.

I know that some people have already worked through the 2016 editions of the books and want to know which questions in the 2017 editions are the new ones. I’ve got the scoop for you! 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.

They’re alive! (Cough. Er.) Well, they’re published anyway: the new Official Guide books are here! In Part 1 and Part 2, we talked about the Quant portions of the new Official Guides, aka the OGs. It’s time to dive into Verbal. We’ll be talking about the verbal sections of The Official Guide for GMAT® Review 2017, aka the OG or the big book, as well as The Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review 2017, aka the verbal review or the verbal supplement. 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 word “that” is one of the most flexible words that the GMAT tests. It can take several roles and could easily be misused. More commonly, it serves as a red herring that forces readers to stop and think about the wrong things. That said, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of how “that” can be used and why. 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 first installment of this series, we deconstructed a challenging Reading Comprehension passage from the GMATPrep® free exams. Pull up that page and keep it handy; it contains the full passage text. (And if you’re just starting here, go through the first three parts before you continue with this one!)

At the end of the third installment, I posted the third problem for the passage. Here it is again: 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.

Are you one of thousands who reads a critical reasoning argument and finds yourself completely lost? You’re not alone. To a much greater extent than the other GMAT sections, CR tests whether you think in the way the GMAT wants you to think. Let’s talk about what your mindset ought to be. 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 short; passive voice is acceptable on the GMAT.

If only it were that easy. 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 first installment of this series, we deconstructed a challenging Reading Comprehension passage from the GMATPrep free exams. Pull up that page, as I’m not going to repeat the full text of the passage here. (And if you’re just starting here, go through parts 1 and 2 first before you read this one!)

At the end of the second installment, I posted the second problem for the passage. Let’s figure it out!

Here it is again: 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.

There’s a particular exercise I like to do with students who overthink Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning problems. (I initially got it from fellow instructor Ceilidh Erickson, who developed this exercise for her own GMAT classes.) It involves answering GMAT RC and CR problems without looking at the passage or the argument. With a little training, my students can often reach 50% accuracy or better! That might seem impossible — but keep reading to learn the secret. 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.

There’s a type of sentence known among linguists and grammar mavens as a “garden path” sentence. These sentences earned this name by leading readers “down the garden path” — you think the sentence is going in one direction, but halfway through, you suddenly realize that it’s saying something else entirely. Here’s the classic example: Read more