GMAC

Since GMAC just announced that as of July 11th, 2017 you will be able to choose the order in which you take each section of the GMAT, I thought I would shoot off a quick blog post with some thoughts. Ready? Here goes…

First of all, they probably should have done this a long time ago. Let’s face it, it sucks having to spend the first hour of the test on sections that don’t really matter to business schools. I used to try to make the case to my students that you could view the AWA and IR as a bit of a warm-up, sort of like stretching and running in place before going for a long run. But I doubt that anyone is going to continue to do those sections first. I mean, a 10-minute warm-up would be nice but 1 hour is a little much.

My second observation is that the GRE will now have to counter this and I predict that they will eventually. GMAC experimented with test takers choosing the section order before implementing this new policy, so presumably ETS will have to do that first as well, but I’d imagine that ETS will feel the need to counter this new “user-friendly” feature of the GMAT and we’ll eventually see the same feature on the GRE.

A third observation that I just feel compelled to share is the very bizarre way in which GMAC put this new information out there. I got an email from GMAC with the subject line “Congrats on Taking Your GMAT Exam!” I was like, wtf, did I just take the exam and forget or did someone hack into my account and take the exam under my name? I was completely perplexed. I mean it did get my attention and motivated me to immediately open up the email, but after reading what the message was actually about I just thought that it was a pretty slimy and underhanded way to convey this new information. Maybe I have a higher opinion of GMAC than most, but it felt very spammy and not what I expected of the good folks at GMAC.

The last thing to mention is that obviously people will now need to strategize which section to do first, and I think that is an interesting conundrum. Again, I can’t imagine anyone doing the AWA and IR anything but last, but which section to do first, Quant or Verbal? I guess I’ll have to see how this plays out with the people I tutor, but I must say that I would personally do Quant first. I could imagine that if you are the type of person who loses focus easily and therefore has trouble with the Reading Comp passages or even the Critical Reasoning stimuli it might be better to do the Verbal first. But something about the Quant section almost feels like it serves as a bit of a warm up for the Verbal section and not the other way around, so I would opt for Quant first.

Now that I think about it, I guess there is a Verbal element to Quantitative questions, but there is not a Quantitative element to Verbal questions. And I guess if you couple that with the fact that schools care a little more about the Quant score than the Verbal one it will probably make sense for most people to do Quant before Verbal. If I had to predict I would say 80% of people will choose to do that. But again I think that for some people, especially those for whom fatigue and focus become an issue on Verbal, it may be good to tackle the Verbal section first.

In any event, this certainly gives test takers an advantage and I can already report that for the few students I have who were thinking of taking the test in the next couple of weeks, all immediately declared (upon hearing the new section order policy) that they will wait until after July 11th to take the test. And they were all very, very excited!!!

In my years as a GMAT tutor I have had many students come to me complaining that although they have done a lot of prep for the test, their scores just are not increasing. There are many reasons that this could be the case, but in this post I would like to discuss what, in my experience, is by far the most common cause and also the easiest one to solve: a reliance on non-official resources!

This may seem over-simplistic, but I really can’t even begin to count the number of times that I have been contacted by someone who BELIEVES that they have not been improving when in fact they have. In fact, I just began tutoring someone who came to me by googling the exact title of this blog post (she was the motivation for this blog post). When I found out what she had been doing (essentially using third party resources without using the official questions and tests released by GMAC) I said what I say to all the people in this situation: “you don’t even know if you have been improving or not because you are not using official questions or taking official practice tests.” And so I had her do what I have all people in this situation do: take an official practice test.

What was the result? The apparent lack progress after months of studying and 6 “non-official” practice tests was revealed to be actual progress. She believed that she had gone from a 530 to a 540 (not a very impressive increase after all of the work that she had put in) when in fact she had improved to a 670!!! The truth is that it’s not even clear how much of that was actual “improvement” since her initial diagnostic was from the same prep company that all her subsequent tests were from (I don’t want to name the company but it is one of the major players). It’s quite possible that her initial GMAT diagnostic score might have been a 600 had she taken an official test!

