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snarky Yale college advice, 1975 edition

Posted on August 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

This has absolutely nothing to do with the GMAT, MBA admissions, or GMAT tutoring. Just warning you.

I was wandering around NYC with some visiting friends this weekend, and we decided that it would be fun to take them to Strand Bookstore, which is one of my favorite places in New York. Eighteen miles of books (supposedly), many of which are piled on sidewalk carts for $1 each. If you’re from somewhere else and you come to NYC, the store is worth a visit.

My bizarre little $1 treasure for today was tattered paperback copy of The Insiders’ Guide to the Colleges, written by The Yale Daily News in 1975, long before college rankings became such a huge national obsession. I was curious to see how top schools were perceived more than three decades ago.

I’m not sure that I learned all that much, but I had a good laugh. The writers are snobby and snarky, and definitely have some Ivy League bias.

I reflexively opened to their commentary on Stanford, my alma mater: “There is a certain trendiness in the air which often stifles any serious attempt to approach an academic problem. The school’s California provincialism can be extremely irritating.

“One manifestation of the student body’s provincialism is their penchant for calling the school ‘the Harvard and Yale of the West,’ or even for terming Harvard and Yale ‘the Stanfords of the East.’ The analogies simply aren’t true.

“…There are also a huge number of students who only care about getting good grades… and another, almost equally large percentage who aren’t really interested in doing anything…. If you want the best education (and the most heterogeneous student body) available anywhere in the country, look to the Ivies.”

Lest they be accused of east-coast bias, the goofballs who wrote this book crapped all over plenty of other schools. In their commentary on Tufts, they said this: “Everybody knows, of course, that it is the goal of most high school students in the Northeast to go to college in Boston. That way you can get a lot of hippie, loose-moraled girls if you are a guy, or a lot of radical committed free guys if you are a girl… and you can get a good deal of dope to tide you over the bad times.”

Fordham: “Fordham University is a Roman Catholic institution, and therein lies its problem.” (!!)
Davidson: “The fact is, many of the students have never been north of the Mason-Dixon line, and occasionally those in the administration and faculty act as if they haven’t either–and what’s more, they don’t care.”
Harvard: “The college atmosphere sometimes seems to ruin those personalities that weren’t warped to begin with.”
Columbia: “…Columbia is unbeatable. But the decision whether to take that beating should be made very carefully.”

Hilarious, right? Of course, the Yalie dorks who wrote the book included a glowing four-page review of Yale itself. Not exactly an unbiased piece of writing, but highly entertaining. I’d love to see somebody write a similar book about MBA programs now–can you imagine the lawsuits?

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you got GMAT-ed

Posted on August 6, 2009 | 5 Comments

I’m toward the end of my second full month of tutoring in NYC, and it’s been interesting to see how my GMAT students here differ from the gang that I taught in DC. I had an amazing range of students in DC, including a couple of people who started at or above 700, quite a few others who started in the high 300s or low 400s, and pretty much everything in between. My first group of NYC GMAT students, on the other hand, consists almost entirely of ass-kickers, gunning for something close to a 700. I’ve met two guys who have gone through every official GMAT question twice; both of them diligently kept notebooks of all of their mistakes, and still didn’t get the scores they wanted. Pretty much everybody else I’ve met has graduated from a Kaplan, Veritas, Princeton Review, or Manhattan course. With only one exception, all of my students have consistently scored in the 600s on the real GMAT, and in the 600s and 700s on practice test.

So all of these guys know the test really, really well. Generally, they start by asking questions about the tough stuff–combinatorics, hard rate problems, set theory, conditional probability, and the most vicious of sentence correction problems. Hardly any of these guys are the least bit worried about their algebra or arithmetic skills when they call me.

I have a few little files of “easy” GMAT questions, mostly consisting of basic algebra, arithmetic, and geometry. Eighth-grade level math, at most. Over the past few weeks, I’ve given the set to most of these veteran GMAT warriors.

How did they do? Well, one student got a perfect score, which is exactly what he should have done if he wants to get a 700. (I’m very proud of you, Mr. V. May the GMAT gods grant you a 750 and admission to the MBA program of your dreams.) Everybody else got ripped to shreds, missing somewhere between 15% and 30% of the questions. That would be fine on medium-to-hard (say, 600- or 700-level) GMAT questions, but nobody with dreams of Harvard or Stanford MBA programs should miss this kind of stuff.

Here are a few examples of reasonably easy questions that caused problems:

1. You drop a ball from a height of 16 meters. Each time you drop the ball, it bounces to a level half as high as its starting point. If you catch the ball after the fourth bounce, how far did the ball travel?
(A) 30 meters
(B) 31 meters
(C) 40 meters
(D) 41 meters
(E) 45 meters

2. If x and y are two-digit integers such that x < 40, which of the following is closest to the maximum possible value of xy ?
(A) 400
(B) 1,600
(C) 4,000
(D) 16,000
(E) 40,000

3. If the numbers 13/24, 9/16, 1/2, 2/3, and 5/8 were ordered from greatest to least, the middle number of the resulting sequence would be
(A) 13/24
(B) 9/16
(C) 1/2
(D) 2/3
(E) 5/8

I’m not sure that any of these questions are much more than 500-level questions, but some good GMAT math students screw these up regularly, just because they don’t read carefully, or because they rush through their calculations. Sometimes it seems that arithmetic and algebra questions cause 600+ scorers to immediately think “this is easy, I’m going to destroy this question in 25 seconds so I can move on to harder stuff”… and then they make a dumb mistake. I call this phenomenon “getting GMAT-ed.”

The GMAT writes questions specifically to test your precision, and they’re trying to get you to fall into traps by being imprecise or careless. If you don’t count the bounces carefully, you won’t get (E) for question 1. If you jump to conclusions on #2 (i.e. by misreading an inequality sign or by missing the word “two-digit”), you might not know that the answer is (C). There’s nothing magical about question #3, but it’s easy to get overconfident and make a calculation or comparison error. The answer, incidentally, is (B). Easily 30% of my 600+ students have missed a version of that last one, even though it’s just a simple comparison.

