GMAT Tips

Test tips from leading prep firms for applicants studying for the GMAT. If you know your strengths and weaknesses, browse by test section: AWA, Quant and Verbal.

Published: November 7, 2017

GMAT Tip: More On Data Sufficiency

While many folks in the U.S. celebrate the arrival of Thanksgiving (or an excuse to watch American football and pig out on decadent sweet and savory treats), there are others who cringe at the idea of cooking an extravagant multi-course feast. If you’re wondering what late night calls to the Butterball turkey help line have to do with data sufficiency, there are some remarkable parallels between the two that might make for better studying (and happy friends and family on Turkey Day). • Take stock of what you have (& avoid last minute trips to the store). Before you Read more

Published: October 24, 2017

GMAT Tip: Relieving Test Anxiety in the Last Week

Everyone gets nervous and anxious in the weeks and months leading up to test day, but what about the last week or two leading up to test day? If you’ve been sticking to a study plan and schedule, you may still be looking for ways to up your test day game. • Inventory what you know. Don’t worry about trying to learn new material. You’ve already put in the time, so organize and review what you already know. Do shorter drills that focus on specific question types, topics and levels of difficulty. Think through your plan of attack Read more

Published: October 17, 2017

GMAT Test Week Advice: 3 Things to Avoid

You’ve prepped for months, sacrificed happy hours and quality time with your friends and stayed up late and risen early just to get in an extra few drills. Much like an endurance athlete, you’ve put in the time, and the only thing left to do is execute. Often the hardest part of the days leading up to test day is doing nothing and clearing your mind. In this week’s GMAT Tip, we take a look at three things you shouldn’t be wasting your time on during that week (and on test day). 1. No Excuses. We’ve all had Read more

Published: October 10, 2017

GMAT: The Importance of Drills

If you’ve ever played a sport, you probably have a love-hate relationship with drills. Whether it was running pyramids at the track, shooting countless free throws, or taking batting practice until you thought your shoulder would fall off, you probably didn’t feel yourself getting better in the moment. If you’re like most, you probably got excited to scrimmage so you could have a tangible measure of improvement (and the satisfaction of beating your peers). GMAT drills and practice tests function in a similar way; practice tests are the bright and shiny measures of progress while drills get resigned (or often Read more

Published: October 3, 2017

GMAT Tip: How to Master Critical Reading Questions

When I was a kid, all I wanted was a cool mono-syllabic last name. People would fumble through my clunky last name and inevitably layer some hybrid of odd accents in all of the wrong places. I just wanted to play lacrosse and hear “Go Capps” or “Go Carp!” Since I couldn’t change my name, I wished for a good nickname instead because let’s be honest, that can be even cooler. But you can’t pick your nickname, so I ended up getting labeled “JC” (my initials). When you go to a Catholic high school and your nickname is a shared Read more

Published: September 26, 2017

GMAT Tip: Decoding Data Sufficiency

There’s probably no other GMAT question type that instills more fear in candidates than data sufficiency. It’s unique to the GMAT and evaluates a candidate’s ability to discern when s/he has enough information to come to a conclusion. And those who are able to efficiently and successfully tap into those higher-order reasoning skills are ultimately rewarded accordingly. Let’s take a look at a few tips to help you decode data sufficiency: Familiarize yourself with the answer choices. Just like the AWA and every other section, the instructions and more importantly, answer choices for data sufficiency don’t change. Your inclination Read more

Published: August 29, 2017

GMAT Tip: Finding Your Motivation

If you ask any runner why they run, you’ll get a different answer. Some run to lose weight while others run for the community and social aspect, but at the end of the day everyone has something that gets them up and out of the door when the conditions aren’t ideal (sadly everyday can’t be sunny with no humidity and with infinite amounts of free time!) Running isn’t unique in this regard; the road to achieving GMAT success can be equally challenging especially if you don’t have some end goals fueling you every day. You likely have thought through many Read more

Published: August 22, 2017

Tips for Productive GMAT Prep

Whether you’re a day or a month into your GMAT preparation journey, you know how important it is to have a plan and to be able to manage your time well. If you start researching the GMAT online, chances are you’ll come across the following two questions pretty frequently: 1) When is the best time to take the GMAT and 2) How long should I prep? You won’t find a short perfect answer to either question here (or a truly-helpful short answer anywhere), but you will find some guidance to help you identify the best time to prepare and some Read more

Published: August 8, 2017

GMAT Tip: 5 Things Undergrads Should Do to Prepare for Business School

As summer starts to wind down, many college students are frantically trying to squeeze in a few more weekends at the beach before heading back to the dorms and classrooms. But for anyone thinking about business school or a graduate management degree, there are 5 things you can do before graduation to help you prepare for business school (or any graduate program). 1. Consider enrolling in “free” quant. Take a look at your current transcript and course load. If you’ve managed to make it through your undergraduate experience (intentionally or not!) without setting foot in the math department, you might Read more

Published: June 28, 2017

New GMAC Report: Is the GMAT Getting Easier?

