5 strategies to beat the gmat

8/3/2019 5 Strategies to Beat the GMAT

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/5-strategies-to-beat-the-gmat 1/6

Last week on the Veritas Prep blog I wrote about the day Iscored 780 on the GMAT. That

post was purely about my experiences on test day. Now, I’ll dig into some of the specific

strategies I used to ace the GMAT.

Note that many of these strategies overlap heavily with Veritas Prep’s own GMAT

prep philosophy — I do work for Veritas Prep, after all — so regular readers will probably

see some overlap between this post and the advice they read from us on a regular basis. Here I

describe how the “rubber met the road” for me as I put these strategies to work.

The Strategies I Found Most Useful

I’ve always been pretty good at math and my quant scores on practice tests were all around

the mid-40′s. My verbal scores were lower and ranged from the mid 30′s to low 40′s. In the

weeks of studying before taking the test, I had a shift in thinking about the strategy of the

GMAT. Excuse the clichè, but I really started to “Think Like the Testmaker.” I thought

“What is the GMAT and what does it reward?” It is a test to get into graduate business school,

not a graduate math program nor a graduate English Literature program. As a result, the

GMAT is not looking for the number crunchers or the grammar Nazis but for those who

would do well in a business program — those who can interpret, distill, manage and simplify

complex, loose data and transform it into usable information to make decisions and solve

business problems. In order for the GMAT to be a useful tool for admissions officers, it must

be a relevant test of the skills needed for an MBA. And in order for the GMAT to be relevant,

it must reward the type of thinking that is consistent with what admissions officers at MBA

programs are looking for. As our Director of Academic Programs, Brian Galvin says, “The

test is not a test of what you know, but a test of how you think.” Now this makes perfect sense

since the GMAT would not be a very good test if you could simply memorize a bunch of stuff

and do well on it.

Most of the strategies I list here have some relationship to how the test rewards that certain

type of thinking that makes you an effective business person.

Problem Solving

“Always look at the answer choices before you start to solve a problem.” (Page 25,

Lesson 10)

This was very useful for me on the problem solving section. I would traditionally try to read

the question, solve the problem and then look for which answer choice matched my solution.

However, sometimes, the answer choices gave clues to what I needed to look for in the

solution as well as whether there was a shortcut that I could use to save time. If a question

asks me to multiply a bunch of horrible-looking numbers together, and the answer choices

were in exponent form and were all an order of magnitude away, then it is a giveaway that I

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2011/08/the-day-i-scored-780-on-the-gmat/



http://www.veritasprep.com/gmat/









can estimate and just get close. Or, if I’m dealing with a geometry problem and I see roots of

2 and 3 or π’s in the answer choices, I know I’ll be dealing with an isosceles/30-60-90

triangle property or some kind of circle property. There were definitely 3-4 questions on the

test that I used this strategy for. I was able to cut a lot of time down by using estimation,

thereby saving time for problems that I needed it on.

The Business Takeaway: “Good business people are able to effectively use the limited

resources at their disposal to solve a problem.” Remember that answer choices are resources

too and they can often help guide you on how to approach the problem.

Data Sufficiency

“Spot the con” (Page 36, Lesson 8 )

Data Sufficiency was frustrating for me because although I knew the math concepts, I kept on

getting fooled by little details and assumptions I was making. The math itself is not hard, but

the GMAT often obscures information or hides information in the question stem or individual

statements to try to trip you up. You often have to re-arrange or translate the information

given to make it useful to the problem. Other times, the test will embed information in one

statement in the other statement, fooling you into thinking you need both statements when one

of them is sufficient alone. When studying for the test, I followed a simple hierarchy of

answer choices:

D

A & B

C

E

When I think I have reached an answer choice, I will double check for any tricks or hidden

information that might get me to a nearby answer choice. If I think the answer is A or B, I

double check to see if the other statement can be sufficient as well, making it D. If one

statement is clearly insufficient alone and I’m thinking A or B, I check to make sure I don’t

need the clearly insufficient statement to be true, thereby making the answer C. If I think the

answer is E, I check to see if I missed something that actually allows me to solve the problem

with C. If I think the answer is C, I check to make sure there’s no embedded information in A

or B that allows me to do it with one statement alone. Finally, if I think it’s C and am sure that

A and B don’t work, I’ll check to see I assumed something I shouldn’t, actually making the

correct answer, E.