The moral of the story? If you read a math question and you think that it’s easy, watch your back. Don’t let overconfidence get in the way of your GMAT score. Check your answer twice–it’s always worth spending an extra 15 seconds to make sure that you haven’t done something silly.

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a ridiculous, expensive GMAT myth

Posted on July 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

Before I make the main point of this post, a few disclaimers: 1) I have absolutely nothing against GMAT prep classes; on the contrary, I think that they’re more cost-effective than a tutor for many students. 2) I have absolutely nothing against any of the major GMAT test-prep companies. In fact, I had an absolutely wonderful experience working for one in the early 2000s. 3) The following is meant to be informative, not bitter or critical.

OK. Just wanted to make sure that I made it clear that I’m not trying to be a jerk here.

But I had to share this with anybody who might be interested. I just started working with a new student here in NYC, and she’s using a GMAT tutor as a supplement to a test-prep course. Her classroom teacher apparently said the following: “If you’re debating between A and D on a GMAT question, the answer is probably A.”

Whoa. Really? This deserves a special place in the Crappy Test Advice Hall of Fame, alongside the old adage about picking C whenever you need to guess.

I would be shocked if the GMAT doesn’t randomize its answer choices. Randomizing might be a little bit tricky on, say, data sufficiency, but I’m pretty certain that A and D are both correct about 20% of the time on GMAT. It’s an awfully sophisticated test; why would they do something stupid like making A the answer most of the time?

As soon as my student said this to me, I probably got a crazed, skeptical look on my face. I started searching for any conceivable explanation… was it on sentence correction, and the teacher just meant to say that people are often overly reluctant to choose A? Was it on data sufficiency, where the same might be true? Nope. My student insisted that they were discussing a plain old math problem solving question.

Again, (here comes disclaimer #4), this is second-hand information, and I’m wondering whether something got lost in translation from teacher to GMAT student to tutor. But if a major test-prep company is making blanket statements about A (or D or C or any other letter) being a fundamentally better guess than other choices, that’s pretty scary stuff.

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exhausting the OGs: a case study

Posted on July 22, 2009 | 3 Comments

As a private GMAT tutor who presents himself in unconventional ways, I tend to attract unusual students. People who are “average” or “typical” tend to do well in prep classes; there’s no need for them to pay for a private GMAT tutor. Often, I find that I’m the GMAT resource of last resort. I get lots of calls from people who have already done everything they can (self-study, prep courses, perhaps repeated re-takings of the GMAT) and can’t think of anything else, so they call an independent tutor, hoping that I can offer some help.

Usually, I immediately have an idea of what to do for a student. Some people complain about their GMAT verbal scores, but haven’t had a lick of SC grammar training–it’s easy to see that there is, at the very least, a content issue in these cases. Some students reveal major deficiencies in their math preparations, and these are also easy enough to fix. I’m about to start working with a student who has scored 330 and 430 on her first two practice tests, and is in the middle of a prep class; at least as a starting point, she just needs a little bit of one-on-one attention to help her grasp some fundamental concepts and build her confidence. Basically, there’s an obvious starting point with nearly every GMAT student I’ve ever worked with, and I can usually figure that out over the phone.

But when I first came to NYC last month, I met a student who might, in some ways, know more about the GMAT than I do. This guy has done every single official GMAT question (OG 11, OG 12, Verbal Review, Quant Review, GMATPrep, GMAT Focus)… twice. And he’s taken all of the Manhattan GMAT tests twice. He kept a journal of all of his mistakes. And he’s taken the real GMAT test twice. I couldn’t ask for a more thorough course of self-study.

Strangely, the poor guy (let’s call him Mr. V) is stuck with a sub-650 score, with particularly weak outcomes on the verbal section (low 40s on quant, but he was right around 30 on the verbal). Apparently, Mr. V called two other independent GMAT tutors before contacting me, and both said that they couldn’t do anything to help him. And I can understand why. What can possibly be done to help this guy, when he has apparently left no stone unturned? He has a strong work background, but is aiming for a 700+ GMAT score so that he can have a shot at top schools. Jumping from, say, 620 to 700 is no joke under the best of circumstances, but it’s one hell of a task for a student who has already devoured everything that GMAC has ever published.

I was honest with Mr. V from the start: I’m not sure how well any of this will work, but I gave him a smorgasbord of options. Ultimately, we decided to do a full run-through of all of the key grammar concepts on sentence correction, as well as a quick tour through the math content to see if we could find any holes in his understanding of the fundamentals. Beyond that, we realized that we needed to squeeze every possible drop of knowledge out of the official GMAT material, and we had to find some way to supplement the verbal content with outside sources.

For sentence correction, I’m forcing poor Mr. V to identify every single mistake in every wrong answer choice. Much of the material in the OGs is far easier than what he saw on the actual GMAT, and I realized that he probably hadn’t really trained himself to find every type of error. I think this approach is driving him nuts, but seems to be helping somewhat. (I’ve given the same assignment to other students, with mixed results.)

On the math section, we’ve discovered that Mr. V is an algebra genius, but that he gets tripped up by some of the logic- and word-based material. Combinations, permutations, conditional probability, and venn diagram questions tend to make him see double. So we’re working through some methods to make him more systematic in his approaches to those questions, and we’re both digging around to find as many additional, 700-level problems as we can for those topics.

The other two GMAT verbal sections, as is often the case, have proven to be more problematic. I’ve shown Mr. V several different tactics for approaching GMAT critical reasoning, most of which involve creating some sort of visual guide for navigating the questions. I’m not sure how well the tactics themselves are working, but we decided to make him suffer through LSAT logical reasoning questions alongside the OG critical reasoning material. At worst, the LSAT material will make the GMAT seem a little bit easier and more straightforward; I hope that he’ll look at the verbal section of the actual GMAT and be a little bit less intimidated by the convoluted language. At best, a steady practice diet of LSAT might actually cure him of his logical errors.