I have written other posts about the need to use official GMAT resources, but I thought that it would be worthwhile to write one devoted specifically to how harmful it can be to rely on 3rd party resources, especially in trying to measure one’s own progress. Let me enumerate the reasons why it can be so detrimental to gauging one’s improvement…

The most obvious and most damaging issue is that 3rd party practice tests do not use the actual scoring algorithm used on the GMAT. Test prep companies certainly aim to approximate the algorithm but they do it with varying degrees of success ranging from ok to not even close! Seriously, not even close!!! So when you rely on these tests you really may have absolutely no idea where you are actually scoring. The tests may be telling you that you are at a 550 when you are really closer to 700 or even the other way around. The aforementioned girl who I just began tutoring received Verbal scores no higher than 34 on the non-official tests she was taking but got a 44 on her first official GMAT Prep test! 44! That is a ridiculous Verbal score (almost 99th percentile) whereas the 34 Verbal was just ok.

Furthermore, the questions themselves are not that accurate. When I do official GMAT practice tests, I usually get 1 Verbal question wrong on the whole section. On 3rd party practice tests, however, I may get 6 or 7 Verbal questions wrong. Why would that be the case? It is not that the questions are just harder – it’s that they are ambiguous or just not well-vetted, well-written questions and so the kind of reasoning than can and should be applied on real GMAT verbal questions often can’t be applied. So not only does one risk having an inaccurate representation of their score when using 3rd party practice tests, one also risks not learning how, exactly, to approach real GMAT questions.

So if your GMAT score SEEMS to not be increasing, the first thing that you need to do is get an accurate understanding of where your GMAT score actually is. It might be that your score IS quite a bit higher than you think (this is often the case for people who come to me complaining that their score is not increasing). Using 3rd party resources is not necessarily bad, but as you get deeper into your GMAT journey you must turn increasingly if not entirely to official resources and of course to get an accurate gauge of where your score really is you need to do an official GMAT Prep test.

If indeed you determine that your score really is not increasing then of course there are reasons why this might be the case. In my next post I will examine some of the other factors that can contribute to the lack of progress and will discuss what can can be done about it.

It never ceases to amaze me how few people use the official GMAT resources that are available. This is perhaps a credit to how good the major test prep companies have gotten at convincing people that their resources are an accurate representation of what is on the test. While third party resources can be very valuable for learning the content that appears on the GMAT or for learning how to more effectively approach questions, when it comes to doing practice questions or especially practice tests, there just is no substitute for using official GMAC-released practice questions and practice tests.

I have written about this in other blog posts, but I am not exaggerating when I say that probably 1 out of every 2 people who contact me for help with the GMAT has either never taken an official GMAT practice test or has not been using official GMAT questions to practice with (and these are people who HAVE been using other resources like those of ManhattanGMAT or Kaplan or one of the other test prep companies). I think what usually surprises me most in these encounters is that people don’t even seem to understand the difference! Often the reaction that I get is something to this effect: “You mean that ManhattanGMAT tests are not official tests?!”

Sometimes just getting people to start using official GMAC resources is enough to get them a significant score increase. In fact, sometimes just even having them take an official practice test is enough. Again a very common occurrence for me is a student who contacts me complaining that they have studied a lot but are still stuck at the 550 mark or 580 mark or something like that. When it becomes clear that all they have done is ManhattanGMAT tests I will often say, “well how do you know you are stuck at a 550 mark when you have never done an official test?” In many of these cases the person then goes and takes an official GMATPrep test and contacts me back to let me know that they scored in the mid-600’s or some score that was significantly higher than what they had been scoring on the ManhattanGMAT or Kaplan tests that they were taking.

Again I am not arguing that third party resources are useless. Even the practice tests can be useful when used for the correct purpose. But trying to give yourself an authentic test-taking experience or trying to gauge exactly what score you are at are not reasons to take a third party test!!! Test prep company materials are particularly good at teaching the content that serves as the foundation on the Quant and Verbal sections of the test and some resources are also good at providing insight into how to approach the questions more effectively. The official GMAC resources are not particularly good in those regards.

But once you have learned the core fundamentals and have begun to understand how to approach the questions you MUST, MUST move on to official questions and then official practice tests to ensure that you are practicing on the types of questions that will appear on the exam.

There are a couple of reasons this is so important. First of all, it is very difficult to write questions that really accurately reflect the questions on the actual exam and test prep companies typically do not have their absolute most experienced and knowledgeable people writing the questions. This is especially true for Verbal questions, which are so hard to write in a way that accurately reflects the logic of the questions on the actual test. If you write a sentence correction question that is too grammar focused and not logic and meaning focused enough then you have a question that really departs from the actual questions in a pretty significant way.

