GMAT Prep: It’s not all math and grammar.
Sometimes you can study for hours and hours, weeks and weeks and still underperform on the actual exam compared with what you’ve seen in practice. Very often, this outcome is not reflective of your quant and verbal abilities, but rather weakness in some other factor that’s blocking you from achieving GMAT glory. Don’t get me …
GMAT Math: A Fail-safe Approach to Factoring (Level: Advanced)
For most (normal, non-GMAT-worshipping) people, “factors” is a broad and untenable topic. The more difficult quant questions that deal of factors generally involve a lot of high level reasoning and creativity. Sometimes, this results in a stroke of brilliance. More often, however, and particularly due to the harsh 2 minute time limit on quant questions …
GMAT Verbal: Intro to assumptions in CR questions (Level: Beginner)
For assumption questions, it is important to first make sense of the premise. Specifically, you need to isolate what is the difficulty or a pitfall in the logic or plan of the premise. “Will a particular statistic, on which the conclusion/plan depends be difficult to find or be difficult to obtain reliably?”, for example. To …
GMAT Verbal: Is the premise conclusionable?
I ran into a fairly standard Critical Reasoning question today with a student. While discussing a good approach to answering the question, I stumbled upon a nuanced strategy that I’d like to share with ya’ll. With certain Critical Reasoning premises, we can make very solid determinations about goodness or badness of a situation and even …
GMAT Verbal: Should you use outside information on Critical Reasoning questions?
My students often ask to confirm that you are not supposed to use “outside knowledge” for Critical Reasoning questions. This is patently wrong. There are things you know about the world and how it works, that you must use to make reasonable assumptions and draw reasonable conclusions. What you cannot do is to use your …