GMAT Tip: Think Like the Testmaker Series, Volume 6 » Clear Admit: MBA Admissions Consultants Blog

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Application Deadlines
Below are the upcoming deadlines for admission to top-tier schools.
Feb 10: INSEAD R3
Mar 1: Michigan / Ross R3
Mar 3: CBS
Mar 3: LBS R3
Mar 4: Kellogg R3
Mar 8: Cambridge / Judge R4
Mar 8: CMU / Tepper R3
Mar 9: Duke / Fuqua R3
Mar 9: Penn / Wharton R3
Mar 10: Berkeley / Hass R4
Mar 10: Chicago Booth R3
Mar 10: Yale SOM R3
Mar 15: NYU / Stern R3
Mar 17: UCLA / Anderson R3
Mar 19: UNC / Kenan-Flagler R4
Mar 30: Cornell / Johnson R4
Mar 31: UVA / Darden R3
Mar 31: INSEAD R4
Apr 1: UT-Austin / McCombs
Apr 2: Dartmouth / Tuck R3
Apr 2: Oxford / Saїd R3
Apr 7: Stanford GSB R4
Apr 8: Harvard R3
Apr 14: CBS

Essay Topic Analysis
Below are links to our comments on some of the top programs' essay topics.
The Career Goals Essay
Berkeley / Haas*
Chicago Booth*
CMU / Tepper*
Columbia*
Cornell / Johnson*
Dartmouth / Tuck*
Duke / Fuqua*
Harvard*
Indian School of Business*
INSEAD*
London Business School*
MIT / Sloan*
Michigan / Ross*
Northwestern / Kellogg*
NYU / Stern*
Oxford / Said*
Penn / Wharton*
Stanford GSB*
UCLA / Anderson*
UNC / Kenan-Flagler*
USC / Marshall*
UT Austin / McCombs*
UVA / Darden*
Yale SOM*
* denotes '09-'10 commentary

Categories
Use categories to access all that has been written on each of the topics. We have categorized by school and by subject matter.

Interview Reports
A selection of interview field reports from fellow applicants posted to the MBA Admissions Wiki. Add your reports when you are finished with your interviews.
Chicago
Columbia
Dartmouth / Tuck
Duke / Fuqua
Harvard
Kellogg
Michigan / Ross
MIT / Sloan
Stanford
UNC / Chapel Hill
Virginia / Darden
Wharton
London Business School

GMAT Resources
MBA.com
Manhattan GMAT
GMAT Club
Princeton Review
Test Prep New York
Kaplan
Beat The GMAT
Knewton

Writing Resources
Guide to Grammar and Writing
The Internet Grammar of English
English Usage, Style and Composition
The Economist Style Guide
Paradigm Online Writing Assistant

School Rankings
Rankings are a good way to start your research on various MBA Programs. Keep in mind each uses a different methodology.
Business Week
Economist
Financial Times
Forbes
USNews
Wall Street Journal

Career Guides
The following resources should be useful to those who want to research the careers open to them after (or before) earning an MBA.
Vault.com
Wetfeet

Business School Resources
The following are business resources offered by a variety of leading Business Schools. It's useful to subscribe to these resources, especially for the schools to which you are applying.

MBA Programs: North America
If an MBA Program is not listed, please e-mail and we will be happy to list it.
Berkeley / Haas
Boston College / Carroll
Carnegie Mellon / Tepper
Chicago
Columbia
Concordia
Cornell / Johnson
Dartmouth / Tuck
Duke / Fuqua
Emory / Goizueta
Harvard
HEC Montreal
Indiana / Kelley
Michigan
MIT / Sloan
Northwestern / Kellogg
New York / Stern
North Carolina / Kenan Flagler
Notre Dame / Mendoza
Pennsylvania / Wharton
Queens
Stanford
Syracuse / Whitman
Texas / McCombs
Thunderbird
Toronto
USC / Marshall
UCLA / Anderson
Vanderbilt / Owen
Virginia / Darden
Washington University in St. Louis / Olin
Western Ontario / Ivey
Yale

MBA Programs: Rest of the World
As there is some variety in the length of international MBA programs, we have denoted the length of the program next to its name (1 = one year; 2 = 2 years). If an MBA Program is not listed, please e-mail and we will be happy to list it.
AGSM (Australia) 2
Cambridge / Judge (UK) 1
CIEBS (China) 2
Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (China) 1
Cranfield School of Mgmt (UK) 1
ESADE (Spain) 1 or 2
HEC (France) 2
Hult (UK) 1
IESE (Spain) 2
IMD (Switzerland) 1
INCAE (Costa Rica) 2
INSEAD (France) 1
IPADE (Mexico)
ISB (India) 1
London Business School (UK) 2
Manchester Bus. School (UK) 2
Melbourne (Australia) 2
Oxford / Said (UK) 1
Rotterdam (Netherlands) 1
Tsinghua IMBA (China) 2
University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) 1

