The playlist was created based on a Stanford study that shows that certain types of music engage different areas of the brain and can improve skills such as paying attention, making predictions, and memory.

Check out Wash U’s blog post on Spotify Playlist here.

An Attention Enhancing Study Playlist provided by @WashULaw, an online LL.M Degree

Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

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This article originally appeared on the Accepted Admissions Consulting Blog, the official blog of Accepted.com.

The World’s Best Online Course

e-GMAT celebrates a major milestone this week – 1000 kudos and 100 reviews on GMAT Club.

Now get the world’s best line course at an incredible price of $199 – a 65% discount over the list price. The course now includes 10 mock tests,  5,000 questions, all the instruction that you need for GMAT Verbal as well as Integrated Reasoning combined with the world’s best analytics. The best thing – the course comes with mocks and GMAT Club tests ($250 value). To make the deal even sweeter, we have also included 12- month Grockit subscription ($350 value) in the package.

Whether you are someone who is looking to jump start his/her preparation or someone who is looking to boost his/her score 10 days before the exam, this course will get you there with 50+ hours of effort. Check out our success stories for evidence of past success. Here are some key features of the course.

Competitive Comparison

Key Features:

Completely online, accessible from anywhere:
The e-GMAT courses are accessible from anywhere as long as you have internet connection with speed128Kbps or higher.

100+ hours of instruction covering all aspects of GMAT Verbal: Verbal Online + Grockit includes our Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension and Integrated Reasoning eLearning courses and 1 year of Grockit Premium membership including 5 full length mock exams.

Most updated course:

Heard about the new “meaning based question-types” on GMAT Sentence Correction? Well it was not new for e-GMAT customers. The e-GMAT course had 33 such questions in August 2010 itself since our course was based on OG 12 and not on an older incarnation. We continuously update our course based on the updates from GMAC so you can be rest assured that you study from most relevant material.

Proper practice makes you perfect. The course provides you ample practice on the entire GMAT curriculum. And these are “gmat like questions” that you can take any time as per your convenience.

Foundation concepts:
You need a solid foundation if you plan to attain new heights on GMAT. To help you master these key skills we have designed concepts such as Sentence Structure, Logical Structure of arguments, & Pre-thinking for assumptions.

Learn from full time instructors:
Helping you succeed on GMAT is all we do. So when you work with us, you can be rest assured that you will be working with someone who is dedicated to your success. How does this make a difference in your prep– ask our customers who have interacted with us and you will know.

Hassle free return policy:
We are a small company and we like to keep things simple. If you don’t like our course, let us know and we will refund the money to you, as long as you have attempted less than 33% of our course. We are reasonable people and don’t want your money if you don’t like our product.

More Successful in Helping Non-Natives Succeed

More non natives succeed using e-GMAT’s courses than do using courses from all other test prep companies combined

Testimonials

Sumeet Vatsav (730, V39): “E-GMAT is blessing. Loved it! They cleared my -Ing modifier dilemma and As vs Like curse. Please give standing ovation to Rajat, Payal and the E-gmat team!” Click here to view his debrief on GMATClub.

Mahesh: It’s not enough to know all the rules, you need to know how to apply the rules. That’s where e-GMAT shines. I would not have been able to get into the 700 club without e-GMAT. Thanks to BB, I registered for SC course on e-gmat. Excellent course. If only I had a time machine and I could go back 2 months in time, I would have joined e-gmat SC course on day 1 of my preparation.

Jai Chandra Reddy: The live classes on Prethinking were amazing. The process of thinking yourself is amazing. If you take any other course, or read the book, you will take twice the time.

Payal’s phone interview with Jai Chandra Reddy (GMATClub: icaniwill) GC Testimonial link: click here

Success Stories

e-gmat course has helped many acheive their dream score. Let us share a few success stories with you.

Vipul – VIPS0000 –

10 days to go- thanks to some really twisted questions posted without OAs by some members, my confidence was shaken and I looked for some more help in SC. Thanks to BB, I registered for SC course on e-gmat. Excellent course. If only I had a time machine and I could go back 2 months in time, I would have joined e-gmat SC course on day 1 of my preparation.

