GMAT Word Problems Unravelled

May 23, 2012 by



GMAT quantitative prepSometimes, you’ll come across a GMAT problem that gives you a lot of information.  The relationship between the pieces of information may not even be clear at first.  In my experience as a GMAT teacher, I’ve found that these types of questions tend to confuse students, especially when students try to immediately write one big equation to solve.  Instead of attempting to reach a solution all at once, take a step back and follow a few standard steps.

First, do not panic.  The question may look like it has too much data to consider in the two minute time frame you are allotted per question.  You need to remind yourself that GMAT questions are written to be solved in about two minutes, so a strategy must exist

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GMAT Data Sufficiency: Say Yes, Saying No

May 21, 2012 by



GMAT Data Sufficiency The trickiest question type in the quantitative section of the GMAT for most students is yes/no data sufficiency questions.  When approaching these problems, it is imperative that you keep in mind the purpose of data sufficiency.

Let’s start with a review of data sufficiency.  On these questions, your goal is not to find the answer.  Rather, it is to determine if you have enough information to find the answer, regardless of what the answer is.  On value questions, this is fairly straightforward.  If you are asked for the value of x and you know it is 4, that’s sufficient, but if it could be 4 or 6, that’s not sufficient.  In the former case we could narrow down the possibilities to one answer.  In the latter, we

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GMAT Challenges: Finding My Achilles’ Heel

May 20, 2012 by



GMAT ChallengesGreetings, I would like to announce that I have officially figured out that my biggest challenge on the GMAT is translating word problems into workable equations that allow me to get to the right answer quickly.

When I first started studying for the GMAT, the words from these long and confusing paragraphs would float in one ear and out the other. I would desperately try to hold on to each word, analyzing each one looking for a clue that would help me.  Then I would read one question over and over and over like the answer was going to suddenly appear and say ‘I was hear all along!!’ That’s the habit that Kaplan instructors train you NOT to do first. With this strategy, no wonder the words were just swimming around in my

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Drive to GMAT Reading Comprehension Success

May 19, 2012 by



GMAT Reading Comprehension By: Serina Isch

Let’s be honest. Most of the time, the reading comprehension passages on the GMAT are…well…as most of my students would say, boring! In order to make a passage more difficult, they can select a passage with the most psychologically daunting technical terms and obscure topic. The test-makers know that that is enough to bog down most test-takers , but you can avoid the slow down if you know what to stop and note and what to cruise right on through. You can get to your ultimate destination more efficiently and effectively.

The key to building a good “map” of the road is know how to read the signs along the way. In a GMAT passage, the primary signs on that map are

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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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