“first-round advantage” is a big fat lie… sort of

Posted on September 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

As summer in NYC rumbles toward a close, the emails and phone calls I receive from aspiring MBA applicants start to sound more and more ambitious.  Most students want to cram their GMAT preparations into three or four weeks, even if they need a massive score gain.  I hear the same refrain over and over again:  “I want to apply in the first round, so I have to take the GMAT really really really soon or else I’ll never have enough time to write my essays and then I won’t apply in the first round and then the world will come to an end…!”

OK, so I’m paraphrasing a little bit.  Very few people sound that dramatic.  (Disclaimer: I swear that I’m not writing this to pick on any of my beloved current or former GMAT students. This post is about a general seasonal trend, not about any particular GMAT student.) But I always hear a lot of unnecessary panic in GMAT students’ voices this time of year, and the anxiety seems to increase as soon as I suggest that an MBA applicant might need more weeks of GMAT prep than they had (perhaps optimistically) anticipated.  Many applicants seem absolutely convinced that they’ll have a chance at their favorite MBA program only if they apply before the first-round deadline.

Call me a heretic if you want, but I’m convinced that the vaunted “first-round advantage” is mostly a myth.  Unless you fit into a few special categories, there is virtually no benefit to driving yourself into a GMAT-addled frenzy just for the sake of being one of the earliest applicants.

Sure, some of you have perfectly wonderful reasons to apply early in the admissions season.  If you’re looking for a scholarship (and are among the tiny handful of applicants who actually have a realistic chance at getting one), you’re definitely better off applying early:  scholarship funds are often given out early in the admissions season.  It’s also possible that you’ll get a lift from applying to binding “early action” programs (Tuck, Columbia, Duke, and Vanderbilt leap to mind); technically speaking, you make a binding commitment when you apply through these programs, and the schools have little reason to think that you’d flake on them if you’re admitted… and that will probably help your chances.

But if you’re obsessed with first-round MBA applications and nothing in the previous paragraph applies to you, you probably need to relax a little bit.  Sure, admissions committees are somewhat more likely to have some spare time on their hands in September than in January, and they’re a bit more likely to read first-round essays with fresh eyes and an open mind.  But that’s really the only general advantage to applying in the first round.

Think about it rationally:  the best MBA programs want to attract and select top applicants just as badly as you want to be among the top applicants; why the heck would they ding a strong MBA applicant in January, but admit that same applicant in September?  At most top MBA programs, less than half of the incoming class is admitted during the first round… so don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of opportunities during second round.

Or think of it this way:  if you’re awesome enough to earn a first-round admit from HBS or Stanford, then you’re probably awesome enough to get in during second round.  Then again, if your application is shaky for some reason, a first-round attempt won’t fix any of your problems.  If your essays are shoddy, your work experience is flimsy, or your GMAT score is hopelessly low, you’ll be just as screwed during first round as you would be later in the admissions season.  Sorry, but the “first-round advantage” won’t mask any of your MBA application weaknesses.

Whatever you do, don’t let the stress of looming first-round deadlines hurt the quality of your application.  If you need an extra few weeks or months to raise your GMAT score, take your time:  a strong GMAT score in January will help you far more than a rushed first-round application in October.  If you could use a few extra weeks to perfect your essays, take your time:  a sloppy, typo-ravaged October application will be far less successful than a polished, eloquent second-round application.  If you get hasty with your essays and fail to tell a coherent “story” about your life and goals, you’ll do enormous harm to your candidacy—no matter when you apply.

The bottom line is that it’s always wise to produce the best MBA application that you possibly can.  If it’s mid-September and you’re just starting to rumble into high gear with your GMAT prep or MBA essays, chances are good that your very best MBA application won’t be ready until second round.  And you shouldn’t feel even the slightest bit of remorse if you wait just a few more months to bless the adcom with your irresistibly charming second-round application.

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Misplaced Math Anxiety: The Evil Four

Posted on June 21, 2010 | 1 Comment

As an independent GMAT tutor with an unorthodox streak, I tend to be the GMAT resource of last resort for many test-takers. The majority of my NYC students have already taken at least one GMAT prep course, and most have taken the test at least once (one of my students took the test seven times before she called me, and cracked 700 for the first time ever this weekend… yay!). I love the challenge of trying to help students beat the GMAT after they’ve already exhausted every other resource, and I’m always honored when somebody puts their faith in me after months–or years–of falling short of their score goal.