Mr. V’s test date is still a few weeks away, and I’ll probably be almost as nervous as he will be. I’ve certainly helped some unique individuals reach their MBA goals, but Mr. V has forced us to rewrite the GMAT test prep playbook. I just hope that the first draft of the new playbook is good enough to get him the points he needs to achieve his MBA goals. I’m fascinated, and will update this page with his progress.

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comparing GMAT tutoring rates (no, not mine)

Posted on July 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

I was just thinking about the good ol’ days when I worked for a big test-prep company, and I was curious to see what the going rate might be for tutoring purchased through similar companies. In case you’re curious, here are GMAT private tutoring rates for the four biggest names in GMAT prep, presented in alphabetical order:

Kaplan: rates range from about $133/hr (with purchase of a 35-hour GMAT tutoring package) to $163/hr (if you buy only 15 hours).

Manhattan GMAT: $185/hr if you purchase 25 hours, $215/hr if you only buy 10 hours

Princeton Review: prices range from $150-$450/hr, depending on whether you choose a “standard” GMAT tutor, a “master” GMAT tutor, or a “premier” GMAT tutor.

Veritas: about $164/hr with purchase of a 42-hour GMAT tutoring package, $175 if you go for 28 hours, $200/hr for 14 hours.

These rates were taken from each company’s own website on July 15, 2009. If asked, I searched for GMAT tutors in New York City–it’s possible that rates are different outside of NYC.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on this. All I’m going to say is that I earned less than $20/hour in 2002 when I worked as a test-prep tutor and classroom instructor for one of these companies, and I was given very little training by the company. I’m not saying that it isn’t worth the price–after all, these companies usually include a fat wad of books and materials in the tutoring package, and it’s arguably worth the extra money to hire a familiar, “reliable” company. I’m not going to tell you that independent GMAT tutors are necessarily better for everybody, but if you go with one of the big GMAT behemoths, please shop carefully.

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five-minute rule

Posted on July 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

When I was a teenager, I worked in a crappy chain diner in the Midwest, where I received my first introduction to the “30-second rule.” Over the following decade or so, I heard varying versions of the 30-second rule in bars and restaurants: there was the 5-second rule, the 10-second rule, and–for the slowest and most unethical restaurant staff–the five-minute rule.

If you have to ask: whenever somebody drops something in a restaurant, somebody is likely to shout “30-second rule,” meaning that whatever fell on the floor is still “good” if you pick it up within 30 seconds. (Assuming, of course, that no customers or managers are watching.) Silverware? No problem, it can go out to the customer’s table if it’s picked up within 30 seconds. A hamburger fell on the ground? No worries, we have 30 seconds to pick it up and put it back together. A slice of pie? Trickier, but definitely doable if you scoop it up, put it in the microwave, and top it with some ice cream.

You’ll never eat out again, right?

And does this have anything to do with MBA admissions?

Yeah, sort of. It’s midsummer, which means that the most ambitious MBA applicants are beginning to throw all of their spare time into the GMAT. The earliest first-round deadlines are less than three months away, and this is the time of year when you might be thinking, “okay, I’ll spend two months studying for the GMAT, and once that’s done, I’ll focus on my essays.”

I tell everybody the same thing: don’t wait to start your essays. Many of you probably know this, but writing these essays is exponentially more time-consuming than you might think. A set of four, 400-word essays might not sound like much, but it can be unbelievably tough to put your entire life in a flattering, readable, 1600-word package, especially if you’re trying to avoid sounding like an egomaniac. Almost every applicant (and this goes for non-MBA applicants, too) underestimates the amount of time needed for the applications, especially if your energy is simultaneously sapped by the GMAT.

If you’re still doing battle with the GMAT, I strongly recommend employing the five-minute rule. (Every time you drop food on the floor, wait five minutes before picking it up. It’ll taste great, and build your immune system! Oops, sorry, wrong industry…) Every day, spend about five minutes on your essays, even if it just means brainstorming a little bit, writing a phrase here or there, taking a couple of notes, or crossing something out. Sometimes, you’ll be inspired to do some serious writing, and that’s great. At the very least, you’ll keep yourself engaged in your MBA essays, and they’ll always be somewhere in the back of your head.

This might sound silly, but many professional writers will tell you that they come up with their most brilliant ideas and phrases at the most random times–in the shower, at the gym, walking the dog, or whatever. Their “ghost writer” (i.e. their own subconscious) is doing most of their work, but they have to make sure that they “tell” the ghost writer what to work on.

I’m not going to tell you that you’ll be able to completely finish your essays in five minutes a day, but I guarantee that you’ll make some great conceptual progress if you’re 100% disciplined about looking at your MBA applications every day. By the time you’re finished with the GMAT after (hopefully) a month or two of studying, you’ll at least have a great set of notes and outlines, studded with brilliant phrases. At that point, the task of turning your MBA essays into something truly spectacular will be much, much easier.

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what? the test-prep industry isn’t totally awesome?

Posted on July 10, 2009 | 1 Comment

I just read a great article in the Wall Street Journal that pretty much hits it on the head when it comes to the test-prep industry: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html. It doesn’t specifically mention GMAT, but it’s still an interesting commentary that applies, in some ways, to everything in the test-prep industry.

Basically, the article quotes a bunch of academic studies that suggest that the average score improvement from SAT and ACT prep courses is minimal: about 30 points on the SAT, and less than 1 point (!!) on the ACT composite. The article, based on some solid reporting from students at Lowell High School in San Francisco, also accuses test-prep companies of rigging their “diagnostic tests” so that they can claim that their students had huge score improvements.

They wouldn’t really do that, would they?

Um, yeah, they would. It’s the oldest trick in the test-prep book, and I’m surprised that parents and students are still duped by promises that a certain tutor or class “will raise your score by 240 points… guaranteed!” I’ve been teaching test-prep for nearly a decade now, and I can tell you that there are never any guarantees–some students, for a host of reasons, will never gain 240 points on their SAT score, no matter how brilliant their prep course or tutor may be. (Similarly, there are some people who will never gain 240 points on their GMAT score.) And yes, many companies still rig their “diagnostic” tests so that they can claim that you made a huge score jump.

