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 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 the Verbal questions in the big OG. 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 had multiple conversations recently with different students about how to improve GMAT Reading Comprehension skills, and each person had a somewhat different angle or issue going on. I realized, though, that these students all had something in common—and, therefore, there was one particular thing that they all needed to do to get better at RC. 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.

After working with thousands of students, I’ll admit: Reading Comprehension is my least favorite subject to teach. Why? Because unlike Quant or grammar, it doesn’t have concrete rules to apply, so it can be harder to find ways to help when students are struggling.

I have found, though, that many students who struggle with GMAT Reading Comprehension aren’t actually struggling with the “reading” or the “comprehension” part (unless they struggle with English skills generally). No, the passages – though dense and often boring – are mostly ok. It’s answering the questions that’s a struggle!

RC questions can seem vague, and the answer choices can feel like a sphinx’s riddle. Often 2 or 3 answers choices may seem equally right, or maybe none of them seem right! So what should you 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 final installment of our series on tackling a tough reading comp passage from the GMATPrep® free exams! If you’re just joining us now, go all the way back to the first installment and work your way through to this one. 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.

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 a tempting trap, 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.

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.

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