Because the prospective students who contact me tend to have so much GMAT experience already, I usually ask the same question: what do you think is holding your GMAT score back? As you might guess, I get a huge variety of answers, but there’s one common thread: nearly everybody blames combinatorics, probability, rates, and/or overlapping sets for at least part of their struggles on the quant section. Let’s call those four topics the Evil Four.

I’m not going to tell you that rate questions aren’t important. I’m not going to tell you that combinatorics, probability, and overlapping sets aren’t important. But I will tell you that the Evil Four are never the difference between, say, a 650 and a 700.

Here’s the thing: when you really look hard at the test, none of the Evil Four seem to appear all that often. It’s possible that you’ll see two rate problems, but it’s more likely that you’ll see only one. It’s possible that you’ll see a combined total of three probability and combinatorics questions, but it’s also possible that you’ll see exactly none–even if you’re doing well on the exam. And overlapping sets questions aren’t so common either: very few test-takers claim to see more than one or two of them.

Think of it this way: you might only see a grand total of four or five questions from the Evil Four on the actual GMAT. That’s only a tiny proportion of the 78 questions on the test, yet I routinely speak with people who seem to spend as much as 50% of their study time on these topics. But if the Evil Four appear in less than 10% of GMAT test questions, why is everybody so stressed out about them?

Honestly, I think that test-takers tend to focus on these questions because they’re so damned memorable compared with the rest of the questions on the test. You won’t necessarily remember the algebra questions (too boring), the arithmetic questions (too pedestrian), or the number properties questions (too abstract); the crazy rate questions with two trains headed toward each other seem to stick in our heads much more easily. The unglamorous reality is that algebra (including word problems and functions), arithmetic (including word problems, percents, exponents, roots, and estimation), and number properties questions are the core of your GMAT quant score. If your accuracy on these three topics is less than stellar, your GMAT score will also be less than stellar.

Again, I’m not saying that rates, combinatorics, probability, and overlapping sets aren’t worth studying. I just think that these questions cause a disproportionate amount of anxiety, and I think it’s crucial to keep them in perspective. If you’re trying to raise your GMAT score from, say, a 47 to a 51, you probably need to study the living hell out of everything. But if your goals and starting score are more modest–or if you need to substantially improve your composite score–don’t overemphasize this stuff.

At the very least, make sure that you don’t focus on the Evil Four at the expense of more important topics. If you need to make a big improvement in your GMAT quant score, spend the bulk of your time developing your accuracy on algebra, arithmetic, and number properties. Since those three topics appear in more than two-thirds of GMAT quant questions, it would be wise to keep them at the front of your mind as you create your GMAT study plan.

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Are last-minute MBA applications hopeless?

Posted on May 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

It’s spring in New York, which means that the sun is shining, the pigeons are frisky, and New Yorkers are much less cranky than usual. Springtime also means that the GMAT and MBA crowds have thinned out a little bit. Everybody knows that peak MBA application season is in the fall and early winter; if you’re calling a GMAT tutor in April or May, you’re probably a forward-looking planner with an eye on first-round MBA deadlines in October. And your GMAT tutor loves you for that.

But then there are the last-minute scramblers who defy conventional wisdom and take the GMAT in the spring. They then undergo a frenzied, abbreviated process of applying for MBA programs’ final deadlines in April or May. You would think that this approach is completely hopeless, right? An application sent within a few hours of a fourth-round deadline on May 15 couldn’t possibly succeed… right?

Here’s the odd thing: over the past few years, a certain subset of my last-second applicants have been extremely successful. Last year, I spent the morning of May 15 frantically helping two former GMAT students edit their MBA application essays–just in time for 5:00 pm deadlines on May 15. I thought that neither of them had much of a chance with last-second applications, but both students were admitted to their first-choice programs. This year, one of my favorite students submitted a third-round “express” application to a solid program, and managed to receive a substantial scholarship—after being waitlisted by a number of schools of comparable quality during the first two rounds.

And my all-time favorite procrastinator—Mr. L, a former actor who has been mentioned in this space before—submitted an application last Monday for a one-year accelerated MBA program. Here’s the thing: he submitted the application two weeks AFTER the final deadline… and just one week before the start of classes in early May. And guess what? Of course, he was admitted. He was accepted to the MBA program on Friday, boarded a plane on Sunday, and started classes on Monday.