Don’t get me wrong: score increases of 240 points happen on the GMAT, but they’re exceedingly rare. Familiarity with the test will definitely improve your score, and a thorough review of basic test content is always productive. A great tutor will help you with the psychological aspect of testing, and any good teacher will help you to get a grip on the trickiness inherent in GMAT. But everybody is different, and there are limits to what prep courses and GMAT tutoring can achieve for any given individual.

All I’m saying is that it’s good to be wary of the claims and statistics. The lively forum debates help keep GMAT prep companies honest, but there are still lots of snake-oil salesman in our midst.

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why rankings are (partially) BS

Posted on July 9, 2009 | 1 Comment

I used to hate talking about college admissions with my father. He was absolutely convinced that there was, somehow, a big difference between the #12-ranked university and the #14-ranked school, based solely on US News & World Report’s annual list. On multiple occasions, I’ve told him that he’s completely full of crap. Now, I’m going to tell you why he’s full of crap.

First of all, keep in mind that MBA and undergraduate rankings are based on completely arbitrary formulas concocted by some random journalists. (Click here for some commentary on the formulas themselves.) I’m not saying that the basic components are necessarily flawed (who would disagree with the notion that salary increases, reputation, and student selectivity are good indicators of the quality of an MBA program?), but there’s some randomness in the way that any particular list might choose to quantify and weight these measures. They should always be taken with a grain of salt.

And then there’s my favorite indicator of the stupidity of rankings: the contradictions among the various lists. Here are a few of my favorites:

Dartmouth (Tuck): #1 MBA program according to Forbes, #3 in The Economist, but #12 in Business Week

Southern Methodist: #18 in Business Week (WTF??), #47 in US News and World Reports, and not even ranked in The Economist or Financial Times

Carnegie Mellon (Tepper): #15 in US News & World Reports and #24 in the Financial Times, but #5 according to a Wall Street Journal survey of recruiters

Berkeley (Haas): #4 in The Economist, #7 in US News, #10 in Business Week, #16 in the Financial Times

Yale: #9 in Financial Times, #10 in US News, #15 in The Economist, #24 in Business Week

Northwestern (Kellogg): #3 in US News and Business Week, but #10 among US schools in the Financial Times… and only #21 globally

Would anybody out there really believe that Kellogg isn’t even among the top 20 business schools globally? Would any of you put Tepper above Harvard on any list? Would any of you dream of putting Southern Methodist above Yale, as Business Week did?

All I’m saying is that these rankings should be taken with a big, fat grain of salt. If you’re thinking that you want to go to a “top 10 b-school” or a “top 20 MBA program,” make sure that you don’t rely on just one of these silly, arbitrary lists.

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my quest for 800… er, 790

Posted on July 8, 2009 | 1 Comment

I was just thinking about my previous entry about how hard it is to score an 800 on the GMAT, and realized that I was arguably being a little bit too impersonal about it. For what it’s worth, I’m definitely gunning for an 800 next time I take the test. Is that a realistic goal? Probably not–I’m a precise test-taker, but I’m not sure that I’m quite precise enough to get an 800 on the GMAT. But I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t going to try.

(Though I might screw myself over in a small way if I manage to get an 800. Test-takers who earn an 800 are banned from taking the GMAT for five years, which means that I’d miss out on my annual visits to the testing room. Boy, that would suck.)

And just to recap, my GMAT tutoring career began with a subpar practice test when I worked for a large test-prep company, and I slowly have worked my way through the 700s. My most recent score was a 780 (51Q/47V). If there’s room for me to improve, it’s probably in the verbal section. I would love to crack 51 in math, but I’ve been humbled enough times already, and I don’t think that I’m the guy who can pull that off.

So what would a GMAT tutor do to improve on his own verbal score of 47? The same things, basically, that I ask my students to do once they’ve ripped through all of the official guides. Lots and lots of LSAT practice to build skills and stamina for the hardest critical reasoning and reading comprehension questions, and then some polishing of my grammar and usage, based largely on (fun!) resources such as style guides and grammar manuals. It never hurts to go back through official SC questions with a fine-toothed comb, but I think we all agree that the hardest stuff in the official guides and GMATPrep tests do not even begin to prepare you for the real thing… especially not if you’re shooting for an insanely high GMAT score.

My schedule is still funky as I adjust to my new lifestyle in NYC, so I don’t know when I’ll have the time to re-take the test. Last year, I took it on about 24 hours’ notice, and I’ll probably do something similar this time around–when the mood strikes (and my schedule allows), I’ll jump on the first GMAT appointment I can find. As soon as I do that, I’ll post a few entries and share my experiences.

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Brutal SCs

Posted on July 5, 2009 | Leave a comment

One of my favorite new GMAT students in NYC asked me to take a look at a set of questions that have been floating around the internet for awhile.  It’s called Brutal SCs, and contains 70 sentence correction questions.  They’re supposed to be brutal, I guess.  And they are… just not in the way that the author (or compiler?) apparently intended.

I’d be lying if I told you that I analyzed every single question in the document with extreme care, but I did take a reasonably thorough survey of the first 25 questions.  I found major typos in four questions, and a fifth question had a misuse of the phrase “due to” in the non-underlined portion of the original sentence.  These mistakes may or may not have impacted the answer, but they definitely made me question the quality of the resource.

More importantly, several of the answers seemed to be just plain wrong.  At least two questions (#21 and #22, if you happen to have a copy) are very clearly flawed, and I’m deeply suspicious of several others.  In short, at least 20% of the questions in this resource contain mistakes of some sort, and I suspect that this figure is an understatement.

The bottom line:  stay away from Brutal SCs, and find another way to practice your GMAT sentence correction skills.

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how hard is 800?

Posted on July 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

Before I started to tutor in NYC, one of my old students asked me how long she would have to study to get an 800 on the GMAT.  I told her that she would be crazy to even think about trying.