Pooja Jolie (GC: pjolie)

About e-gmat Verbal: At this time, I decided that I needed a prep course to boost my verbal. After considering Vertias, MGMAT and Kaplan, I decided on e-GMAT’s live course because of its focus on verbal. This course took my preparation to the next level.

SC course: The SC concepts that I learned through MGMAT were crystal clear after going through this course. Two other things helped me a lot on SC. Firstly the fact that the course is very heavy on application. There are these application files that don’t teach you anything but to apply what you have learned. Secondly, they have this OG solutions video course that is awesome. SC articles by Shraddha form egmat were really helpful too.

CR course: The CR course when combined with live sessions is really good too. It helped me weave through the logic of arguments and provided me an approach for most CR questions types. My accuracy just shot up. I would definitely recommend this course if you need help on verbal. This course played a major role in improving my verbal from 30 to 42.

Gurpreet Singh (GC: gurpreetsingh)

I joined E-gmat course and found it very useful. I saw improvement in verbal after e-gmat course. The live sessions of RAJAT on strategy and CR are awesome. Payal and Shraddha are no less than Stacy and Ron of MGMAT. No doubt no one knows more than these two experts of Mgmat, but sometimes I used to find their replies too technical to grasp. On the other hand – the lives sessions of Payal and Shraddha were awesome. Their articles and replies on the questions are fabulous. REALLY something that helps you to learn the concepts. I would highly recommend e-gmat for non natives, not only the course but also the replies and articles of its representatives.

Saurabh (GC:SOURH7WK)

I subscribed for e-gmat verbal live course and started once again my preparation for 4th attempt. After I subscribed to E-gmat course I realized my shortfalls in my verbal strategy. The course was very very helpful to bring up my V23 score to V40. And I would fully attribute my verbal success to e-gmat.

SC course: A ton of thanks to the ace teachers of e-gmat (Rajat, Payal & Shraddha) for putting up their efforts in this forum too. I got everything I needed to crack SC and RC (the RC strategy worked very well with me). Knowledge of sentence structure & attacking SC question by splitting the clauses was the key in improving on SC.

Learn what to read now to best prepare yourself for GMAT Reading Comprehension

Not surprisingly, one of the very best ways to prepare for GMAT Reading Comprehension is simply to read, preferably from a high-quality reading list of GMAT-style material.  If you have only a few weeks between now and the GMAT, you probably should stick to GMAT RC passages for practice.  If, though, you have several months between now and your GMAT, you can afford to invest time in reading for the GMAT.  If you don’t like to read, that is all the more reason why you have to read, to get your mind in shape for the reading you will have to do on the GMAT.

What to read for the GMAT

First of all, what subject areas would be relevant?  All GMAT Reading Comprehension passages fall into one of four areas

1.  Physical Sciences

2.  Biological Sciences

3.  Social Sciences

4.  Business

A good reading plan for the GMAT should cover all four of these areas, and should all be material written at a high level of English usage.  While reading a Wikipedia article about a science topic you don’t understand might stretch your mind, there’s no guarantee the grammar or the choice of vocabulary will be of the highest quality.

The easiest area for which to make a recommendation is business, and there are more Reading Comprehension passages on this in the OG than on any of the other three categories.  If you are planning to go to Business school, get an MBA, and pursue a corporate career, you already should be reading the Wall Street Journal newspaper every day and the Economist magazine every week.  If you have never taken economics, it would be worthwhile to get either an Economics text book or some other introductory books, such as Yoram Bauman‘s Cartoon Introductions to Micro and Macroeconomics.  Those latter two books may not be at the highest level of English usage, but if you are lacking a strong background in economics, those books would be an excellent way to catch up.

For both the physical and biological sciences, Scientific American is an excellent source.  If you have a relative weak background in the natural sciences in general, pushing yourself through Scientific American articles could be excellent training for wrestling with similar passage on the GMAT.  If you are more ambitious, get your hands on a textbook (borrow from a friend or from the library) and force yourself to read a couple chapters.