Another issue is the distribution of questions that you see. Often test prep companies focus too much on some question types and not enough on others. So you might be practicing on a lot of combinatorics and probability questions when these questions are not that well represented on the actual test (and even when they are, they are often very difficult questions that may be better to guess on anyway). This is especially true of 3rd party practice tests – if the distribution of different question types is not accurate to the test then the practice test is not a realistic representation of the test. What’s worse is that when you analyze your performance on the test you may walk away with the belief that you need to work on particular topics (like combinatorics and probability) when you are coming to that belief only because you saw an unrealistically disproportionate number of those questions.

And with the practice tests, level of difficulty is important too. If the questions on a non-official practice test are just too hard then you may run completely out of time and draw the conclusion that you have serious time management issues that you don’t actually have. And the score that the tests output may lead you to believe that you are doing much better or much worse than you actually are – test prep companies try their best to approximate the scoring algorithm of the actual GMAT, but no one knows exactly how the algorithm works so the scoring system on third party practice tests is bound to be at least a little bit inaccurate (and in some cases it can be wildly inaccurate).

The official guide books and the official GMATPrep tests, on the other hand, present real questions that appeared on previous GMATs (which means that the questions underwent a rigorous vetting process before they ever made it onto the exam). The distribution of questions, both in the books and on the tests, is a good representation of what appears on the actual GMAT. And the scoring algorithm on the GMATPrep tests is the actual scoring algorithm that is used on the GMAT.

So people, please, please use the official GMAT resources!!! Again it is fine and even helpful to use third party resources to help you master the foundational material and learn how to approach the questions more strategically and effectively. But when it comes to practice you MUST use official questions. And when it comes to taking practice tests and gauging your overall performance, you MUST use the official GMATPrep practice tests!

GMAC recently announced new policies regarding both the cancellation of scores and how often one can take the GMAT. These new changes taken together are pretty significant, offer some big advantages to test-takers, and really affect how one can approach the test.

As of July 19th, 2015 there is 16 day waiting period between tests. This is a significant improvement upon the 31 day waiting period that test takers had to deal with for many years. GMAC is no doubt motivated by the GRE, the makers of which have gone out of their way to compete with and even one-up the GMAT. As of this writing, the waiting period between GRE tests is 21 days, though I would not be surprised if they eventually change that to something shorter (like 14 days) just to outdo the GMAT!

When the waiting period was 31 days, the following scenario would often play out with my students. A person would take the GMAT and would really have been ready, having scored at or above their target score on previous official GMAC practice tests. But on the actual test they would sometimes come in underneath their target and then be in the unfortunate position of having to wait a full month before taking the test again. If a person needs significant reprep, then waiting 31 days is not a big deal. But when you are genuinely ready and just underscore because of a bad test day performance, sometimes what you need is just to jump right back on the horse and take the test again. That 31 day was excruciating for people in that situation since they literally had to sit on their hands and just wait for 31 days to pass.

So 16 days is much more reasonable – people will be much less likely to slide backwards even if they do very little practice in that period. And so this is really a significant improvement over the previous policies and will be sure to make test-takers happy.

The other major change just announced is that test takers can now cancel their scores (right after they are shown them at the end of the test) and not worry about having a “C” on their score report. C’s will no longer be printed on score reports as of July 19th so even if you took the test before the 19th and cancelled it, if you send a score report to schools after the 19th then the C will no longer appear.

This may not seem like a big deal, but coupled with the news about the 16 day waiting period, it really does constitute a significant change for test-takers. You can now be much more aggressive about taking the test because if it does not go well you can essentially erase the score completely AND you can jump right back on the horse and take the test a little over 2 weeks later. In the past I would not have my students be so aggressive in part because if they did not do as well as hoped they would then be barred from taking it again for 31 days. But 16 days is such a short amount of time that even if you were pretty much ready when you took the exam you could just continue in stride, push for 2 more weeks, and then just get right back in there and do it again.

Essentially these policies almost translate into allowing people to go in and take the GMAT as a sort-of dress rehearsal for the real thing. It can be like taking an official practice test in real test conditions at the actual testing center. The only difference is that it costs $250 and that you can’t see which questions you got wrong! The only thing that I would caution people against is in being too cavalier in the use these GMAT tries. You still have only 5 attempts in any 12 month period. Now most people don’t end up taking the test more than 3 times, so most test-takers would be just fine burning one test a little prematurely. But I have known and tutored many people who end up taking the test 4 or more times, including a handful of people who have taken the GMAT over 5 times.

At the end of the day these new policies, if used appropriately, are really a boon for test-takers since they allow them to worry a little less about any single test day performance. If a particular test does not go well, a test-taker can erase the score completely and then retake the test very soon thereafter.