I meant her no disrespect at all.  She is about to start her MBA program at the University of Chicago, so it’s safe to say that she’s an extremely talented woman.  But achieving an 800 on the GMAT is ridiculously tough.

Let’s start with some stats from the official GMAT site:  fewer than 50 students (out of roughly 250,000) score an 800 each year.  If you’re keeping score at home, this means than an 800 score would fall somewhere above the 99.98th percentile.  And that’s assuming that there are close to 50 people who get a perfect score–the figure could, in reality, be much smaller.

Now, let’s talk about the torture that GMAT will put you through if you start to get close to a score of 800.  (For the sake of illustration, I’m going to talk mostly about the quantitative section here.  The same ideas apply to verbal, but are trickier to explain.)  On the GMAT math section, formulas are of limited value on difficult questions.  You obviously need to know all of the fundamentals, but it’s easy enough for GMAT writers to cook up an evil question that defies formulaic thinking.

At the highest levels, there are some extremely wicked questions.  Last time I took the test, I ran into an absolutely brutal series notation question that destroyed me.  I spent eight minutes on it, and I still had no idea how to solve the stupid thing.  It was so complex that I couldn’t even remember the question after the test.  And believe me, I was trying like crazy to wrap my head around it, so that I could study it later. Nope.

So basically, the GMAT writers are brilliant enough to lay waste to almost everybody (including arrogant, Stanford-educated GMAT tutors with nearly 10 years of experience), at least some of the time.  I might have gotten 35 questions correct on the quant section last time around (though I’m sure that I made some dumb mistakes somewhere… I can say that I was extremely confident in 35 of my answers, and definitely missed at least two questions), and I scored a 51.  But the test can still stump me whenever it wants to, apparently.

And let’s talk about that raw quantitative score of 51.  I’ve never heard of anybody getting higher than a 51, and I’ve been stuck on that score for a long time.  Strangely, it’s theoretically possible to get a raw score of 60. (Visit http://www.mba.com/mba/thegmat/gmatscoresandscorereports if you don’t believe me.)  But I’m pretty sure that I understand what it means to get something higher than a 51:  you need to get those evil questions right, somehow.  I suspect that the impossibly hard questions would have kept coming last year, even if I’d managed to get that series notation beast right.

I’ll go back in to take the test again in the next few months, but the odds that I’ll ever get to 800 remain slim.  There’s absolutely no room for silly errors, and I would have to somehow slug my way through the dirtiest of the questions.  You won’t, of course, find any truly brual, 800-level questions in any official GMAT material, including the GMATPrep and GMAT Focus tests.  So there’s no way to practice, really, once you’re beyond a certain level.

I’m sure that very few of you are really gunning for an 800 (it won’t, in all honesty, really help you get into an MBA program), but I find it fascinating that the writers of the GMAT make it so tough to get the top score.

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nobody reads your essays, part II

Posted on July 2, 2009 | 1 Comment

Most GMAT students I’ve run across really don’t worry all that much about the analytical writing portion of the test, but I occasionally meet somebody who is absolutely neurotic about this part of the GMAT. In my opinion, there’s rarely any need to spend more than a token amount of time on AWA.

First of all, one of the main reasons why MBA programs care about the GMAT is because of rankings. Unfortunately, US News & World Reports will look less favorably on a b-school if the program has low composite scores, so admissions committees are forced to focus on your GMAT score. (The test is somewhat valuable in other ways, but that’s a story for another day.)

Of course, AWA has absolutely nothing to do with your composite score, and it therefore has no impact on MBA rankings. You don’t want to completely screw it up, but there’s no reason to believe that your AWA score of 5.0 would keep you out of Stanford. The adcom might start to wonder if your AWA score is, say, 2.5, but I see no reason to worry if your score is reasonably high. They’re looking for business leaders with decent communication skills, not novelists.

So what does it take to earn a “reasonably high” score? Not much, really. I’ve seen some really, really bad writers earn scores of 5.0 or 5.5. They took advantage of the fact that nobody really reads your AWA essay.

As you probably know, GMAT essays are graded by a computer and by a human; if there’s a discrepancy between the two scores, then an additional human reads the essay. Obviously, nobody really knows exactly how the computer’s scoring system works, but I’m absolutely convinced that the program primarily looks for structure using basic keyword algorithms. From there, it probably counts things like the average number of words per sentence, the average number of letters per work, and then it checks for grammar, usage, variety of words used, and perhaps spelling. I suspect very strongly that the structure is the most important part of the scoring system; spelling might not even count at all. (Again, I’ve seen some horrid spellers get really good scores.)

The “human,” for his part, is ultimately looking for the same things as the computer: structure, clarity, correctness, richness of language, etc. But this human probably doesn’t actually read your GMAT essays any more closely than the computer. Again, imagine that you’re the poor slob who gets paid $20/hour (as of a year or two ago, GRE and TOEFL graders earned $20/hour; I don’t know whether the rate is similar for GMAT) to read bazillions of these essays, most of which are tragically bereft of interesting content. Are you going to read every single word? Hell, no. You’ll skim the introduction, maybe read the first sentence of each paragraph, and then maybe skim the conclusion. (And if anybody asks, you’ll tell her that you read every single word with great care.)

When I wrote about the people who read (or skim) your MBA essays, I claimed that you should strive to make your essay interesting–you want them to read it carefully, right? For the AWA, you don’t necessarily care if the human grader (or the computer) actually reads your essay. You just want a good score.

So focus on structure, even if that means that you produce an essay that would, under normal circumstances, seem like a crappy, contrived piece of writing. Don’t beat around the bush: every paragraph should start by clearly stating the main point of the paragraph. The entire essay should start with a crystal-clear thesis statement. Somebody should be able to read the first sentences of each paragraph, and still basically understand the entire essay. Just make sure that you leave a few minutes to proofread the essay, just to make sure that you haven’t committed egregious grammar, usage, and spelling errors. (If this means that you don’t write a terribly long essay, that’s fine–quality matters more than quantity.)