For the social sciences, unfortunately most popularly available publications (e.g. Psychology Today) are not nearly academic enough.  Occasionally, the New York Times will cover an academic social science issue; in particular, if the Sunday NYT Book Review reviews a book about social science, that can be good material to read.  Here, unfortunately, there is no analog to the Economist magazine or Scientific American.  If you really want social science reading practice, I have to banish you to the academic journals.  Go to a good academic library, and peruse the highly respected social science journals: yes, this will be very dry and cerebral, but if you can stomach these, then anything the GMAT throws at you will seem easy.  You may also try this open access listing of online academic journals.

How to read for the GMAT

You know a question the GMAT Reading Comprehension almost invariably asks is the “main idea” question, so whatever you read, you should constantly be in the habit of summarizing the main idea(s) and the roles of each paragraph.  That’s a bare minimum.

Ideally, you will find a GMAT reading partner.  Then, if both of you struggle through the same article, you can quiz each other on the main idea, you can discuss points of view and tone and details.  If you are very ambitious, you can every start to write full practice GMAT Reading Comprehension for each other.  (If you practice having to create four tempting and credible-sounding wrong answers for each question you write, that process will give you great insight into the patterns that the GMAT uses in crafting its wrong answers.)

Here’s a practice social science GMAT Reading Comprehension question:

1) http://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/1215

This post was written by Mike McGarry, GMAT expert at Magoosh, and originally posted here.

If and are consecutive positive integers, and:

which of the following represents all the possible values of ?

(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
(E)

Verbal (SC)

For all his professed disdain of such activities, Auden was an inveterate literary gossip.

(A) For all his professed disdain of such activities
(B) Having always professed disdain for such activities
(C) All such activities were, he professed, disdained, and
(D) Professing that all such activities were disdained
(E) In spite of professions of disdaining all such activities

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What is the difference between these two GMAT tasks?

Some GMAT Reading Comprehension passages or AWA questions will have a “compare and contrast” type question.  Others will ask us to compare “the pros and cons” or “the benefits and liabilities” or “the advantages and drawbacks” of a particular decision or plan or strategy.  Students sometime wonder: what is the difference between these two tasks?

First of all, let’s consider a concrete example.  Suppose the topic is the New Deal programs initiated in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  This was a series of programs to combat the worst effects of the Great Depression as well as some of the problems in the financial system that caused it.  It produced numerous public works across the country, as well as systems that are still in place today, including both the Social Security System and the Security and Exchanges Commission (SEC).  (Incidentally, both of those are systems with which you should have at least passing familiarity before taking the GMAT.)  Politically, the New Deal is a charged topic, as American liberals would tend to valorize it as one of the great examples of a government program doing good for the public, and American conservatives would tend to vilify it as one of the worst examples of “big government” increasing spending and doing the jobs that private industry could have handled.  This is a complex topic with lots of room for disagreement.

Compare and Contrast

Any “compare and contrast” question is going to ask you to compare and contrast the New Deal with something else.  That’s the big idea of “compare and contrast”: it’s always an external comparison, a comparison of the thing you are discussing to some completely new thing.

For example, you might be asked to compare and contrast the New Deal with some other social or political program in the United States: Reconstruction, or L.B.J‘s Great Society, or Obamacare.  Alternately, you might be asked to compare the New Deal with a major social program in some other country, for example, the Great Leap Forward in China, or Gorbachev‘s Perestroika.  You would be asked to “compare” — that is, find similarities between the New Deal and the other program — as well as “contrast” — that is, find differences between the New Deal and the other program.

Any similarity could be a good thing both share, or a bad thing both share, or something neutral that they both share.  Any contrast or difference might be something good that one plan included and the other lacked, or might be a bad effect of one that wasn’t a bad effect of the other.  In other words, either comparing or contrasting could make the New Deal look either very good or not-so-good, and any particular comparison or contrast might be completely value-neutral and objective, simply stating a similarity or difference that doesn’t engender strong judgments.  Neither the word “compare” nor the word “contrast” necessarily mean either something good or something bad.

Here’s a GMAT RC practice question in which doesn’t use the word “compare” buy asks you to discern what makes a newer study different from earlier research.