So how did these applicants do it? First of all, none of the aforementioned applicants were targeting top-10 programs. We’re talking about solid programs at the fringes of the top 30 or 50—think George Washington University or University of Florida or University of Iowa, not HBS or Columbia or MIT. MBA programs that are strong but not super-elite often face a great deal of unpredictability during the spring—they simply don’t know how many admitted students will actually choose to attend their school, which means that these programs may (or may not) have a bunch of empty slots at the end of admissions season.

In some circumstances, MBA programs can get pretty desperate in May. MBA programs often have high fixed costs, and nobody wants to have an empty chair in the classroom. So if a particular program has several unexpected empty chairs, they might be forced into “warm body mode.” Basically, they’ll admit nearly any (reasonably qualified) warm body who can provide a tuition check—even if the very same applicant would have been rejected (or waitlisted) by the very same program during earlier application rounds.

So there’s reason to have some hope if you’re submitting a last-second application to a non-elite program. If the MBA program has already filled (or nearly filled) their class, you’re probably screwed. But if the program is in “warm body mode,” you might be in luck, even if your GMAT score is below the MBA program’s average—as was the case for all four of the MBA applicants mentioned above.

Once you decide to submit a late application, be friendly but persistent with your calls to the admissions office. Try to make a connection with the person who answers the phone, since he or she might able to quickly get your case in front of a key decision-maker, even if the application deadline has already passed.

Whatever you do, don’t let the adcom think that you applied on a whim. In your phone calls, emails, and essays, do everything you can to make it clear that the MBA program is actually a top choice for you; as with any MBA application, be sure to clearly explain why you’ve chosen that particular program, and make sure that your essays are polished and error-free. If you have to, hire an editor or an admissions consultant to ensure that your work looks professional and convincing.

If you get a little bit lucky and you play your cards right, you might be among the blessed few who receives an acceptance in the spring… giving you the right to gloat in the general direction of your friends who are just starting to study for the GMAT.

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GMAT percentile rankings, part II

Posted on April 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

As a GMAT tutor, I regularly receive calls from students (or potential students) who are nervous about some sort of “imbalance” between their verbal and quant scores on the GMAT.  In many cases, those worries are absolutely reasonable–if you have, say, a 51Q/30V, you clearly have an issue.

In many cases, however, the imbalance might not be quite as bad as it seems, especially if you’re (overly) focused on percentile rankings.  Over the years, I’ve met quite a few people with wonderful GMAT scores (48Q/48V, 44Q/42V, 44Q/49V) who worried that they have an imbalance because their quant percentile rankings are much, much lower than their verbal percentile score.  In many of these cases, I don’t think that the test-taker has much to worry about.

In a previous post about percentile rankings, I mentioned that a large percentage of GMAT test-takers do extremely well (raw score of 47 and above) on the quantitative section, but not so well on the verbal.  I admiringly call this the “Asian effect,” since I’m convinced that the bulk of these GMAT quant studs come from math-intensive education systems.  (The United States, of course, is one of the world’s worst wealthy nations when it comes to teaching K-12 mathematics.  You should never hire an American GMAT tutor… crap, wait a minute… scratch that last part.)

Anyway, I clumsily punched some GMAT data into an excel spreadsheet, and made a little chart out of it.  The chart shows the rough shape of the GMAT verbal score distribution (approximately normal or bell-curved), the composite GMAT score distribution (also approximately normal or bell-curved), and the GMAT math score distribution (not so normal).

Please keep the following disclaimers in mind:

Disclaimer #1:  This data is extrapolated from a GMAT score report.  It is definitely NOT very precise data.  I also tinkered with a few numbers to smooth out the curves, so take all of this with a grain of salt.

Disclaimer #2:  GMAT section scores and GMAT composite scores don’t really belong on the same axis, since you can’t easily convert from raw scores (0-60 scale) to a composite scale (200-800) unless you know the GMAT algorithm… and even then, they still wouldn’t really belong on the same axis.  Again, this is just a rough visual representation.

Okay, enough prefaces–I think you’ll get my point as soon as you see the graph.  Here it is.  Enjoy.