Honestly, it’s almost that simple. If you lay out your argument in a completely clear, 5-paragraph format, you’ll be in good shape, especially if your writing mechanics (grammar, usage, etc.) are basically solid. You might ultimately write an essay that is about as much fun to read as a phone book… but fun isn’t really the point, is it?

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scary story about letters of recommendation

Posted on June 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

This isn’t the sort of post that will really help you get into an MBA program, but I thought this was an interesting story, and wanted to share.

Once upon a time, one of my all-time favorite GMAT students applied to about five schools during the first round.  She had a solid profile, with great work experience and interesting essays.  Her GMAT score was unspectacular, but should have been enough to get an interview or two.  Plus, she’s female, and that never hurts.

And guess what? She didn’t even get an interview from any of her first five target MBA programs.  Ouch.  (Both of us were wondering whether she’d hired the wrong GMAT tutor and admissions consultant.)

She tried again:  four schools this time, with three applications heading out in time for the second round deadline.  The fourth application, if I remember correctly, arrived for the third round.  This time, she scored interviews from three of the four schools, and was admitted to two.  One of them even offered a partial scholarship.  And I wouldn’t say that this second fleet of schools was much less prestigious than the first.

What happened?  We’ll never know for sure, but the only thing that changed was her recommenders.  Most notably, her boss (at the time) wrote recommendations for the first five schools, but not for the last four.  As luck would have it, my student was up for a performance review at work, sometime between her first five rejections and her subsequent acceptance to a top-tier MBA program.

And guess what?  It turned out that her boss absolutely hated her.  Again, we’ll never know for sure, but we strongly suspect that the boss wrote scathing (or at least indifferent) recommendations to the first five schools, effectively sabotaging her candidacy.

There’s no moral to this story, really.  You already knew that you should only ask trusted colleagues to write your recommendations, right?

Um, right?

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why you shouldn’t worry (too much) about percentile rankings

Posted on June 28, 2009 | 1 Comment

I’ve already met some brilliant MBA candidates in my first few weeks here in New York, but the most gifted GMAT student I ever tutored was probably a young woman I met in DC, before my Manhattan days.  She was a cum laude graduate of Duke University’s economics program, and she had already earned a ridiculously high score on the GRE.  She was solidly scoring in the 700s on her GMAT practice tests, and just wanted help getting her math score “as close to perfect as possible.”

I’ll be honest:  there’s a pretty good chance that this particular student (let’s call her Susan) was smarter than I am, and that’s a beautiful and intimidating situation to be in as a GMAT tutor.  I suspected (correctly) from the start that she didn’t have any fundamental GMAT math weaknesses; all I could offer was some practice questions designed to help her make connections on the hardest GMAT math questions.  (Basically, math formulas are of limited value on hard GMAT questions, and you need to be able to “see” a connection before you’ll have any prayer of getting the right answer.  I’ll expand on this in another post.)

Basically, tutoring Susan meant spending two hours inventing the hardest GMAT-style questions I could possibly come up with.  I loved it, and I probably learned more from the experience than she did.  Occasionally, I’d manage to stump her, and that was great.  After about eight or ten tutoring sessions, we decided that she had probably “worked her GMAT math muscles” as much as was reasonable, and she went to take the test.

And she was bitterly disappointed when she looked at her percentile ranking.  She scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal, and her composite score was also in the 99th percentile.  Her quantitative score, however, was only in the 84th percentile.  How could this be true?  She scored a 760, but somehow wasn’t even in the top 10% in math? WTF?

If you have any experience with the GMAT, you surely realize that a score of 48 on the math is pretty darned impressive.  (Frankly, anything above 40 is probably good enough to allay any fears that an MBA admissions committee might have about your quant skills, but that’s another topic entirely.)  For whatever reason, however, there are lots of impressive math whizzes taking the GMAT.  A full 20% of test-takers earn a score between 47 and 51.  The score distribution, then, is not a bell curve at all for the quantitative section–it basically looks like a slowly increasing function, with an extra little jump at the end.

I admiringly call this the “Asian effect.”  Based on anecdotal evidence, I’m convinced that most of the people who achieve quantitative scores in this range are not products of the United States education system.  (News flash:  by global standards, we Americans are generally pretty lousy at math.)  Basically, there are a ton of people in Asia who demolish the quantitative section of the test, and make a whole lot of GMAT-takers feel inadequate when they see their percentile score.

Interesting, the verbal score distribution is almost a perfect bell curve.  Similarly, the composite score distribution is also a fairly non-skewed bell curve.  This suggests that most of the GMAT “quant ninjas” are not particularly great at verbal.

The bottom line?  If you’re trying to get into top MBA programs, it’s probably OK to have a math score “only” in, say, the 70th or 75th percentile.  Don’t let the percentile score mess with you:  if your raw quant score is comfortably in the 40s, it probably won’t, by itself, sabotage your MBA dreams.

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nobody reads your essay, part I

Posted on June 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

If you’ve ever attempted to write a really good essay for an MBA application (or for any other graduate or undergraduate program), you know how hard it is.  It’s not like crapping out a financial report or a blog post or an essay on the use of soliloquys in Hamlet.  These essays take a whole lot of thought and effort, especially if you’re trying to flatter yourself in 400 words without sounding like a raging egomaniac.

And guess what?  Much of the time, nobody cares.

Imagine that you’re the guy who gets to read every single application that rolls into, say, HBS.  You would read roughly 6700 applications, each of which contains at least four essays.  That’s 26,800 essays, most of which come flooding in within 72 hours of one of the deadline dates.

For a little bit of perspective, here’s a completely random story about essays…  once upon a time, I was part of a small team of “scorers” for an international academic competition.  Along with one other scorer, I was asked to rate 160 essays, giving each one a score from 1-100, and ranking the top three essays in each of two age groups.

