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Congratulations on INSEAD! I know exactly what you mean about RC ... the GMAT seems to choose the most boring things in the world for these questions. When I was taking the test, there were some paragraphs I spent 5-10 minutes on because of that ... and I still ended up with a 47, which just shows you that what you experienced isn't an indication of your ability. I think it really helps if you can find a way to be interested in the topic ... try to convince yourself that you care about the passage. Also, I agree with the previous advice of reading editorials in newspapers like the New York Times on a regular basis ... it will definitely help!

That's funny. I live in Canada, and I am flying to Germany in a last minute decision on Sunday. I like riding bikes, but not so much in the rain. And I have green eyes and brown hair. How is your trip to Canada going?

Find the roots of the closest squares that you know and then approximate based on the magnitude of the differences... 20^2 = 400 25^2 = 625 576 is much closer to 625 than to 400 so it will be between 20 and 25, but much closer to 25. ... Difference between 625 and 576 is about 50 Difference between 400 and 576 is about 175. 175 is more than 3 x 50 ... So ... intuitively it should be somewhere around 24. Which happens to be the exact answer. By the way, there is a trick for finding the square of any 2-digit number ending in 5. You multiply the first digit by the digit that follows it, and add 25 to the end. ex. 15 x 15 = (1x2)25 = 225 35 x 35 = (3x4)25 = 1225 75 x 75 = (7x8)25 = 5625 ... a little trick from Russian elementary school.

Congratulations on the perfect AWA score ... 6.0 is in the 95th percentile and it shows that you are a good communicator, which is still important, especially if your application is in the gray area. Way to go! Hey, what happened with that girl you met at the testing centre?

Congratulations! Well done.

I have to agree with the statement about analyzing your mistakes to look for patterns. Clearly, if your score isn't improving with practice, you are falling into the same traps over and over again. Look for patterns, and figure out which types of questions you get wrong and what your particular mistakes are. Know what to look for in the correct answer for those types of questions. So I am with gmatnaive on this ... practice is great, but it's all about practice and analysis so that you can improve. Practice alone will help your pacing, but not your hit rate.

Cancelling your score is almost never a good strategy, unless you lost 10 minutes on one of the sections because you were throwing up or something. It's nearly impossible to tell how well you are doing based on how you feel. In your position, I would go over my review materials, do practice tests to get into it, and just do your best during the test. You can never be perfectly ready ... and most of the time, a little bit of incremental prep only makes a small difference in your score... your score can even go down, depending on how you feel that day.

Join the GMATNetwork group in Yahoo!Groups. Then go to Files > Full Length Test

I found all the major books had a few of these, with good explanations of how to do them. For more questions, I would suggest doing a search on these forums. I just tried a search for "average" under the category "GMAT Math" and got lots of problems. Good luck!

It depends largely on which questions you get wrong. The first questions count for more - after the first 10 or so, the GMAT has decided on your approximate score and is mostly fine-tuning. If you get the first 4 in a row wrong, you can get the rest of the questions right and still end up with a crappy score. So it's not about how many questions you get wrong, it's about how hard the questions you get wrong are. It's better to be getting hard questions wrong than to be getting easy questions right!

In the sets, I probably averaged as many as 5 wrong answers.... it really depended on whether I was paying attention to the question, as silly as that sounds. On about 1-2 questions, I would learn something new content-wise as I looked up the solutions. On the other ones, the mistakes were purely due to not reading the question carefully. I really found that a lot of doing well on the GMAT is about relaxing, concentrating on the question, and getting into GMAT-Mode. Practice really helped me, especially the questions I did in the couple of days leading up to the exam when I focused on reading the question carefully and solving everything in an average of 2 minutes. For Verbal, my only Prep was to solve the last few questions in the OG... I got all the SC and RC questions right, but messed up on one or two of the CRs. That's when I realized that the hard CR questions actually require you to treat the argument's assumptions as part of the argument, because only using the data given in the question made all of the answers seem outside of the scope of the argument. If I had more time, I would work on questions of this level, probably by going through the LSAT practice questions. In my GMATPrep tests, I got 7-11 wrong on Math (including a couple wrong within the first ten) and 2-3 wrong on Verbal. Sorry for the delay in posting files guys, I am just going to post links to them instead one day when I find some time (hopefully soon).

Hi guys, My official scores came in and it turns out I got 6.0 on the essay :) I was trying to upload some problem sets in this post, but it turns out all my files are too big and I have 0 days left on my WinZip trial. I will download it and try again. So Chris, tell me about you.

Hi Shake, I was wishing you luck on test day ... but hey, I guess you got a hot date out of it, so it wasn't all bad! I am sure you will have no trouble cracking 700 next time, after learning from this first experience. However, I have to say that 660 is still a high score and the rest of your profile has serious B-School appeal, so don't let it get you down!