The Business Takeaway: Good business people are generally able to make decisions with less

information but know when they are making unfounded assumptions and need to do more

research.

Reading Comprehension

The “STOP” reading methodology

I definitely had some trouble with reading comprehension on my practice tests, missing about

1 or 2 questions per passage — far too many to score well on the verbal section. I found that

my strategy for dealing with reading comprehension was flawed. I was trying to read the

question first and then skim through the passage to get the answer to the question. This did

not work well since many of the questions require an understanding of the passage as a whole,

not just individual parts. As a result, I started employing “active reading” using the Veritas

Prep STOP methodology. I changed my strategy and spent more time on the first question

reading the entire passage carefully while actively looking for the STOP elements of Structure,

Tone, Organization and main Point. This way, I had a much more clear understanding of the

passage from the first read through and could immediately identify things such as:

What is this passage seeking to do?

How are the paragraphs organized and what is the point of each one?

Is the author arguing for/against something or simply presenting information? If he’s arguing

for/against something what evidence and logic does he use to support his position?

How do these specific examples or pieces of evidence support his claim or act as

counterexamples?

By taking more time up front to read the passage carefully, I found it much easier and faster

to answer the subsequent questions about the passage. So instead of spending 2 minutes on

each of 4 reading comprehension passages for a total of 8 minutes or so per passage, I instead

spent 4 minutes first carefully reading the passage, looking for the STOP elements and then

spending about 30 seconds to 1 minute on each of the subsequent questions.

After doing this, I went from 1 or 2 errors per passage to 1 or 2 RC errors in the entire verbal

section.

The Business Takeaway: When presented with foreign, unfamiliar subject matter, the

effective business person is able to focus on and extract the most important elements from an

otherwise esoteric source of information.

Critical Reasoning



Focus on the specifics of the argument and ignore any answer choices that do not

directly address the linear logic of the argument.

I’ve found that a lot of the wrong answers I was choosing on the CR section were answer

choices that were true, but did not directly address the specific path of logic that the argument

uses. Often times, an answer choice that more appropriately fits the argument’s reasoning

turned out to be the correct one.

For example: “Ever since the CEO of the company implemented a company-sponsored health

care program, the productivity per employee has been up 12% over last year. Since there were

no other incentive programs created in the last year, the rise in productivity must be directly

attributable to the employees’ happiness with the CEO’s program.”

When asked which answer choice would most WEAKEN the conclusion of the argument, a

popular wrong I answer I might have selected may have been:

“Incentive programs have been shown by business studies to be generally ineffective at

boosting employee productivity.”

However, the correct answer choice would have been:

“Over the last year, over 15% of the staff of the company has been laid off, while the

company has shown the same level of business activity.”

As you can see, the first answer choice is very tempting since it has the words “incentive

program” and “employee productivity” in it. However, it only states that it is a general case

and not an absolute rule. The second answer, while it may not sound as good, actually directly

addresses the argument’s logic in that the rise in per employee productivity may have actually

been the result of employees having to cover for the laid-off employees’ workload.

Using this general strategy, I was able to much more effectively identify the trap answers that

did not relate directly to the pattern of logic presented in the argument.

The Business Takeaway: Effective business people have a tight focus on the things that really

matter when faced with critical decisions and do not get dissuaded by irrelevant facts or

information.

Sentence Correction

Approaching sentences with the goal of creating logical meaning instead of “relying on

my ear” or on idioms to correct sentences. And getting rid of “junk.”