Is the GMAT getting easier? That’s the question that the Graduate Management Admission’s Council (GMAC), a non-profit organization of leading graduate management schools, set out to answer in their recent market intelligence report: The GMAT Exam Is Not Getting Easier: The Fallacy of Score Increases and the Impact of Score Preview. The 26-page white paper is the first in an annual series that will serve as a sort of quality assurance (QA) report for the GMAT. Read more

Published: February 6, 2017

Four Easy Steps to Improve Your Test Scores from ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business

Sponsored Content Your performance on the GMAT or GRE is an important indication of potential success in a rigorous graduate program. As such, you’ll spend weeks, or even months, preparing for your entrance exam. And despite all that preparation, mistakes are inevitable. There are, however, ways to minimize mistakes. Consider the following tips to improve your likelihood of success on test day. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare This is an obvious one. With all the test prep services and practice quizzes available, there’s no reason you should be unpleasantly surprised by the types of questions you face on test Read more

Published: October 4, 2016

GMAT Tip: The Logic in Sentence Corrections

You’re great at grammar, right? You know your idioms, correlative conjunctions, and indirect objects by heart. You could probably teach about past present and future perfect tense to a room full of eighth graders. But, when faced with the Sentence Correction section, you’re still getting 65% or 70% of questions right. If you’re fantastic at grammar, what gives? Most test takers fail to recognize that, frankly, the GMAT is not assessing your ability to effectively mark up paper with a red pen. Even English teachers and copywriters find themselves in a pickle when it comes to the sentence Read more

Published: September 12, 2016

GMAT Tip: It’s Always the Same with Exponents

When evaluating exponent questions in the quantitative section, many test takers freak out when faced with seemingly messy but frequently appearing problems. “Do I need to know logs?” “Wait, is this testing something from Calculus?” Have no fear – while exponents show up often on the GMAT, how these questions show up is repetitive, requiring that we take the same steps over and to solve them. Key things we need to know when it comes to exponents: When we multiply numbers containing exponents, we add the exponents… but they must have the same base. For example: 2^2 + 2^2 = Read more

Published: September 5, 2016

GMAT Tip: Don’t Apply Your Outside Knowledge

The way that we tackle the GMAT Critical Reasoning section (or, you know, most of the GMAT) requires we have the unique mindset of pretending we are totally clueless, but also a keen expert who can find the gap in assumptions made by a critical reading prompt. What do we mean by clueless? Let’s start with one of our favorite Critical Reasoning questions: Numerous ancient Mayan cities have been discovered in the Yucatan peninsula in recent decades. The ruins lack any evidence of destruction by invading forces, internal revolts, or disease, and appear simply to have been abandoned. Some archaeologists Read more

Published: August 8, 2016

GMAT Tip: The IR Matters

Many test takers spent the vast majority of their preparation working towards improving in the Quantitative and Verbal Reasoning sections, only taking a day or two to skim through the Integrated Reasoning sections, and almost always skipping the IR section on practice exams. Not giving the Integrated Reasoning section due diligence and/or just a tenth of preparation time may be detrimental for a competitive application. Set up as an experimental section, many b-school experts felt that the IR would never become a valid aspect of a GMAT application. But more recent surveys indicate that IR is, in fact, becoming an Read more

Published: July 26, 2016

Corrections for The Official Guide for GMAT® Review, 2017

The below information about The Official Guide for GMAT® Review, 2017 is from the Graduate Management Admission Council—the makers of the GMAT exam. This content was originally posted on The Official GMAT Blog. Official Guide for GMAT Review Corrections We recently released The Official Guide for GMAT® Review, 2017 and we have discovered that this version contains a number of typos that occurred during the publishing process. We understand that these errors may make it difficult to understand certain content and could affect the study experience for the GMAT exam. Below, we’ve outlined options that provide updated materials. For complete details and a full list of Read more

Published: May 9, 2016

GMAT: Consider Algebra, not Arithmetic

Many test takers fail to make the connection between not being permitted to use a calculator on the quantitative section of the GMAT and, well, not making intensive, calculator-required calculations. The reality is, when you are working through a question and think a calculator is needed and/or there is some simplistic, obscure formula is required, you are not using the right strategy. This proves most true for arithmetic questions, when tedious calculations take test takers down the road where an algebraic approach should be considered instead. Let’s look at an example: 5^10 + 5^10 + 5^10 + 5^10 Read more

