Beat The GMAT Forums and Articles – Improve Your GMAT Score

Get some great insights on how to tackle your GMAT studies with these favorite tips from Grockit tutors, including some cool tricks on data sufficiency and sentence correction problems!

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You’ve got just about two months until the MBA application deadlines of early January roll around. You want to present an organized, complete, and impressive application, all under the buzzer. There’s only one way you’ll get it all done—and done well!—and that is, by getting organized.

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If you have read the news lately from Business Week or Inside Higher Ed, you may have noticed that the GMAT is now popping up on corporate recruiters’ checklists for job applicants as well as for many top consulting, finance, and banking firms as a measure of job potential.

So how should you wrap your mind around this information?

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With interview invitations from a number of programs already on their way out to Round One applicants, we wanted to offer Beat The GMAT readers some advice on this critical element of the admissions process. While we have previously offered tips about interview etiquette and suggested approaches when ‘interviewing the interviewer’, we’ll focus today’s post on a few fundamental steps one should take to effectively prepare for an MBA admissions interview.

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The GMAT quantitative section is different from most math tests. You don't usually see Data Sufficiency questions outside the GMAT, for one thing. They're tricky, and mastering them requires a high level of familiarity. The good news is that the answer choices are the same for every question, and precise calculations are often unnecessary.

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Time management is one of the most important factors in GMAT success. Too often students who can solve 700 level problems turn in 550 level performances because they neglect the basics of smart time use.  Focused on getting every problem right and trapped by traditional methods and scrupulous consistency, some dramatically underperform because GMAT rewards the quick-witted and punishes those who hesitate. Careless of details and falling into predictable traps again and again, others race to destruction, neglecting the critical pauses. Top GMAT performance is about knowing when to pick up the pace and look for the shortcut vs. when to slow down and be careful. We will consider below general mistakes that students make in managing their time on the math section. Consider these in evaluating your own performance if you have trouble finishing the math section in the given 75 minutes or if you find that you repeatedly lose points on careless errors.

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Last time I talked about anticipation stress and how it can impede your prepration for the GMAT.  But you’ve conquered that kind of stress, done a great job studying and made it to test day.  Congrats!  On test day, there is a chance that you might experience one of the following three situations:

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On October 15, I left the sunny climes of Northern California to travel to frigid New York City for the third annual GMAC Test Prep Summit.  For those of you who are not familiar with GMAC, it is the organization responsible for creating/developing/maintaining the GMAT test.  The purpose of this conference was to inform GMAT test prep companies about GMAT trends and how the test works—information we would then use to inform students like you.

The GMAC Test Prep Summit was fascinating (for a GMAT nerd like me), and the event featured many great speakers—the highlight of which was Dr. Lawrence Rudner, the head of research at GMAC.  Here are some of the major points I took away from the event:

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Many MBA admissions officers will tell candidates that if they can complete their applications and submit them in Round 1, then they should do so. Most MBA programs will also tell candidates that they should try to avoid Round 3, as the majority of the places in their classes will have been filled. So, what does that say about Round 2?

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The 2008 collapse of the Wall Street giants – AIG, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, to name a few – coupled with the demise of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have done a number on the prospects of the financial MBA. Even just five years ago, landing a job in the investment banking sector of Wall Street was sometimes enough to guarantee you a low six-figure income straight out of college (not a mean feat in any economic climate), and a solid mid-six figure income out of business school. Fast forward to 2009, and it’s reality-check time: Wall Street and the finance industry are still reeling from a loss of over 200,000 jobs, over 60,000 of them in New York—and the jobs that are left certainly aren’t bringing in the huge bucks. Whereas the top b-schools used to send over 45% of their graduates on to join the private equity, hedge fund, i-banking, and consulting ranks, these numbers are quickly shrinking, and both newly-minted and prospective MBAs are being forced to find new and innovative ways to not only bring their knowledge to the companies that are hiring, but also make a living.

Even though the finance MBA is not dead, the jobs left standing in the aftermath of the financial collapse are no longer the ones Gordon Gekko would lose sleep over. The remaining large investment banks are still hiring—mostly positions in mergers and acquisitions, though (a popular field in an economy when bigger companies come to the rescue of smaller ones in danger of collapse). Regional banks and boutique firms are still strong: positions as portfolio managers, analysts, financial advisers, and—quite popular recently—credit risk management analysis are still available and popular. Smaller regional banks like BB&T and lenders like Buffalo, New York-based M&T are still looking for fresh talent. However, says Ed Fredericks, professor and career adviser at Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, “the jobs aren’t going to be as lucrative, exciting, or crazy as they were before.”

What does this mean for you, budding MBA? That the times, well, they are a-changin’.

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The slow down paradox: going slower on the GMAT can make you faster.

Recently, one of my GMAT tutoring students, an engineering undergrad at Penn, hit the test prep wall.  After a couple of months of study he was consistently scoring 670/680 on weekly practice tests, but he needed to do significantly better to qualify for Wharton’s sub matriculation program.  This student was a bright guy and a typical engineer, accustomed to attacking challenges and blowing through them.   His problem was quant. – all kinds of quant.  This was particularly surprising since, in both our sessions together and his homework, he demonstrated mastery of high-level content and methods. But something was falling apart under test conditions. Together, we analyzed his situation and soon saw a pattern.  Specifically, he was making unforced errors, misreading the problems and falling into traps.  Meanwhile, he was regularly finishing the section 15 minutes early!

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The Africans at Microsoft diversity group recently assembled a panel of experts to talk about earning and making the best of an MBA degree. The panel is a candid discussion with business school admissions and career services people, current students and MBA graduates on a range of topics. Speakers included representatives from some of the best schools in the country, including Harvard Business School; Sloan School of Management at MIT; UC Berkeley; University of Washington; Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and Wharton, among others. The panel, hosted at Microsoft’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, WA, had over 200 attendees from around the world including employees of Microsoft, Boeing, and Coastal Carolina University. Listen in as we bring the event to you.

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This week, we’re going to analyze a particular GMATPrep® Sentence Correction question.

First, set your timer for 1 minute and 15 seconds and try the problem!

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The best way to think of inequalities is as equations with slightly less specific information. Instead of providing an exact location, they provide a range of locations, all of which are satisfactory. With “=” instead of“<”, we can solve for the exact number. In an inequality, that number will be used as an endpoint.

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This is the last of a short series of articles on the short list of what are known as coordinating conjunctions, short words themselves that show up very frequently in the GMAT Sentence Correction questions. Learning them can save you time, allowing you to eliminate wrong answer choices quickly and confidently; understanding them will of course also help add style and clarity to your AWA and admissions applications.  These coordinating conjunctions are often remembered by the acronym FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So); their job in a sentence is joining two or more parallel  . . . well, things in a sentence.

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