Hi Sandeep, I am uploading some files I got from other posts that helped. I think I got them from Clintonn's posts? I also found the explanations to the questions here really good: http://questionbank.4gmat.com/mba_prep_sample_questions/number_systems/ Most of the Number Properties questions in the Sets have also been posted in the math forums, with some great solutions by very intelligent math whizzes. I found that the key was to learn to think in a structured way about numbers. For instance, if you have an expression like n(n-1)(n-2) in the question stem, you know that at least one of those numbers will be even (only one will be even if n is odd and two will be even if n is even) and at least one of them will be divisible by 3. So if the question asks you whether the product is divisible by 12, you have to ask yourself under what conditions it would be true. You can figure out that the number will be divisible by 4 if n is even because n(n-2) would then be divisible by 4, as long as n>2. You don't necessarily need to plug in different values for n(n-1)(n-2), as that would eat up time and hopefully, by G-Day, you have learned to think strategically and algebraically about math. This kind of thinking saves time. This dawned on me the day before my GMAT, and it would have been nice to have more time to practice, but if you have time, this is what I would recommend. Try to comprehend what the equation "tells" you so you don't need to plug in every possible value, thus eating up valuable time.

Ok, now for the actual test. 1. AWA The topics were all right. My issue topic was deeply uninteresting, but I found plenty to say, since I was already in essay-writing mode after the Analysis of an Argument. I took the entire time and look forward to getting my score. 2. The Break. I accidentally took a 15 minute break. You are not allowed to have a watch, and I could have sworn it was 5 minutes. I was the only one taking the test, so I really had nothing by which to gauge the time. 3. Quant I was a little panicked after realizing that I lost nearly 5 minutes of my valuable Quant time, since I always use the entire 75 minutes, in contrast to Verbal, where I always have at least 10 minutes left! I was also starting to feel the effects of not sleeping on my concentration, but I tried not to let it get to me. The first question was one of those weird functions with a made-up symbol. I don't remember the exact ordering of the questions, but here's a general breakdown: - Number properties were the single most common type of question, especially among the DS questions. - Algebraic word problems were the second most common, and of about the same level and style as the OG. - A few times on the Number properties questions, I had the feeling that I had seen them somewhere in the previous few days ... either because the actual questions are floating about, or because the question type is pretty standard. - I had a couple of remainders problems - A couple of geometry problems, only one of which was tricky - I only had ONE probability problem ... it involved very basic permutations. - A couple of problems involved difficult-ish square roots (Jaybird, one of them was like a problem you solved for me) and equations involving exponents. - One word problem about ratios - A couple of progressions (one arithmetic, one with a made-up formula). - A couple of problems about sets of groups (one of which I solved with a Venn diagram, the other with a 2x2 decision matrix. You know the type). On the whole, it was very much like the GMATPrep tests. I was in the process of clicking on Next on the last question as my time ran out, so I think that question counted as Blank. I also suspect I didn't read all the questions very carefully (again!), since the topics covered did not exactly stump me. It would have been great to have that 5 minutes back and a good night's sleep to crack the 50 barrier, but I am still satisfied with 49, since it's still a great score for 2 weeks of prep. I have two major things to say about prep for quant: -> Ignore what Princeton says about plugging in. Learn how to make equations, as well as Venn Diagrams and decision tables. It will make your life easier. -> Make sure you study number properties and understand well how remainders and exponents work so you don't spend 5 minutes on those questions, since there are quite a few of them. 3. Verbal I have very little to say about verbal, except that it was similar to the GMATPrep tests. The really hard CR questions get into arguments which back up / weaken the assumptions in the argument, rather than the actual argument. In retrospect, I do wish I'd practiced those a little bit so that I could bring up my score a little bit more. Anyway, there were no surprises content-wise. A lot of SC problems seemed suspiciously easy. My one suggestion would be to make sure that you re-read the sentence with your new chosen solution. This is because they will sometimes put the "best" solution into a fragment which, when inserted back into the sentence, makes the sentence incomplete and ridiculous. Do watch out for that. 4. Final Thoughts Honestly, a part of me does want to take it again just to crack 50 on Quant, since I finally know that I can do it. However, the part of me that is in touch with reality knows that taking the test again just to crack 760 is insane. Anyway, if you guys are interested, I could include some of the online materials I thought were good, or a list of things I would do if I had more time and could take it again. Thanks a ton to everyone in this forum! Your insight has greatly helped me to set the bar high and develop a deeper understanding of math. There are many people on this forum who really deserve to be in the 700s and I am sure you will be. Just make sure you are comfortable with all of the major topics which are covered, buy some sleeping pills, and stay calm and focused during the test.

