In a previous post I discussed the tendency that people have to “go on a hunch” on Data Sufficiency questions. This is a big no-no because DS questions are designed to punish people for making unwarranted assumptions. Generally speaking it is best to try to...
Many of you may be aware of the book The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In the book Taleb uses the analogy of a black swan in nature to describe the problem of predicting highly improbable events. He comments that just because one has never seen a...
When I tutor I often like to ask my students, “what makes a hard question hard from the point of view of the test writers?” Invariably I get answers that point to specific techniques that are used to dial up the level of difficulty, such as abstraction,...
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...
GMATers, especially newcomers to the test, tend to spend on average less time on Data Sufficiency questions than on the other Data Insights question types. This is in part because Data Sufficiency questions don’t require an “answer” in the same way that the...
Understanding the “Spectrum of Sufficiency” is a key advanced strategy on Data Sufficiency questions and yet very few people seem to be aware of the technique. Nevertheless, understanding the concept and how to apply it can really help you answer some of the...
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