Additional Resources
Here we link a host of additional resources available across the web. E-mail info@clearadmit.com to have resources added to this list.
AACSB International
Association of MBAs
Beyond Grey Pinstripes
EFMD
gradschools.com (worldwide)
Infozee
International Student Loans
mba.com (GMAT Scores)
MBAInfo
mbaleague.blogspot.com
MBAzone
MBA Jungle
TOEFL
Top MBA

MBA Tipline
We encourage admissions officers, students and applicants to alert us of interesting news and developments, please send an email to news@clearadmit.com so we can blog it.

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Wednesday, February 03, 2010

GMAT Tip: Think Like the Testmaker Series, Volume 6

Today’s GMAT tip comes from our friends at Veritas Prep. In today’s article, they present the sixth installment of their “Think Like the Testmaker Series,” which focuses this week on solving quantitative questions in an efficient manner:

Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT prep courses.

At graduate school functions, a common elitist quip from engineers and scientists when talking to MBA students is to ask, “Are you majoring in PowerPoint, or Excel?” (A similarly-popular retort is “I’m majoring in outsourcing your job”) While, obviously, business school curriculum is much more substantive than some graduate counterparts will like to admit, the truth does remain that you will use programs like Microsoft Excel quite often in business school, and you’ll also need to buy a fairly sophisticated financial calculator. So, knowing that, why would the GMAT not allow you to use a calculator or spreadsheet device on its quantitative section?

The reason that the GMAT prohibits calculators is that its primary concern is not to test your ability to “crunch numbers,” but rather to assess your ability to problem solve using numbers. In fact, in many cases, questions are crafted in an attempt to bait you in to an attempt to calculate numbers by hand that will be a sufficient combination of time-consuming and error-prone to cripple your test performance and elicit an incorrect answer.

Knowing that the GMAT isn’t a math skills test, but rather a test of problem solving, efficiency, and other, more business-oriented skills and traits, you should prepare yourself to recognize when problems can be solved in a simpler way. Often times, this can be done by recognizing patterns in the ways that numbers interact. Consider the question:

What is the units digit of 2²⁵ – 6⁷?

In seeing this question, you may well think that, although it may take some time, you can work through the calculations and actually determine the values of the two exponential terms. After all:

2¹ = 2

2² = 4

2³ = 8

2⁴ = 16

2⁵ = 32

4⁶ = 64

And so on. How much more work can it be to get to the 25th power? Well, as the numbers get bigger, you’ll undoubtedly slow down in calculating them — 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, and that only gets us to the 13th power with the real heavy lifting still to come. If you’ve noticed from the question, however, that the question specifically and exclusively asks for the units digit — the last digit before the decimal point — then you can eliminate most of the work. You don’t need to calculate that 2⁵ = 32, as long as you know that 2⁵ yields a units digit of 2. Multiply by 2, and you’ll know that 2⁶ yields a 4, 2⁷ yields an 8, etc.

What’s more, you can also begin to notice that a pattern emerges, as there is a cycle: 2, 4, 8, 6, 2, 4, 8, 6… The cycle repeats every fourth digit, with the fourth unique digit in the sequence being 6. Therefore, the result for each exponent that is a multiple of four is 6, so 2²⁴ will yield a 6. 2²⁵ is the next term in the cycle, so the units digit will be 2.

Sixes are easier : 6¹ = 6; 6² = 36; 6³ = 216… This pattern dictates that multiplying a units digit of 6 by 6 is going to yield a 6, so regardless of the exponent (as long as it’s a positive integer) the units digit will be a 6, and you don’t really have to do any math.

One last twist to this problem: you need to realize that 2²⁵ will be considerably larger than 6⁷, so your subtraction problem will look something like:

XXXXXXXXXXX2
– YYYYYYYY6

The answer, then, is 6, as this problem will take the form of 12-6 (since this multiple of 2 is clearly larger than this multiple of 6), and not of 2-6 (yielding -4), which would be the case if the 2 term were known to be smaller than the 6 term.

Again, the GMAT is testing something a little higher-order than math here — did you consider all of the possibilities, or make a quick, incorrect assumption when you thought you were done?

For more information on Veritas Prep, download Clear Admit’s independent guide to the leading test preparation companies here. This FREE guide includes coupons for discounts on test prep services at ten different firms!

# posted by Clear Admit @ 8:00 pm in GMAT - Quantitative, GMAT Tips

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