Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT preparation courses.
Murphy’s Law dictates that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”, which is a fairly pessimistic way to look at life, but seems to hold true in many situations. The GMAT is one of them, but for a different reason than simply cruel circumstance. If there is a formula that you struggle to apply correctly, or a mistake that you tend to make, chances are you’ll see it on test day. The reason? The GMAT is written specifically to carry a high degree of difficulty, and to prey on the mistakes that you tend to make when you’re not thinking clearly and deliberately. If you’ve identified a concept or question type as something that concerns you, the authors of the test probably have done so on a larger scale, recognizing that such a concept is apt to elicit mistakes, and using it to do so.
To combat this trend on the GMAT, pay attention to these trouble spots and slow down to double check your logic when you do. Often times, the concept isn’t nearly as difficult as is the rapid application of it, and if you manage to proceed with a little caution you can quickly identify the author’s bait and navigate around it. Consider the mathematical statement:
There are twice as many apples as bananas.
When you see a statement like this on the GMAT, your first inclination is to turn it in to math as quickly as possible so that you can use it in calculation. While this is certainly an important step, your concurrent compulsion is likely to write down the numbers and variables in order, leading you to:
2A = B
Here, you should pause to think the statement through logically. Because the statement gives you a ratio, and not and equation (an equation would need to have “=” , or a literary equivalent like is, separate two quantities; in this case the term “are” precedes all values), you can’t simply jot down the numbers in sequence. If you double-check your statement for logic, you’ll note that, if there are twice as many apples as bananas, you could possibly have:
2 apples, 1 banana
Well, this wouldn’t work with the equation that you were inclined to write before. If you plug in 2 for A and 1 for B, you’d end up with 4 = 1, which is obviously untrue. However, if you go back to your potential values above, it should be clear that, if you multiply the number of bananas by 2, you’d equal the number of apples:
A = 2B
This is the correct expression, but the authors of the GMAT know that half, if not more, of GMAT examines will at least flirt with, or use, the incorrect expression 2A=B. Because of that, know that the answer choice at which you would arrive with the incorrect equation will certainly appear as one of the choices. The test knows how you think, and if you don’t take care to correct those easy-to-make mistakes, it will punish you.
More important than the punishment, however, is the fact that, often, all you need to do to combat these mistakes is identify that you’re approaching a trouble spot and pause to think logically before you commit to a speed-induced mistake. Track your mistakes in practice so that you can identify them on the test, and you’ll avoid most of these common pitfalls.
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