1) http://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/1231

Pros and Cons

Any question about “pros and cons” or “benefits and liabilities” or “advantages and drawbacks” is asking you to talk only about features of the New Deal.  That’s the big idea of “pros and cons”: it’s always an internal comparison, a comparison of one feature of the thing you are discussing to some other feature of the same thing.  Unlike “compare and contrast”, this is definitely about good vs. bad.  A “pro” or “benefit” or “advantage” of the New Deal is about something you (or the author of the passage) believe is a good thing, a worthwhile thing, something worth admiring and emulating.  A “con” or “liability” or “disadvantage” of the New Deal is something you (or the author of the passage) believe is a bad thing, an unfortunate or problematic aspect, something to repudiate and avoid in the future.

Unlike “compare and contrast”, an analysis of “pros and cons” necessarily involves value-judgments.  Value-judgments about something as charged as the New Deal could be contentious.  American liberals might think the New Deal a “holy cow,” replete with benefits, and might be hard pressed to formulate any criticism beyond something like “it should have gone further.”  American conservatives, by contrast, might consider the New Deal a colossal failure, the worst example of bloated government overspending, and might be at a loss to find anything at all positive about it.  The big idea: in considering “pros and cons”, both the liberal and the conservative are focused only on qualities of the New Deal itself, pluses and minuses of this program only, without bringing in any comparison to anything outside the New Deal.

Of course, the GMAT is certainly not a place for you to air your own political biases, whatever they may be, but it may well be that in a particular Reading Comprehension, the author (through some subtle cues) will indicate something about his or her own political leanings, and discerning this can be invaluable in answering inference questions.

Here’s a practice RC question that doesn’t use the word “pros and cons” but asks you to make a value-judgment about someone’s conclusions.

2) http://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/1228

This post was written by Mike McGarry, GMAT expert at Magoosh, and originally posted here.

Basics of GMAT Reading Comprehension

Just as a reminder.  Your GMAT Verbal section will have 41 questions, which will be split approximately equally into the three question types: Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning, and Reading Comprehension —- about 13-14 of each.  The RC questions, obviously, will be “clumped” around passages.  A “short” passage (200-250 words) typically has 3 questions, and a “long” passage (300-350 words) typically has 4 questions.  On your GMAT section, you most likely will see three “short” RC passages and one “long” passage, although you could see two of each.

Reading the RC passage

What we recommend at Magoosh is: take time to read the passage — actually to read it.  This would be 2.5 minutes for a short passage and 3.5 minutes for a long passage.  From now on, in all your GMAT RC practice, set a timer when you read to convince yourself that these times are, in fact, ample for digesting a passage.  GMAT RC is not about speed reading.  It is not about a mad rush through a passage.  It is about actually reading in precisely the way you will have to read articles and memos once you have your MBA and are out working in some management position.  You want to be able to read it once and get what you need.  Yes, you may have to go back and re-read a specific part to answer a detail question, but your first reading is enough to give you the layout of the whole passage.

You goal is in reading is to follow the argument and understand it, but not to memorize.  Map, don’t memorize!  This is where note-taking is an absolutely crucial skill.  For some reading, students resist this, thinking it will take more time, but in the long run, mastering the skill of note-taking is one of the biggest time-savings on the entire GMAT.

What notes do you take?  Write down the main idea, preferably in ten words or fewer.  Feel free to use arrows, symbols, any shorthand code that makes sense to you.  Write down the main idea of the passage very briefly, and write down just as briefly what each paragraph is about.  This is your “map” of the passage.  This is extremely important to practice: DO NOT plan on doing this the first time on test day.  Practice note-taking every time you read a GMAT RC passage.

Here is one excellent test of your note-taking ability. One day, read a passage, at the relaxed speed we recommend, and take notes on it.  Put those aside.  A day, or a couple days, later pull out just those notes, not the passage itself, and try to answer the question from the notes.  Of course, you will not be able to answer every question, but from your notes, you should be able to answer any “main idea” question easily, and for detail questions, you should have a good idea about where you would re-read in the passage to find that specific information.  Practice with the notes, and you will become someone who dispatches batches of RC question with lightning efficiency.

