Yue Xu: You’ve been putting hours upon hours studying for your GMAT, but you can’t seem to get your score to that higher level. Welcome to MBA PodTV. I’m your host Yue Xu. Today, we’ll talk about how to boost your score, those last 50 points, and you’ll find out it’s not just a matter of studying harder.

Joining us is Brian Galvin, Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, A GMAT prep provider. He’ll tell you how to think like the GMAT test makers and why that’s important in improving your score. We’ll also hear from Admissions Directors and how they evaluate the GMAT.

So before we dive in to how to improve your score, let’s talk about how you’re scored. So myth or fact: The first 10 questions of the GMAT are weighed more heavily than the rest of the questions?

Brian Galvin: Like anything with the GMAT, I think you can really learn a lot by just asking yourself, “Does this make sense?” So would it make sense that you would want the first 10 questions to matter significantly more than the rest, out of 37 math questions or 41 verbal questions, that the first 10 would be so heavily weighted up front?

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially when you think and hopefully, GMAT students watching this have studied a little bit of probability. The probability of accidentally getting the first 4 questions right, blind guesses, right? If 1 out of 5 chance at each of those is 1 out of 625. And there are a couple 100,000 people who take the GMAT every year. So they’re willing to give those first 4 people even if you got the first couple right on your own. Maybe you got the first 6 right based on that kind of probability.

Are they willing to give those people that big of an advantage over someone who makes an honest mistake early but then goes on a run late and really knows their stuff? It just doesn’t stand a reason.

Lawrence Rudner:    The computer is selecting questions specifically for you based on your responses to the previous questions. The way this works is we start off with a big pool of questions, pick a question of about average difficulty and look at your response. If you get that question correct, we give you harder questions. If you get it incorrect, we give you easier questions.

After each response the computer looks at all the questions, looks at all the responses you’ve made, looks at all the difficulty of all the questions you looked at and it makes new estimate of ability and picks the question that’s going to provide the most information. As a result you will see very few questions that are very hard for you and very few questions that are very easy for you. As a result of that, this gives us much greater precision at testing because there’s less opportunity for you to make careless mistakes or very lucky guesses.

Yue Xu: It’s not an uncommon place to be when you’re studying for the GMAT where things seem to stagnate. You can’t seem to improve no matter how hard you try. So how do you breakthrough the GMAT plateau?

Brian Galvin: One of the most important things to know about the GMAT is that it’s not an exit exam which is what most people have taken their entire lives, final exams and even you’re tested the DMV, “Did you read the book of what it takes to be a driver in this state?” “Do you know this knowledge that we’ve given you?” The GMAT is an entrance test. Most people take it after a few years of being out of school and it tests things from high school and junior high. It’s not even testing what you would have learned your last year of college.

So it’s an entrance exam. And so because of that what is really looking to test isn’t what you know, but what types of thought processes are you using, how able are you to synthesize information to make good decisions. A lot of times in school, the harder questions, the ones that separated the A’s from the B’s were just more obscure pieces of knowledge, right?

What’s the capital of Honduras versus what’s the capital of France? Well, you probably heard of Paris, you may have been to Paris. The capital of France is more accessible, the capital of Honduras maybe a little bit less, just up there in your mind or top of mind to be able to go through it, and more obscure knowledge tend to be harder in an exit exam type context.

The GMAT is different though. I think a lot of people tend to look at, “I’m not doing well at sentence correction. So I need to learn harder sentence correction. I need harder problems.” And you even see a lot of the problems that people produced, that you find people talking about online or students bringing into classes from outside sources. They try to make it difficult by making more obscure information.

But that’s not how the GMAT does it. One of my favorite things that GMAT does is try to test you on more obscure information but use that as a smokescreen for what they’re really testing you on which is pure logic. And so this question we’ll put up. Here is one of my favorites. It tests what people think is an idiom question. So people will eliminate answers choice A right away. “So dense and convoluted as to pose a challenge,” they don’t like.

