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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Published: August 15, 2017
3 Ways to Make the Most of Your GMAT Practice Test
Taking practice tests is an essential component of your GMAT study regimen. But it’s not the mere act of taking the test that provides you with your greatest opportunity for improvement. Sure, taking the test is helpful: it exposes you to more practice problems, forces you to consider pacing and work under timed pressure, and trains your mind and body for the 3.5 hours you’ll spend testing at the test center. More importantly, however, your practice tests provide you with a blueprint for your performance; they show you how you perform under those timed, labor-intensive conditions and, in doing so,
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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
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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.
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New GMAT Feature Offers Test-Taking Personalization
For hopeful business school students taking the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), a significant change will be going into effect on July 11, 2017. Previously, those taking the GMAT tackled exam sections in a set order: Analytical Writing Assessment, Integrated Reasoning, Quantitative, and finally the Verbal section. The amendment made by the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) offers considerably greater flexibility, giving test-takers some choice in the order in which they complete these tasks. The new GMAT feature, officially titled the Select Section Order, was implemented based on research from GMAC. “GMAC is committed to continuously improving the GMAT
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Is Trump Rhetoric Driving Prospective International Business School Students to Canada?
Graduate management education has become increasingly global, but fewer prospective business school students from outside the United States cite America as their most preferred study destination than have in the past, according to a recent report from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). Anti-immigrant rhetoric and uncertainty around potential changes to student and work visas—coupled with growing numbers of high-quality programs in other parts of the world—have driven the decreased appeal of U.S. programs, GMAC’s data suggests.
More prospective students than ever—nearly three in five (59 percent)—intend to apply to programs outside of their country of residence, according to the 2017 mba.com Prospective Student Survey Report, released this week by GMAC. That’s up from 44 percent in 2009. Those looking beyond their own country’s borders do so in pursuit of a higher-quality education (says 63 percent of respondents), better odds of securing international employment (58 percent), and to build an international network (51 percent). And a third of candidates (34 percent) who prefer to study outside their country of citizenship say they also hope to land a job in the country where they go to school.
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Are Specialized Master’s Programs Cannibalizing MBA Programs?
Business schools have been launching increasing numbers of non-MBA business master’s degrees—but not without worry that these very offerings could be gobbling up prospective applicants to their MBA programs. Responding to these concerns among its member schools, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) added new questions to its 2017 mba.com Prospective Students Survey to find out. Based on analysis released yesterday of responses from more than 11,000 individuals who registered on mba.com between February and December 2016, schools may be able to breathe a sigh of relief. “We have heard schools asking, ‘Are we cannibalizing our
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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
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Published: November 30, 2016
More Business Schools Accept GRE in Bid to Draw Non-Traditional Students, Kaplan Survey Shows
Despite emerging in the late 1940s, the Graduate Record Exam—more affectionately known as the GRE—took time to be seen as a viable MBA admissions exam alternative to the more standardized GMAT. But growing numbers of business schools accepting the optional test has eased the way for more non-traditional MBA students to apply by simply taking the same test they might use to apply for any number of other master's degree programs.
Just seven years ago, test preparation education company Kaplan Inc. found that only 24 percent of business schools accepted the GRE instead of the GMAT. Today, that figure has soared to 92 percent, according to Kaplan Test Prep’s 2016 Business School Admissions Officers Survey.
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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
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Published: September 21, 2016
GMAC Introduces New Features for GMAT Enhanced Score Report
In early January 2016, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns and administers the GMAT, introduced the GMAT Enhanced Score Report (ESR), providing test-takers with deeper insight into their scores. Recently, GMAC unveiled a newer, enhanced version of the ESR, including three new features.
The new elements build on the initial ESR, which allowed users to look at separate result segments of the GMAT and compare themselves against other test-takers. In addition to giving the test-takers a percentage ranking to see where they stack up against potential competition, it also allowed them to pinpoint the areas in which they would benefit most from additional preparation.
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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 =
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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
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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
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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
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Stress Around Standardized Tests, Tuition Costs Looms Large for Current MBA Applicants
Entrance exams generate more angst than any other part of the MBA admissions process for the majority of applicants to business schools, according to a survey released today by the Association of Independent Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC). Sixty-one percent of respondents cited standardized tests as the most challenging application component, while 46 percent pointed to written essays and 20 percent indicated interviews. Interestingly, newer additions to the application process—such as videos and group exercises implemented in recent years by schools like Kellogg and Wharton—seem to incite less anxiety, with only 19 percent of applicants saying these were especially challenging. In fact,
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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
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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
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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
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Published: March 31, 2016
ETS’ Campus Badly Vandalized—All Signs Point to GMAT Bus
Princeton, NJ (Reuters)—The Educational Testing Service (ETS), makers of the GRE exam and several popular standardized tests, fell victim to vandalism on its lush, Princeton-area campus earlier this week—sustaining significant damage including to its staff-only golf course. It seems that a large vehicle, most likely a bus, drove across several acres of lawns as well as golf course fairways and greens—resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in damages. Police on the scene estimate that the bus was on the grounds for more than 90 minutes in the wee hours of Monday morning, beginning sometime between 2 and 3 a.m.
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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
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