Thanks guys. Here's my debrief. First, a little background about me. I am a 22-year-old female with a B.Comm. I am not planning to apply to B-School for another year or two, when I have more experience. However, since the score is valid for 5 years, I thought it made sense to write the GMAT while I was relatively fresh out of school. About 3 weeks ago, I ordered my GMAT books and started to do basic math review. I bought: 1. Princeton Review (I found the math practice to be pretty good, although their focus on plugging in numbers and guessing is only helpful if you have to guess. I find that it takes me less time to write an equation and solve the program than it takes me to find convenient numbers to plug in. I would strongly recommend that everyone become comfortable with algebraic equations if they want to do well in Quant.) 2. Kaplan 800 (I only used the PS section, and found it was good. As I was going through the problems, they seemed far too easy. However, looking back on it after taking the actual GMAT, they really are representative of the hardest problems you'll encounter. The actual problems were not as difficult or as tricky as I thought they would be) 3. OG 11 (The best! I only went through the last 5-10% of verbal questions, at the end of my prep, and the last 25% of PS and DS questions, also at the end of my prep. These were very representative of what I encountered on the GMAT). 4. McGraw-Hill Guide (I think I am the only one who bought this one - it was ok, but didn't add much to my studies. I did, however, spend 2 days on it as I liked the font. I would say that the paper tests were also pretty comparable in difficulty level to the actual test.) I also used my brother's old Kaplan book (the 2003 edition), as well as the accompanying CD-ROM, which, while incompatible with Vista, still had good problems in it. After I spent a day or two reading over the math tips in these books (the 100 math concepts in Kaplan were especially useful), I did the first test in the GMATPrep software and got 740 (46Q, 46V). 46Q is only the 80th percentile, while 46V is the 99th. At this point, I had only gone over the very basics of math after being very out of practice. I figured I could improve that score with a few days of good practice, so I decided to book the test. Ottawa only has a temporary testing centre, so I had a choice between writing in 2 weeks or writing in 6 weeks. With the typical hubris of someone who was once good at math, I decided that two weeks would be plenty of time for me to improve my Quant score. After giving GMAC my credit card number, however, my confidence wavered and I wanted to know how long other people took to prepare, which is how I stumbled onto TestMagic. I read Clintonn's debrief and downloaded some of the materials he had, as well as the Sets from the GmatNetwork Yahoo group. Since my verbal score was already in the 99th percentile, I decided to spend all of my time on Math. I did practice problems and found that my success rate improved with experience. However, I still made very stupid mistakes which could have been avoided by reading the problem carefully. My math score varied widely based on my level of attentiveness to the actual question. I found this message board and the regular contributors (you know who you are, and you all deserve at least a 750) really helpful for my Quant prep. The questions published here are among the most difficult I encountered and seeing some math whizzes' ways of solving the problems was really helpful. By the way, I finally realized why it was increasingly difficult to get a high percentile score on the Quant section - the Indian engineers are skewing the bell curve! Looking back on it, my biggest mistake in prep was doing questions I enjoyed (such as algebra and probability) and avoiding questions I did not enjoy (such as data sufficiency and number properties). Data Sufficiency and Number Properties, and especially Data Sufficiency ABOUT Number Properties were the most common type of question I saw on the GMAT. Considering that I knew this would be the case, I should have prepped more for this type of question. Having said that, I have to admit that my understanding of number properties increased exponentially in the days leading up to the tests as I re-read posts about these questions on this forum. I also found this question set really helpful: http://questionbank.4gmat.com/mba_prep_sample_questions/number_systems/ I would strongly encourage everyone to focus on this topic during your review, just because there are so many questions on it relative to the other question types. The night before my test, I read TwinnSplitter's post and was really encouraged by what he said about the difficulty level of Quant problems on the GMAT. In other debriefs I read, people were saying that the real GMAT was much more difficult than GMATPrep. I found it pretty much exactly the same. Anyway, this post encouraged me to take the second GMATPrep test. [As an aside, I'd like to note that my scores in all the other CATs I took were pathetic. This is equally true for Princeton and Kaplan. Many people feel that Kaplan is too hard (which it is), and that Princeton is too easy compared to the real GMAT. I would just have to say that they are not representative. In my opinion, only the OG and GMATPrep are representative. According to what people say about Princeton test results, I should have ended up with a 500]. Anyway, back to my GMATPrep 2 experience the night before the real thing. I started at around 10 pm and decided to go through the whole test, including the essays, since I had not written any essays up to that point and had no idea how long they would take me. I found the essays took me the entire half an hour, but that I fit into the time, so that part was all right. I scored 770 (50Q, 47V). The 50Q made me jubilant and hopeful about the real test, as it seemed I had finally conquered number properties. Upon reviewing my mistakes, I found that half of them were due to not reading the question carefully (again!) and that I was finally comfortable with the actual material. I thought I was ready to crack 50Q, so I went to bed. Looking back on that night, I wish I had heeded TwinnSplitter's wise advice and procured NyQuil in advance. However, as luck would have it, I could not find a single sleeping aid inside my house! I tossed and turned until 4 or 5 in the morning, visions of horrible Data Sufficiency problems dancing in my tortured mind. I woke up around 8 and made a review sheet for myself with the major formulas on it and some random things I had picked up from this forum, in addition to reviewing Kaplan's 100 math review topics. Then I read through the solutions to the last few PS problems in the Official Guide. Sleepy, nervous, and deeply regretful about my lapse in judgment in failing to ensure that I would have sleeping aids on hand the night before the test, I arrived at the testing centre at 12:30 and went through the security procedures to write my test. Next post will be about the test experience.

