{edocs}pdf/EconomicTimes120309.pdf,720,1020{/edocs}

The MBA Center is proud to present this week's examination of a GMAT Problem Solving Exponents question:

The MBA Center is proud to present this week's examination of a GMAT Sentence Corrections question:

The MBA Center is proud to present this week's examination of a GMAT Data Sufficiency question:

Some people, even after many months of training and many hours of classroom lessons and private tutoring sessions, feel that they are never going to be in a position to improve their scores enough to break the 650, that magical number that seems to be a sort of glass ceiling for the standard "top MBA" programs (by which we mean the gamme of Wharton, HBS, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago Booth, Kellogg, Sloan, INSEAD, LBS, IMD IESE, Bocconi, HEC and the like).  Is this really possible?

It might be.  Remember:  the GMAT is a very well-crafted test with a significant psychometric dimension.  That means it tests your mental abilities more than what you have learned, and consequently it is a very hard test to "learn."  No test is foolproof, of course, but there are reasonable limits to how far humans can stretch their own abilites, mental or otherwise.  For example, someone who was never particularly keen on math in high school is going to have a lot of work to do on the Quant section.  And the older one gets, the more difficult it will be to form new neural connections and increase one's abilities in remarkably weak areas.

So for some people, even very well-educated people with good careers, the peak score will not be around 650 to 750 but around 500 to 600.  At this point, you need to forget the big guns and explore other options.  But what? and how?

The MBA Center is proud to present this week's examination of a GMAT Critical Reasoning question:

The financier is widely considered to be "over-represented" among MBA candidates.  This is true to some extent, but it is ironic:  those whose initial higher education and career were in finance are generally less well-poised to score highly on the GMAT than are engineers.

The engineer has an obvious advantage over the average test-taker in mathematical prowess, obviously, but it is more than that.  Engineers tend to come from educational backgrounds very rich in logical and scientific analysis, so they not only KNOW more math, but they are also better able to pick apart and reassemble problems in different ways, very efficiently.  This is why engineers often need less time than many people to master the GMAT Quantitative section:  they are able to sort out all the different angles of the problems they are working on and, most importantly, generally good at recognizing and correcting their own mistakes quite rapidly.  Thus, while the engineer may not be overly familiar with the "discrete" topics (number properties, manipulative statistics, sequences, counting, probability), he can learn them fairly quickly.

by Nicholas Moses

The last two parts (read part 1 and part 2) in this series talked about Critical Reading as it applies to respectively Sentence Corrections and Critical Reasoning.  Logically, you might have thought that this next one would discuss Reading Comprehension, right?

Here is a PS practice question that will nicely illustrate the point we made above.  Pay close attention to what the question asks and mathematize the information very carefully.

***

The long-distance phone company Advanced Technology charges $0.20 per minute on each long-distance phone call.  The long-distance phone company Brett Stevens charges $1.50 for the first six minutes of long-distance calling that a subscriber makes each month, then $0.15 per minute thereafter.  For what number of minutes of long-distance calls would the phone bill for one month be the same for either Advanced Technology or Brett Stevens?

by Nicholas Moses

Last month, we discussed the importance of semantics in GMAT Sentence Corrections—why one must read a sentence with a feel for what it actually says and seriously asks whether what it says makes sense.  We said that this was important all over the Verbal section; indeed, it becomes more and more subtle the more complicated the questions get.