And it was absolutely excruciating.  Not because the essays were bad, but because it took forever to read each one.  After about five essays, we figured out that it was best to just skim the introduction and the conclusion; if the essay looked good in the introduction, we would read the first sentence of each paragraph to determine whether the essay merited consideration for an award.  After skimming about 80 introductions and conclusions, we stopped even bothering with the conclusions, and started slapping on scores based on the introduction and (embarrassingly) the handwriting in each essay.

So no, we didn’t really read anything.  And we only had 160 essays.  Imagine if we were asked to read 26,800 essays, as our poor, hypothetical HBS guy does.

My point is that even the most well-intentioned reader of MBA applications will inevitably skim most of your essays.  If you’re unlucky, the reader won’t even bother to read anything beyond your introduction.  No adcom member in their right minds would ever admit to it, but it’s simply human nature to skim essays when you have a massive pile of them in front of you–especially when the essays don’t exactly start with a bang.

So what can you do about this?  Write essays that start with a bang, and write essays that are easy to read.  If you write long, verbose paragraphs, virtually any human being will be inclined to start skimming… or put the essay down entirely.  No matter how wonderful your work experiences or extracurriculars are, there’s always the risk that the reader won’t actually read your carefully crafted comments if you don’t make them seem interesting, gripping, and unique from the start.

We all know that MBA programs are looking for great potential business leaders, not great potential poets or novelists or journalists.  But they still love a good, well-written story, and a little bit of writing flair might be exactly what you need to have them notice your potential as a business leader.  If you keep your paragraphs short and write with at least a modicum of humor, it will help your essays to be worth the effort that you pour into them.

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a quick acknowledgment

Posted on June 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

Most of you really don’t care, but I wanted to thank my friend (and GMAT student) Mike DeMeo for inspiring this website title.

I’ve been teaching and blogging for a long time, but never bothered to put all of my thoughts on GMAT tutoring in one place.  Mike, like many other people, gently harangued me for failing to have a concentrated web presence, and then jumped all over me (in a good way) when I accidentally used the phrase “GMAT ninja” during a lesson.  He was convinced that it should be the name for my business, GMAT blog, and website.

And I (eventually) agreed.

Thanks, Mike.  May the GMAT gods grant you a big, fat, juicy 750 on your next score report.

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ignore the man behind the GMAT curtain

Posted on June 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

Pretty much all of my students have, at some point or another, seen a really easy question on the GMAT, and had a mild panic attack as a result.  We all know that the test is adaptive; if, say, question #25 seems really easy, doesn’t that mean that the test-taker is doing really really badly?

No, of course not.

Well, okay… maybe.  If you’re doing really badly, you probably will see some really easy questions, particularly on the math section of the test.  But there are other possible explanations, and perhaps you’ve heard them before; based on my experience as a GMAT tutor, these explanations still don’t prevent students from freaking out a little bit.

First of all, there are plenty of experimental questions on the GMAT test.  You might be kicking some serious butt, and then a complete softball comes your way.  Is it a sign that you weren’t really kicking butt?  Probably not.  You might just have received a little unscored nugget.  Answer the question as if it counts, and then put it out of your head.

I’m also convinced that the GMAT algorithms group questions by topic, and the test actually accounts for your performance on each topic.  You might have done wonderfully on the first, say, 12 questions on the GMAT, but then you miss your first geometry question.  Perhaps the test recalls that you screwed up on geometry, and then gives you an easy geometry question next time.  This is just speculation on my part, but I think it’s possible that seemingly easy questions might come at you when you’ve displayed weakness on a particular topic–even if you haven’t, in general, shown yourself to be a weak test-taker.

Most importantly, you should never worry about the difficulty level of the questions.  If a GMAT question seems easy, read it really, really carefully–it might not be as easy as you think, or you might be missing something crucial in the question.  And even if it is easy, why the hell would you want to waste your energy worrying about it?  Get the question right, and worry about your score at the end.

This might seem obvious to you, and this post is obviously just a little bit of nagging.  But it’s funny how many people apparently need to be reminded that they shouldn’t waste their time thinking about the algorithm and their score during the GMAT.

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stealth exponents

Posted on June 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

It’s always a little bit tricky and annoying to write math problems on a GMAT blog (there’s no way to comfortably write equations, unless you want to import images), but I’ll do my best with this topic.  I just want to make a few little comments about exponents, and how the GMAT Official Guides (referred to hereafter as “OGs”) can lull a perfectly good GMAT student into complacency on the topic.

Hopefully, you know all of the basic exponent rules.  If you’re multiplying two terms with the same base, you’ll add the exponents (example:  x^3*x^4 = x^7).  If you’re dividing, you know that you subtract the exponents, and then you might encounter something like a “power of a power” question (example:  (x^6)^2 = x^12).  If you know these rules and a few other basics (i.e. what happens if an exponent is negative, a fraction, or zero), you’ll be fine on the GMAT.  Right?

If you’re focused on the OGs… well, yes, you’ll be fine.  Let’s take a quick survey of the exponent questions in the problem solving section of the 12th edition of the OG:  #15, #28, #46, and #108 all contain exponents, but they’re mostly a matter of calculating (or simplifying) some numbers.  #104 and #110 look like exponent problems, but both are really about factors, not exponent properties.  #137 could be solved using exponent properties, but is just as easily done with some simple calculations and logic…

I could go on.  My point is, most of what you encounter in the OGs doesn’t require much knowledge of exponent properties.  And when you do need to use exponent properties, they’re just covering the basics.

Funny, I didn’t see anything basic last time I took the GMAT, and neither did most of my students who scored above 600.  I keep hearing the same refrain:  the exponent problems looked nothing like they do in the OGs.

I’m convinced–based on the GMATPrep, GMAT Focus, and the real thing–that the GMAT is much more likely to show you an exponent question that has something to do with factoring and/or “base conversion.”  Neither of these topics are dealt with much in any prep book, at least not to my knowledge.

Please accept my profuse apologies for the crappy notation, but here are a couple of examples of realistic, harder exponent problems (NOT from official GMAT material, lest I incur the wrath of some bigshot NYC lawyer sent by the bigshots who write the GMAT):

(7^10 – 7^8)/3 = (2^x)(7^y).  If x and y are integers, then what is the value of x + y?

