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Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT preparation courses.
When developing any GMAT question, the authors of the test have two goals in mind. They want to:
1) Create a high likelihood that you will answer the question incorrectly
2) Waste your time on your way to selecting your answer so that you answer subsequent questions incorrectly
And, naturally, they need to do this fairly – impossible-to-answer questions, or questions that cannot possibly be solved in ~2 minutes are out of the question, as the test needs to reward those test takers best suited for business school and separate them from those who may not be as qualified.
Overall, though, the authors of the GMAT do not want to ask you any questions that you’ll definitely answer correctly – with only 37 quant and 41 verbal opportunities to separate you from your competition, they cannot afford any “gimmes”, and you shouldn’t want that. You want to demonstrate that you are more qualified for school than most other applicants, and difficult questions give you the best opportunity to do so.
With that task – simply phrased, to keep your score down – in mind, the authors of the GMAT employ several devices to challenge you and waste your time. While some math questions may ask specifically for the Lowest Common Denominator concept, others will simply employ one of humanity’s lowest common denominators: fear.
If you’re interested in a marketing track in business school, you may watch the television show Mad Men, which is set in the formative years of the advertising industry. One classic Mad Men scene (check it out here) involves the marketing of Lucky Strike cigarettes. The ad agency focuses on one seemingly-unimportant part of the manufacturing process for cigarettes – “they’re toasted” – as the focus of an ad campaign. When the client protests that “all cigarettes are toasted”, the agency reply centers on customers’ propensity for fear, noting that if Lucky Strike’s ads focus on that portion of the company’s process, it will create fear in consumers’ minds that the competitive brands are sufficiently toasted. Simply introducing this fear proved to be a powerful motivator in the marketplace, and is also a key concept to remember about human nature – fear just may be the human emotion that trumps all others.
The authors of the GMAT – mad men in their own right – know this, and introduce fear in to many GMAT questions. Think of this notion of fear when you see certain GMAT elements that tend to intimidate most candidates:
• Multiple variables
• Variables contained within exponents
• Long, verbose stimulus paragraphs
• Obscure idioms
• Technical language in Reading Comprehension passages
• Function or symbol problems (i.e. if a µ b = a2 +2b for all values of a and b…)
When the authors of the GMAT use these devices, their primary goal is to strike fear in your heart, because they know that fear can break your spirit, or at least your focus, and may not only cause you to answer that question incorrectly, but will likely carry over to self-doubt on future questions. Know going in to the test that the authors will engage in “psychological warfare” with you, using fear as their central weapon. If you’re simply looking for those elements and can confidently smile knowing that you’re a step ahead of them, that should increase your score. Also know that:
• When the GMAT employs multiple variables, one can typically eliminate at least a few variables by finding relationships between them.
• When variables are contained within exponents, your job is to factor the bases of each exponent to form concrete relationships between the exponents.
• Function/symbol problems may be the biggest smokescreen of all; that symbol looks intimidating, but your job is simply to be deliberate in arranging your math to look just like the function, and then it’s a matter of algebra.
• Technical language in Reading Comprehension passages is a good thing – the longer the word, the more it acts as a “bookmark” for you when you need to return to that portion for a specific detail question, and because this isn’t the MCAT, you won’t need to be an expert on the science behind the term.
• Long, verbose stimulus paragraphs can almost always be broken down sentence by sentence and put in your own simpler terms; those paragraphs tend to test your patience more than they test your intelligence, so just be calm and methodical.
• Obscure idioms are never the primary element of the sentence being tested, so use them as a cue to search for the cleverly-disguised major error theme that the sentence contains.
Most importantly, know that the GMAT is going to try to intimidate you, and that your greatest defense is a calm, confident demeanor. When you know that your biggest fear should be fear itself, you can derive that confidence from knowing that you’re winning the psychological battle against the testmaker.
Read more GMAT advice on the Veritas Prep blog. Ready to sign up for a GMAT course? Enroll through GMAT Club and save up to $180 (use discount code GMATC10)!
