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5 Main Strategies for GMAT

Last week I wrote about the day I scored 780 on the GMAT. That post was purely about my experiences on test day from
what I ate in the morning to how I kept my mind sharp during short breaks in the exam. Today Ill dig into some of the specific
strategies I used to ace the GMAT.
Note that many of these strategies overlap heavily with Veritas Preps ownGMAT 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 on this blog
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
Ive always been pretty good at math and my quant scores on practice tests were all around the mid-40s. And my verbal
scores were lower and ranged from the mid 30s to low 40s. In the weeks of studying before taking the test, I had a shift in
thinking about the strategy of the GMAT. Excuse the clich, but I really started to Think Like the Testmaker. I thought What
is the GMAT and what does it reward? Its 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 its a giveaway that I can estimate and just get close. Or, if Im dealing with a geometry
problem and I see roots of 2 and 3 or s in the answer choices, I know Ill 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 actually 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 Im thinking A or B, I check to make sure I dont 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 theres no embedded
information in A or B that allows me to do it with one statement alone. Finally, if I think its C and am sure that A and B dont
work, Ill check to see I assumed something I shouldnt, actually making the correct answer, E.
The Business Takeway: 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 a bit
flawed. I was trying to read the question first and then skim through the passage to get the answer to the question. This didnt
work so 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 hes 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 dont directly address the linear logic of the
argument.
Ive 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 arguments 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 CEOs 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 arguments 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 was not 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 shouldnt 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 behaving 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, Fidos had a plain metal name tag.
Dealing with sentence correction using this frame work was infinitely easier than trying to pull out the proper idiom from my
memory bank. There wasnt 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 wasnt 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 countrys 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, its 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 dont 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.
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.

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