Published: April 25, 2016

So, You’re Terrible at Integrated Reasoning…

Since its release on the June 2012 exam, the Integrated Reasoning portion of the GMAT has had some test takers stumped. This 30-minute, 12 question section is oddly scored on a 1 to 8 scale, and no partial credit is given, even for multi-part, multi-answer questions. For the past several years, it was a matter of debate on whether business schools evaluated applicants on the basis of the Integrated Reasoning section. Admissions offices can be slow to adapt to changes in standardized tests, waiting for enough points of comparison to consider whether the change corresponds with other ways that applicants Read more

Published: April 4, 2016

Probability Tip: Three Strategies That Aren’t Used Enough

Some GMAT instructors will say that students often place too much emphasis on studying for Probability and Combinatorics, rather than spending more time focusing on the heavy lifters of Algebra and Arithmetic. Like it or not, GMAT students get fixated on combinatorics and probability because a) these questions are never, never as straightforward as remembering and plugging into the permutation or combination formula and b) these problems have the illusion of being easy and attainable. But these sticky types of GMAT questions are notorious time wasters, driving test takers deep into a rabbit holes without consideration the right strategies. In Read more

Published: March 14, 2016

GMAT Critical Reasoning Tip: Mind the Gap

Let’s start this post with a critical reasoning question: When a group of people starts a company, the founders usually serve as sources both of funding and of skills in marketing, management, and technical matters. It is unlikely that a single individual can both provide adequate funding and be skilled in marketing, management, and technical matters. Therefore, companies founded by groups are more likely to succeed than companies founded by individuals. Which one of the following is an assumption required by the argument? Before we dive into the answer choices, let’s start by wrapping our heads Read more

Published: March 7, 2016

The Managerial Approach To Sentence Correction

For most examinees, GMAT Sentence Correction can look a lot like a typical workday: you face a series of tasks and decisions that seem a bit daunting and quite a bit out of your control or expertise. But remember: the whole reason you’re taking the GMAT is to eventually become a high-level manager, and what effective managers do is determine where they’re best able to add value and then focus on that. The same ideology should be true of your Sentence Correction approach! Elon Musk is able to spearhead initiatives in space travel, electric cars, and (perhaps soon) revolutionary public Read more

Published: January 18, 2016

GMAT Tip: Know Your Conversions

Powerball fever took over the U.S. in recent weeks, and it culminated in an aspirational post last week when someone suggested that if the winner split the $1.3 billion equally amongst 300 million Americans, it would give each person $4.3 million. While the post went viral, the reasons why were surprising to many folks. Let’s take a look at the quick math… 1.3 billion divided by 300 million. That’s a lot of zeros, but it doesn’t take advanced math to write out the computation: 1,300,000,000 / 300,000,000 = 4.33 4.33 DOLLARS, not 4,300,000… Or 4.33 Read more

Published: December 7, 2015

GMAT Tip: Don’t Let Misplaced Modifiers Derail Your Score

It’s getting to be that time of the year. For the sake of being somewhat politically correct, it’s the slightly-chillier-time-of-the-year-that’s-directly-proportional-to-increased-gift-giving. If you work most 9-to-5 jobs, there’s likely some type of end-of-calendar-year celebration planned which can be make or break time in office social circles. You want to sit next to Brad from Marketing who is super dreamy and knows more about The Walking Dead and Shark Tank than the producers while avoiding Mark from Finance who can be heard a mile away because he jingles orange Tic-Tacs in his shirt pocket. Wait, is it Marketing who is dreamy or Read more

Published: November 9, 2015

GMAT Tip: Pros & Cons of New GMAT Features

It’s nice to have choices (would you have ever choose a free response test over multiple choice?), but sometimes too many choices can be overwhelming. The Graduate Management Admission Council rolled out some new GMAT features this year that give you more choices than you could have previously imagined. While most test takers are rejoicing at the options, let’s take a closer look at some of the pros and cons of the newfound choices: 16 day retest policy (replacing 31 days): Test takers (and schools) were doing cartwheels when this update was announced because every year there are Read more

Published: October 26, 2015

GMAT Tip: Relieving Test Anxiety in the Last Week

“The hay is in the barn.” Before you start thinking you’re reading the wrong blog, this isn’t about farming or agriculture. The saying means that all of the hard work has been done, and all that’s left to do is execute. Everyone gets nervous and anxious in the weeks and months leading up to test day, but what about the last week or two leading up to test day? If you’ve been sticking to a study plan and schedule, the hay should be in the barn, but you may still be looking for ways to up your test day game. Read more

MBA Applywire

November 5, 2024 10:15am ET

Applying: Wisconsin

Intake Year: 2025

Pre-MBA Career: Accountant

Post-MBA Target Industry: Other

GPA: 2.5

Years of Work Experience: 4

Location: Illinois

November 5, 2024 4:02am ET

Applying: Columbia, Cornell / Johnson, Dartmouth / Tuck, Duke / Fuqua, Georgetown / McDonough, HEC Paris, Imperial, INSEAD, Manchester / AMBS, Michigan / Ross, Northwestern / Kellogg, NYU Stern, Oxford / Saïd, Rochester / Simon, U. Chicago Booth, UNC Kenan-Flagler, UPenn / Wharton, USC / Marshall, UT Austin / McCombs, Vanderbilt / Owen, Yale SOM