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GMAT Guessing Strategy

Posted on April 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

Conventional wisdom says that you should always finish every question on the GMAT, and that the computer will thrash you silly if you don’t. It even says so on page 17 the 12th edition of the GMAT Official Guide:

F[act] — There is a severe penalty for not completing the GMAT test.

If you are stumped by a question, give it your best guess and move on…. If you don’t finish the test, your score will be reduced greatly.

Thanks to this particular part of the official guide, a lot of GMAT students seem to think that they’ll face imminent GMAT doom if they don’t finish every single question. As a GMAT tutor, I often field anguished calls from students, who swear that their scores would have been much higher if they hadn’t accidentally ran out of time before they had a chance to answer question #37 on the quant section.

And guess what? A random guess on question #37 doesn’t seem to matter all that much. This little fact comes straight from the (tragically underused) official GMAT blog, which rarely receives more than one new post per month.

I strongly encourage you to read the blog post, or you could go straight to the pdf of the entire study if you’re feeling ambitious. And if you’re not feeling all that ambitious, here are the highlights:

  • the last question or two never really matters much — so don’t freak out if you don’t have time to guess
  • if you have five or fewer questions left on the verbal, it doesn’t really matter if you omit questions at the end
  • if you are of below-average ability on quant, it might actually be better to omit questions at the end
  • if you are of relatively high ability on quant, you are better off guessing on the last few questions… but again, it doesn’t make a big difference if you omit just one or two questions at the end

Pretty crazy stuff, right?  All of this information apparently comes from actual GMAT test data, and it definitely represents a departure from standard GMAT test-prep advice.

The bottom line is that a few random guesses or a few “skipped” questions at the end of the test won’t ruin your life, one way or the other. Remember that you have a huge margin for error on the GMAT, and you can miss a crapload of questions and still get an absolutely wonderful score on the test.

So relax a little bit. Whatever you do, don’t stress if you can’t answer the last quant question—it certainly isn’t worth causing the sort of anxiety that may inspire unnecessary verbal underperformance or a tearful call to your GMAT tutor.

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GMAT Focus Stinks

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

In a previous post , I gave a qualified endorsement of GMAT Focus, which is a series of 24-question quant tests sold by the makers of the GMAT.  GMAT Focus consists of retired test questions, and I was pretty convinced that the test is a useful product, since so many real GMAT test questions seem to (very, very strongly) resemble questions seen on GMAT Focus.

The only trouble is that the tests are too short, overpriced (in my opinion), oddly timed (24 questions in 45 minutes?  huh?), and a little bit of a rip-off, since some of the questions also appear in the GMAT official guide and quantitative review.  If you don’t believe me, click here to see a brief discussion of this in a Manhattan GMAT forum.

Over the past year, I’ve strongly encouraged my students do use GMAT Focus, but I think it’s time to advise everybody to stay away from it.  Believe it or not, one of my students just took a GMAT Focus test that had 14 questions that overlapped with the official guide (12th edition) or the quant review book (2nd edition).  That means that only 10 of them were fresh questions.  Dude, my poor GMAT student totally got ripped off.

(Luckily, my student didn’t recognize all of the questions, and still missed 6 of the 14 repeats.  It’s safe to say that he still got a good math workout; it’s also safe to say that his GMAT tutor needs to kick his butt a little bit harder.)

Here’s the complete list of questions that appeared on this particular GMAT Focus test:

  • official guide DS #33, 45, 48 (though I found it interesting that they removed the reference to the year 1989 in that question), 66, 70, 75, and 76
  • official guide PS #48, 81, and 89
  • quantitative review DS #33
  • quantitative review PS #142, 146, and 147

And if you’re curious, here’s the complete list of GMAT Focus repeats that I’ve marked over past few months:

  • official guide DS:  #44, 45, 52, 53, 62, 66, 68, 70, 75, 76, 79, 82, 87, 90, 94, 110, 121, 123
  • official guide PS:  #73, 74, 81, 89, 107, 117, 148, 163
  • quantitative review DS: #11, 33, 122
  • quantitative review PS:  #142, 146, 147

I’m sure that I haven’t caught everything, but this should be enough to convince you that GMAT Focus probably isn’t worth $25 per test.

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GMAT verbal underperformance

Posted on March 3, 2010 | 1 Comment

I recently received an email from a lovely mother of three who has done an absolutely heroic job of raising her GMAT quantitative score from 18 to 36 in just a few months. That’s an amazing jump, and her math tutor deserves a cookie. Unfortunately, the poor woman has seen her GMAT verbal score move in the opposite direction in the past few months: she’s gone from a 33 to a 26 to a 24.