Really tired now ... will post a debrief later. My major comment is that it was really similar to the GMATPrep tests.

For the card question, I agree with 1/4. On the second turn, there is a 1/3 chance, since there is 1 diamond out of 3 cards. However, this 1/3 chance only occurs in the 3/4 of cases when the diamond was not already picked on the first turn. So it's 3/4 x 1/3 = 1/4.

I am not applying anywhere anytime soon, but from what I've learned from others' experiences, here are my 2 cents: - Your 680 is very respectable ... don't stress too much about it. - Spin the non-profit experience to show that you are an outstanding individual who will add diversity to their student profile and contribute to class discussions. - Write interesting essays and really use your non-profit experience, which is something that sets you apart. Good luck!

This question is basically tricky wording. I'll explain it in too much detail... When you invest a certain amount A at an annual interest rate r, you have A*(1+r) after 1 year, and A*(1+r)*(1+r) the following year. For instance, if you invest $100 at 10%, you have $100(1.1) or $110 the next year and $100(1.1)(1.1) = $121 at the end of year 2. The difference changes from year to year because each year's interest compounds on the new year's balance, which is greater than the previous year's balance because it's already been collecting interest for a while. What the question is fundamentally asking is this: If you put A in the bank and the bank forgot to compound your loan at the end of the first year so it can continue to collect interest on the larger amount, you would have been screwed out of $1.60 ... at least I think of it that way, because I am a business major and I am used to annual and quarterly interest rates. Anyway, if the bank did forget, you would have $20 in interest at the end of year 2 in my example, instead of $21. (This $1 difference in my example is the equivalent to the $1.60 in the question). A*(1+2r) is the amount after the simple interest (A*2r = 40 is just the interest), and A*(1+r)(1+r) is the amount after the compound interest. A*(1+r)(1+r) = A+41.60 A*(1+r)^2 - A = 41.60 A*[r^2+2r+1-1] = 41.60 Ar (r+2) = 41.60 A*(1+2r) = A+40 2Ar = 40 Ar = 20 20 (r+2) = 41.60 r+2 = 2.08 r = 0.08 (The annual interest rate is 8%) Back to one of the original equations, A*2r = 40 0.16A = 40 A = 40/.16 A = 250

Thanks a lot, Jaybird. On the first one, I didn't think to treat B separately to rationalize it, so I ended up with more and more complicated equations with every step. I'll try to avoid that on Thursday. I am adding your wonderful and obscure rule on terminating decimals to my cheat sheet. Do you have any other rules like that up your sleeve? It wasn't in any of my books, but I've seen that question type before.

Thanks guys. Jaybird, these are from the Sets (somewhere between 22 and 26) ... I think I am going to stop using sets b/c so many of the OAs are wrong. The book one drove me crazy wondering what I was missing. Thanks a lot for the detailed explanations!

The official answer is D, or (2^-2)/2

Haha, I remember just enough trig to think that it's possible to solve it using trig, but I don't remember how. Anyway, I am not sure it's possible anymore, as I think it was based on a flawed assumption. My reasoning goes thus: The two sides of the triangle, BC = CE = 1. If this triangle had been equilateral, we would have this problem made. But it isn't, so let's see if it's another kind of triangle that we can recognize. Angle BCD = 90 degrees. For some reason, I assumed that BCD + BCE + ECD = 360. I am not sure we can do that. But if we could, BCE would be 270/2 = 135 degrees. Knowing 2 sides and 1 angle of an equilateral triangle, we could definitely use trig to figure out the other side... don't remember the formula at the moment, but I am pretty sure there is one. However, I don't know if we can assume the 135 degrees.

Two couples and one single person are seated at random in a row of five chairs. What is the probability that neither of the couples sits together in adjacent chairs?