Sentence Correction was my worst verbal subject before I started studying. I kept on getting a

good number of questions wrong and wasn’t able to identify any solid rules to follow so I



just started memorizing the particular structures of the sentences on the questions that I got

wrong and saying “OK, this is the idiomatic way of writing this.” This became completely

unmanageable because there was no way I could hold all those idioms and constructions in

my head with a sufficient level of accuracy.

Then I thought, “Well, the GMAT really should not reward my ability to memorize idioms.

Otherwise, the people with the best memory and not necessarily those with the best reasoning

abilities would do well on the test.” As a result, I changed my thinking and started to

approach sentence correction from a logical standpoint. Instead of relying on a vast library of

idioms, I took a small subset of grammar rules (mostly those in the “agreement” category)

such as verb tense, pronoun agreement, modifier agreement, subject-verb agreement, and

agreement between equivalent elements. I found that almost all of the sentence correction

problems could be solved by applying this relatively small set of rules to them. It was much

more manageable and made much more sense:

When describing things or events in the past, your verbs better agree when they are also

describing things in the past.

When you have a singular subject, use a singular pronoun and use a plural pronoun for plural

subjects.

Make sure the sentence is modifying the correct subject. “Since she had been behavin g well

all day, Liz rewarded her dog with a treat.” Who was well-behaved, the dog or Liz? I saw this

type of thing a lot on the test.

Make sure that comparisons are also logical and that the elements are equivalent (nouns to

nouns, actions to actions, etc). “Like other dog collars, Fido had a plain metal name tag.” The

dog collar and Fido (the dog) are not equivalent. You would need “Like other dog collars,

Fido’s had a plain metal name tag.”

Dealing with sentence correction using this framework was infinitely easier than trying to pull

out the proper idiom from my memory bank. There wasn’t a single question on the actual

GMAT where I had to actually KNOW the proper idiom to use in that situation. In fact, there

were several instances where I saw that a wrong answer choice contained a “nice-sounding”idiom that ultimately ended up being the incorrect answer choice because it did not conform

to one of the rules above. Had I “used my ear” like I was doing before, I would have certainly

gotten those questions wrong.

Finally, the difficulty on the harder sentence correction problem was not so much that there

were harder and more obscure rules that were thrown at me as much that the GMAT just put a

bunch of junk in my way to hide where the real subjects and antecedents were. So a tricky

sentence would read something such as:



“The committee that handles the country’s budget, made up of six senators and six

congressmen from twelve different states, are currently deciding what programs to cut in

order to reduce the deficit.”

You see how this is trick since the sentence hides the verb “are” from the singular subject“committee”. By cutting out all the fluff, the sentence would ready to me as:

“The committee, ::junk junk junk junk::, are currently deciding ::junk junk junk junk::”

Now, it is plainly obvious that the “committee” requires a singular verb of “is” instead of

“are.” For many of the problems, I was so focused on the critical elements in the sentence, I

don’t even remember what the subject matter of those sentences were after answering the

question!

There are probably only 2 dozen or fewer grammar rules that you actually have to know to do

well on sentence correction — much easier than memorizing a whole list of idioms!

The Business Takeaway: Effective business people are able to avoid distracting information

and sort through to the most important elements.

Key Takeaways

In conclusion, the same skills that are rewarded on the GMAT are the same skills that are

required to become successful MBAs and effective business people:

creative, efficient problem solving

effective management, transformation and interpretation of data

ability to extract the most important elements from unfamiliar sources

clear focus on the path of logic or reasoning behind a proposal or plan of action

and finally, the ability to ignore extraneous, distracting information that is irrelevant to the

task at hand

When you are studying for the GMAT, keep in mind that the GMAT rewards this type of

thinking and you will be able to tell which strategies will actually be effective on the GMAT

and which strategies will not.

5 strategies to beat the gmat

Documents