If you were her, you’d probably be pretty upset, too.

Believe it or not, she’s absolutely not alone. I think that about 20-30% of the people I meet have experienced some sort of inexplicable verbal calamity on the GMAT. By “calamity,” I just mean that their official GMAT scores don’t match their practice test scores—and unfortunately, the scores sometimes aren’t even close. This seems to happen much more often on the verbal than on the math section, and it took me quite a few years to figure out why that might be the case.

First of all, I really don’t think that the GMAT official guides necessarily give you a good sense of what “real” verbal questions feel like. Very few of the reading comprehension and critical reasoning questions in the official guide seem to be much tougher than, say, 650-level questions. I’ve seen plenty of actual GMAT passages that are nearly incomprehensible, but there are very few such passages in the official guides. (Many of my students–especially those who scored above a 35 on the verbal–seem to share my opinion on this.) The bottom line is that students who rely primarily on the GMAT OGs might be thrown off by the surprisingly difficult critical reasoning and reading comprehension passages on the real test.

Worse yet, some students rely far too heavily on “knockoff” test-prep material, and you know how I feel about that. It’s outrageously difficult for test-prep companies to accurately copy the nuanced style of the verbal section of the GMAT, and non-official practice questions are inevitably very different from the real thing. In a lot of cases, using these materials can actually do more harm than good, unfortunately. Students grow accustomed to the question-writing style of their chosen test-prep firm, and then feel suffer mightily when they take the real test. The best test-prep firms offer some good techniques for tackling the verbal, but I think it’s a mistake to rely too heavily on their practice tests. There is no replacement for official GMAT and LSAT materials, and most students will do best if they use “knockoff” tests sparingly.

But I think the most important reason for verbal underperformance has nothing to do with study habits: many test-takers are simply way too “amped” when they start the verbal section. For pretty much everybody, the quant section of GMAT is an intense experience–you’re racing against the clock, the adrenaline starts to flow, and you push yourself as hard as you possibly can. You take your little eight-minute break, and then you go back in to the testing room, foaming at the mouth, ready to rip the verbal to shreds.

And in your haste to power your way through the verbal, you get a little bit too intense, and maybe you skip a word here or there. You finish with a few minutes to spare, or maybe more. And then your score sucks. Why? If you’re not reading very, very carefully, you’ll get GMATed by every verbal question type. Even if you miss just one key word on every other question, you’ll do massive, massive damage to your score.

Case in point: an unusually brilliant JD/MBA applicant hired me for two weeks of fast-paced, balls-to-the-wall GMAT lessons. This guy is at an Ivy League law school, and he’s ridiculously smart, even when compared to other Ivy League lawyer types. He hired a GMAT tutor just to help him to shake off some math rust, and needed basically no help on verbal. On the GMATPrep test that he took before his first tutoring session with me, Mr. Ivy League Law scored a 37 on math, and somewhere in the mid-to-high 40s on verbal. So we focused on math, and brought his actual GMAT quant score up to a 47 after just a couple of weeks.

Awesome, right? But hold on: Mr. Ivy League Law was so amped after the math that he raced through the verbal at breakneck speed, and finished with 20 minutes (!!) to spare. His verbal score dropped to a 41. That’s still enough for a 710 composite, but if he’d taken a few more deep breaths, he could have easily gotten a 750. (Not that it really matters–a 710 is high enough, and Mr. Ivy League Law will soon be Mr. Ivy League JD/MBA. But he’s a great illustration of how an overaggressive approach to verbal can sabotage your score.)

So I’m convinced that stress, exhaustion, and haste are the biggest culprit for almost everybody whose real GMAT verbal score doesn’t seem to match their practice test scores. If you have a tendency to race too much on the verbal, taking a few deep breaths might be more important than any studying you could possibly do. When you finish the quant, use your eight-minute break to re-orient yourself. Grab a snack or a drink or a smoke or whatever makes you happy, and relax a little bit. Focus on being precise and thorough and alert on the verbal. Even if you’re a slow reader, you’ll gain much more from being calm, focused, and accurate than you’ll lose from having to guess on a small handful of the 41 verbal questions.

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