Intake Year: 2025

Pre-MBA Career: Project Management

Post-MBA Target Industry: Consulting, Technology Companies: Accenture , AT Kearney , Bain , BCG , Deloitte , Ernst & Young , KPMG , McKinsey , Amazon , Apple , Facebook , Google , Microsoft , Tesla

GMAT: 695

GPA: 3.4

Years of Work Experience: 9

Location: India

Post MBA Location: USA

Notes:

I want to pivot into traditional Project/program or Product Management role.

November 4, 2024 6:49pm ET

Applying: Harvard Business School, Northwestern / Kellogg, Stanford GSB, U. Chicago Booth, UPenn / Wharton, Yale SOM

Pre-MBA Career: Financial Auditor - Public Accounting

Post-MBA Target Industry: Consulting, Non Profit/SI Companies: Accenture , Bain , BCG , Deloitte , McKinsey

GRE: 326

GPA: 4.0

Years of Work Experience: 2

Location: Florida

Notes:

I graduated with dual degrees in accounting and business analytics with minors in economics and writing from a local school. I currently work for a Big 4 firm in financial audit, and I'll have three years of full-time work experience when I apply in 2025. I work on multiple clients throughout the year so I've sat through multiple busy seasons. I'm a high performer at my firm and will have strong recommendations, but I don't plan on getting my CPA license. Post MBA, I would like to work in consulting for a few years and then transition full time to nonprofit and social impact work.

Outside of work, I serve as a program manager or lead in initiatives that provide pro bono services to local nonprofits, work with diverse students from low income areas to encourage them to pursue college and careers in business, and volunteer at an animal shelter. I'm very involved with new hires and students, and frequently facilitate trainings, serve as a coach and advisor, and participate in recruiting events for the school I graduated from. I was also heavily involved during undergrad.

November 4, 2024 6:32am ET

Applying: Columbia, Dartmouth / Tuck, Duke / Fuqua, Northwestern / Kellogg, U. Chicago Booth, UT Austin / McCombs, UVA / Darden

Intake Year: 2025

Pre-MBA Career: Consulting

Post-MBA Target Industry: Consulting Companies: AT Kearney , Bain , BCG , Deloitte , Ernst & Young , McKinsey

GMAT: 720

GPA: 3.33

Years of Work Experience: 6

Notes:

Have been working in public sector consulting for four years, with two additional years of experience in public policy.

Looking to transition to commercial management consulting with the big 3.

November 4, 2024 2:27am ET

Applying: Carnegie Mellon / Tepper, Georgetown / McDonough, Georgia / Terry, Georgia Tech / Scheller, Northwestern / Kellogg, U. Chicago Booth, UCI Merage, UCLA Anderson, Vanderbilt / Owen

Intake Year: 2025

Pre-MBA Career: FinTech, Entrepreneurship

Post-MBA Target Industry: Consulting, Technology, Family Business, Entrepreneurship Companies: AT Kearney , Bain , Booz Allen Hamilton , Deloitte , KPMG , PWC , Amazon , Google , Hewlett Packard , Oracle , Tesla

GMAT: 720

GPA: 6.18

Years of Work Experience: 4

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MBA LiveWire

November 5, 2024 5:10pm ET

Interview Invite to U. Chicago Booth

Round: Round 1

Received via portal on October 17, 2024

GPA: 3.9

GRE: 338

Program Type: Traditional Two-Year

Target Career: Healthcare

Note:

email received prompting me to check portal, then scheduled interview (selected on campus, 10/31) and got instructions for video essay submission

November 5, 2024 4:35pm ET

Interview Invite to USC / Marshall

Round: Round 1

Received via email on November 03, 2024

GPA: 3.75

GRE: 317

Target Career: Healthcare

Application Location: Los Angeles

Note:

MBA.PM program

November 5, 2024 3:28pm ET

Interview Invite to Emory / Goizueta

Round: Round 1

Received via email

Program Type: Traditional Two-Year

Target Career: Healthcare

November 5, 2024 1:34pm ET

Interview Invite to UNC Kenan-Flagler

Round: Round 1

Received via email November 5, 2024

GPA: 3.73

Program Type: Traditional Two-Year

Target Career: Finance

Application Location: Raleigh, NC

November 5, 2024 10:22am ET

Interview Invite to NYU Stern

Round: Round 1

Received via email November 5, 2024

GPA: 3.8

GRE: 327

Program Type: Traditional Two-Year

Target Career: Marketing

Application Location: Italy

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