Avoid a GMAT Train Wreck

May 17, 2012 by



GMAT ratesEver since I started teaching GMAT classes, I have taken note of any references to standardized tests I come across in television shows and movies.  In the six years of doing so, I have found that these references almost always follow the same pattern.  One of the characters needs to take a standardized test that they find difficult or boring.  In order to illustrate this to the other characters, they will read an example of one of the questions on the exam.  Invariably, the question they read involves two trains leaving two different stations at two different times and traveling towards each other.

Because of this, rate problems that feature two trains (or cars or people or anything else) have a bit of a bum rap.  These questions are seen, unjustly, as difficult, time consuming and

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1, 2, 3, GMAT—count nouns on Sentence Correction.

May 16, 2012 by



GMAT Verbal ReasoningConsider the following two statements:

“I ate some cake at the birthday party”

“I ate some cakes at the birthday party”

If one of those two sentences sounds fishy, you have a good ear—but I assure you both sentences are grammatically correct. They just mean different things.

The key concept behind those sentences is the grammatical notion of countability, a set of idiomatic rules frequently tested in GMAT sentence correction problems. The English language distinguishes between nouns that can be modified by a number and ones that can’t. For instance, you can have one chair, two chairs, or fifty chairs. But although you have confidence that you’ll do well on the GMAT (as you should!), you can’t have one, two, or fifty confidence in that fact.

If you’ve done many Sentence Correction problems, you’ve probably

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GMAT Leverage: Make your strengths even STRONGER

May 14, 2012 by



GMAT strengthsWe all do it.  We can’t help but get wrapped up in what we do wrong and fail to acknowledge everything we do right.  Ironically, our strengths overwhelmingly outweigh our weaknesses.  If people spent most of their time falling short, I suspect we’d have died out as a species long ago.

The tendency to toil away with GMAT concepts and question types that just aren’t clicking can cause grave harm to your potential score on Test Day.  A GMAT score is a scaled, aggregated number ranging from 200 to 800.  Have you ever heard a conversation that goes like this?

X:  “I am so happy!  I scored a 700 on the GMAT!”

Y:  “Oh yeah?  And what are the component parts of that score?  Did you get an equal number of questions correct as per

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GMAT Studying: Correct Answers Can Be a Bridge to Success.

May 13, 2012 by



GMAT Probability For about a year, I always used the same method to solve the following GMAT problem:

How many liters of water must be evaporated from 50 liters of a 3 percent sugar solution to get a 5 percent sugar solution?

“This is simple percentages,” I would say. “Just start by taking 3% of 50 liters, which is 3 over 100 times 50, which comes out to 1.5 liters sugar…”

But one day, teaching this same quantitative problem, a student’s hand shot straight up. “Yes, James?” I said. (That wasn’t his real name, by the way, but it will do.)

“Eli, who cares about the sugar?”

I paused. “Well, the sugar will help us figure out the solution.”

“But you don’t need it!” James explained. “I’ve been a chemical engineer for years, so I do this problem all the time. The

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On the GMAT, Use Primes to Crack Big Numbers

May 12, 2012 by



Everyone studying for the GMAT wants to identify the skills that will lead directly to the greatest point increases.  While this can be difficult to do, given the adaptive nature of the exam, some skills definitely do come into play more often than others.

GMAT Quantitative SectionOne of the most important skills to master for the GMAT is prime factorization.  Finding prime factors can be useful on many different types of questions.  On test day, if you are stuck on a question and unsure of how to solve, remember the big number rule.  The big number rule is simply this: if you see a big number, one that is so large it is unreasonable to work with, find its prime factors.  Once you have those factors, you should be able to simplify.

Every positive integer

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Kaplan GMAT Alumn: Making Business Social

May 10, 2012 by



Kaplan Business SchoolIn an earlier post, we kicked off a Kaplan GMAT student success story series.  We want to share our students’ successes to inspire you to reach for your goals because they are attainable.  In fact, your goals are so important to us that you can win cash and prizes just by telling us about them!  We want to know:  Where will you take you?TM

Jeff Gibbard never had a problem with creativity. But in order to get his social business agency off the ground, he needed to give himself a left-brain advantage. After preparing for the GMAT with Kaplan, he got a scholarship to Drexel’s fast-track MBA program and eventually founded his own social business agency.

Q: Why did you decide to get an MBA?

My undergrad degree

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GMAT Essays: Computers score your work, and they are really good at it.

May 9, 2012 by



GMAT test scoreHere’s a fun fact:  An expert human essay grader spends 2-3 minutes per essay and is, thus, capable of scoring up to 30 essays in an hour.

Here’s another fun fact:  A computer can score 16,000 essays in 20 seconds (and does it just as accurately as the human).

A new study out of the University of Akron published some very intriguing findings on the efficiency and accuracy of automated readers (aka, robo-readers, e-Raters, e-graders, etc.).  A team of researchers used more than 20,000 essays across eight different prompts and nine different programs to evaluate our electronic counterparts and the algorithms that govern them.  Turns out, not only are these programs staggeringly more efficient, but they are also just as accurate as their human workmates.  Sorry, John Henry.

So does this mean that GMAC is keeping

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GMAT Permutations: Putting Things in Order

May 6, 2012 by



GMAT Probability I want you to think back to when you were in grammar school (strange how often the test for business school has us thinking about grammar school).  Specifically, I want you to think about gym class and every time you needed to pick teams.  For purposes of today’s discussion, let’s say we are picking a baseball team from the students in class.  Now I realize that for some of you this was a traumatic experience, and GMAT teachers are no exception to that – we are not particularly notable for our athletic prowess.  However, this scenario can help you understand a difficult question type on the GMAT – permutation problems.

A permutation problem will ask you to determine the number of ordered subsets of a certain size that exist in

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B-school Perspectives: Going Full-time vs. Part-time

May 4, 2012 by



Let me begin by introducing the 700lb gorilla in the room: creating a sound financial argument for choosing to quit your job and go to b-school full-time is extremely difficult.  In a previous blog post, I wrote about the financial reasons to consider a part-time MBA program.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to move beyond the money issue and speak about what going full-time meant to my experience as compared with the many part-time students I worked with while in school.  Then I’ll kick it over to my colleague, Jonathan Wylie (a current part-time MBAer) to see what he has to say about his experience as he finishes up his first year in Berkeley’s program.  I’ll begin at the beginning…

Upon entering business school in pursuit of an

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GMAT Quant Problems: Divide and Conquer

May 3, 2012 by



GMAT Quantitative ReasoningWe all love to impress our friends with tips and tricks, especially geeky GMAT tricks…Come on, admit it.   These divisibility tricks are always crowd pleasers.   More importantly though, divisibility problems show up regularly enough on the GMAT that to be prepared for test day you should know the divisibility shortcuts for whole numbers 2 through 10.  The following list will tell you the quickest way to check if an integer is divisible by each numbers:

Two: If the number is even, it is divisible by 2.

Three: Add up all of the digits.  If the result is divisible by 3, then the original number is divisible by 3.  For example, 534 is divisible by 3 because 5 + 3 + 4 = 12, which is divisible by 3.

Four: Look at the last two numbers.  If

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