Summary

Read the GMAT RC passage once.  Read it carefully, for understanding.  Take notes, to extract a main idea and create a map of the flow of the passage, and use your map to locate details you need.  You can practice right now on this free question.

1) http://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/740

This post was written by Mike McGarry, GMAT expert at Magoosh, and originally posted here.

• SC diagnostic: 15 questions with audio visual solutions
• RC diagnostic: 13 questions with 4 passages and audio visual solutions
• CR diagnostic: 13 questions with audio visual solutions.

The e-GMAT diagnostic tests have been attempted by over 10,000 students in the last 12 months.

How to compare your performance against that of your peers?

We will be publish comparative results such as the one presented below on October 1, 2012. This will allow you to establish where you stand. Also, make sure that you review the detailed solutions especially for questions that you did not answer correctly.  Do post questions in the adjoining forum posts if you have a doubt.

Feel free to explore the free trial?

At e-GMAT we allow you to have a taste before you take a plunge. Therefore, we provide a free trial that contains more than 150 problems. Feel free to explore the free trial. Make sure you do the free concept and application files for bold face questions. Also try the main point concepts in Reading Comprehension course and while you are at it, take our highly acclaimed Verb-ing modifier concept in Sentence Correction. View this video below if you need any help.

Regards,

Rajat Sadana

Welcome to the second GMAT strategy session. In the first session we will focus on refinement – how to customize your study plan in the last 30 days to attain maximum score improvements. The key questions answered in this session are the following:

1. How to define your study plan in the last 30 days:
• When to take mocks
• How to decide where(on which topics) to spend time
• When to take vacation.
2. How to evaluate your mocks to determine your strengths and weaknesses
3. Tactical strategies to maximize your mock scores
• Timing strategies
• When to skip question
• Which question to skip

In this concept we will introduce 2 new terms – Takt Time and Total Productive Time and show how you can use this to maximize your score from mocks.

Time and Date of the session: Aug 25, at 9.30 am Pacific Time (PST), 12:30 PM EST, 10:00 PM Indian Standard Time

How to join Session: Click here, select join as guest and enter your name.

Please note that attendance on first come first serve basis. We have a limited capacity meeting room so we recommend that you join at least 15 minutes in advance to reserve your spot.

See you in session.

Regards,

Rajat Sadana

Start reading GMAT-like texts now

Take notes

Don’t panic

Return to something interesting

Say a friend tells you a story about something that happened to her at work. Her boss has decided to assign her to a very specific research assignment, despite the fact that such research rarely yields practical results. Hearing this reminds you of something that recently happened to you: Your theater director cast you in a performance that was performed even though it was unlikely to draw an audience.

Are these situations identical? Nope! But they are analogous, because they share a few key structural and logical elements. On the GMAT, both Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning questions might ask you to identify a situation that is analogous to one presented in a prompt or passage. This requires you to look past the specific details of a situation and focus instead on its underlying logical aspects – things like changes, conflicts, cause-effect relationships, and patterns of reasoning.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Passage Situation: Ectothermic animals—those that cannot control their body temperatures except through external means—often have developed behavioral adaptations that seem counterintuitive. The Peninsular Rock Agama, an Indian lizard, must sit completely exposed on heated rocks for extended periods each morning to reverse the cooling experienced the previous night, flattening its body to the rock when predatory birds fly overhead.

Abstract Situation: An animal cannot maintain its body temperature internally, so it does so environmentally, even though this puts it in danger.

Underlying Aspects: A reliance on the outside environment is necessary, but dangerous.

Analogous Situation: A shopkeeper must publicly post his store’s prices in order to draw customers, although this enables larger stores to easily undercut those prices.

Notice that analogous does not mean identical – a shopkeeper doesn’t seem to have anything to do with a lizard. This makes analogous situation questions particularly difficult for test-takers, because at first glance, the correct answer might seem out of scope.

Don’t let the specific context of the situation throw you; focus on the structural and logical aspects of the passage or argument and find the answer choice that keeps those consistent. You’ll be an analogous situations expert in no time!