3^(x-1) – 3^(x+1) = -(9^5)(2^3).  What is the value of x?

I’m not going to post solutions until I’m begged repeatedly, but hopefully you see where I’m going with this.  You’re going to see problems that require some factoring, as well as the ability to make some ostensibly unlikely connections.  Unless you’ve seen these problems, you might be wondering where the heck the 2′s are coming from.

Welcome to the GMAT.  If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re probably not doing well.  Either that, or you’re way smarter than I am, and you shouldn’t be wasting your time reading a blog posting about exponents on the GMAT.

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why I love the GMAT

Posted on June 5, 2009 | Leave a comment

When I first encountered the GMAT, I was working at a major test-prep firm as a GRE and SAT instructor.  At the time, I was 23 years old, and had absolutely no thoughts of business school.  For that matter, I hadn’t even finished my undergraduate degree; I was dancing professionally during an indefinite hiatus from university, and there was no reason why I would have any interest in the GMAT.

But as luck would have it, my company needed a GMAT teacher, and I was ushered into a computer lab to take a practice test.  After clobbering the ACT, SAT, and GRE, I figured that the GMAT would be basically the same deal.  For the first time in my life, I did “just okay” on the practice GMAT.  I did well enough to be initiated as a GMAT instructor, but I was nowhere near a perfect score.

And my curiosity was piqued.

Fast-forward eight or nine years, and I’m still playing with the GMAT.  I’ve worked as a private tutor for a long time now, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time tutoring the SAT and GRE and ACT–but there’s a special place in my heart (or brain?) for the GMAT.

The GMAT is, without question, the most complex and nuanced standardized test out there.  There’s absolutely no way to boil the GMAT down to a nice, simple series of tricks.  The GRE, by contrast, employs an extremely limited set of questions; once you know what to expect on the test (particularly the quantitative section), it’s just a matter of execution.  The GMAT seems almost infinite, and they seem to write questions that only the most ridiculous of geniuses are able to solve.  (When I took the GMAT last year, I spent eight minutes on a single question… and still had absolutely no idea how to solve it.  Whoever writes these questions is a bad, bad dude.)

So that’s why I’m here, all these years later.  Still playing with GMAT, still trying to figure out every little nuance and evil question, so that I can offer the most help possible for my friends and students who want to achieve their MBA goals.

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beware the knockoffs, part I

Posted on May 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

I was reading a thread on a GMAT forum a few days ago, and saw that the owner of a test-prep firm was telling students that they should avoid independent GMAT tutors who rely on commercially available GMAT materials.  The owner’s logic sounded good (hey, look, we know enough about the test to write our own book!  hire us!), but I wholeheartedly disagree with the idea that you should use material written by random companies.  The only GMAT materials you should completely rely on are the official guides–which are, of course, commercially available.  Anybody who claims that they’ve written something better is either lying, or completely deluded about the complexity of the GMAT.

It is extraordinarily difficult to copy the writing style of the GMAT, even on math questions that contain few, if any, words.  The GMAT is a ridiculously complex test, which is exactly why I love it.  (And, perhaps, exactly why you hate it.)  I don’t know exactly how many brilliant test-writers are employed by GMAC, but I suspect that it’s a fairly large fleet of people, and I’m certain that questions are very thoroughly vetted before they are ever inserted into the scoring algorithm for the real test.

The challenge for “knockoff” GMAT writers is even greater on the verbal section.  I’ve written and edited TOEFL practice tests, and I can say that took an enormous amount of effort to make our material sound even vaguely like the real thing.  GMAT verbal questions are even more detailed than TOEFL questions, and it’s extraordinarily hard to write GMAT questions that will be “hard in the same ways” as the real thing.  I’ve found countless mistakes in widely-published GMAT verbal material, and the companies seem to struggle with all three verbal question types.  Frankly, most of the mass-market publications will do more harm than good if you’re using them as primary verbal prep resources.

A majority of my students contact me after they’ve already taken either a prep course, or a reasonably thorough self-study course.  I’ve seen refugees from Veritas, Manhattan, and Kaplan in roughly equal numbers, as well as an occasional graduate of Princeton Review or other (less well-known) competitors.  Some of these companies are better than others (and one, in my opinion, stands head and shoulders above the rest), but the bottom line is that all of them are inevitably limited in their ability to replicate the GMAT experience.

For what it’s worth, the company that makes the very best “knockoff” materials manages to capture about 80-90% of the real GMAT experience, and that’s an astounding achievement.  (I feel that it would be inappropriate to make an endorsement here, so I won’t name the company.)  This same company probably makes its verbal questions look like the actual GMAT only 70% of the time–it’s amazing how often I see (or hear of) real GMAT questions that fall outside the scope of even the best “knockoff” curriculum.  Again, I think that this company is absolutely amazing for doing as well as they do, but that shows how hard the task of “reproducing” the GMAT really is.

The other companies?  Not even close, and I’ve looked at material from some of the most expensive, “boutique” test-prep firms, as well as the household names.  As a general rule, the verbal questions will do more harm than good, and even the second-best large company produces tests that are riddled with typos and errors.

I mean none of this disrespectfully–quite the opposite, actually.  These firms throw a ton of resources into an extremely difficult task, and their results are necessarily mixed.  But before you buy a practice resource sold by a small company, be very aware that the material will probably be filled with inaccuracies.  There are presumably a few gems out there, but all of them should be handled with extreme care.

I’m regularly asked if I include some sort of textbook or workbook or self-published GMAT guide as the backbone of my tutoring program.  I write supplementary GMAT questions all the time, but trust me on this:  you probably wouldn’t want to hire me if I relied primarily on a self-published resource.  A good GMAT tutor or test-prep firm will supplement lessons with their own materials, but any independent operator who says that they’ve written a magical, best-in-the-industry GMAT resource is probably exaggerating, if not egregiously lying.

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