But they want to see “So dense and convoluted that they posed a challenge.” So X that Y is an idiom that people who are trying to study a lot of idioms they feel comfortable with. That’s one of the idioms that any idiom-based flashcard group has top of mind. That’s what you’re looking for. But if you really look at what they’re testing, logic, logical verb tenses and time frames.

They say that Kant’s writings are characterized by these sentences. Currently, this is just something that’s emblematic of his sentences. There’s no reason is you look at the end of each of these answer choices, it all ends in pose or posed, past tense. So pose, indicative tense; posed, past tense. There’s no justification for using the past tense. These sentences have not stopped to be a challenge or a hurdle from many readers, they are still a challenge.

And so people’s favorite idiom is in answer choice C. And so those who are just looking for the more obscure information, the harder information to get will a lot of times gravitate towards C because they like that idiom. But if you look at what you’re really being tested on, is this is a logical verb tense? Is this a logical sequence of events? Posed is wrong. There’s no reason you would use the past tense which brings you back toward A.

It turns out that that’s an okay idiom. But what’s interesting about idioms is that there are thousands of them, if not tenths of thousands of them. Some of them that I’ve seen students debating, if you go online to different university grammar websites, there are different linguistics professors still debating them. So there’s one tried and true, “This is the only idiom you would use.” There are too many of them to become good at but you can become really good at verb tenses and logic that way.

If you actually think about being an Admissions Officer at Stanford or Harvard, would you rather have someone who has a consulting job, works part-time for a nonprofit organization, kind of an organizer for a charity, for education for underprivileged kids and studies for the GMAT 3 or 4 hours a week when they have time? Or would you rather have someone who is unemployed, whose apartment is covered with idiom flashcards?

Yue Xu: Virtually all schools publish our GMAT school ranges and averages, and in order to be competitive you want to be within the ballpark of these scores. Scoring well on your GMAT would certainly be an asset to your application to business school but it’s not the only thing that matters. Let’s hear from these Admissions Directors on what they have to say about the GMAT.

IMD Business School

Lisa Piguet:   So the GMAT at IMD is just one of the criteria that we actually use. So the average in this year’s class is 670, and the 80% range I believe is 620 to 750. We’re not a school that if you don’t have a 700 you’re automatically declined. When you’re looking at the application at IMD we’re actually looking at the whole package. The GMAT is very important but it’s only one component. So we’re also looking at career progression, we’re looking at international exposure. We’re looking at your career goals.

We’re one of the only schools in the industry that links career services and admissions together. We want to make sure that if somebody has a career goal that we know for a fact that if we admit them that can actually be placed. So again, the GMAT is just one component that IMD uses.

Betsy Ziegler: So the GMAT with respect to the decision is one important attribute or input into the decision making process. This year for all of our MBA programs we are also accepting the GRE. And the reason the GMAT and the GRE are particularly important to us is because it gives us a measure of quantitative skills and our program is very rigorous and very analytical. And so this gives us a sense of how successful an applicant will be in our program.

Kellogg School of Management

But as I’ve said, the GMAT and the GRE score is just one of many things we look at. We look at the essays, the recommendations and the interview that we have with all of our admitted students. So each admitted student is interviewed and those things come together into a package where we think we can make really, really thoughtful and great choices of students that get admitted to our program.

Brian Galvin: The GMAT is a tricky test for perfectionists, for people who always strive for really good grades in school because typically the way that people achieve higher grades is by working harder, by studying more. The people that you knew who are gunning for valedictorian in high school would talk about how many hours they studied over the weekend, even on a Friday or a Saturday night. But the GMAT isn’t an effort based exam. Sure you’ll need to put some effort in but it’s a lot more about your ability to synthesize concepts than to know facts.

And so I think the reason that a lot of people underachieve compared to what they feel their effort level is, is because all they really know to do is to do more things. “I’ve been studying for 6 months.” “I’ve used these books.” “I’ve go through all the official guide questions twice.” They’ll tell you what they did in terms of number of books, number of hours, duration of study, but they very infrequently tell you why they’re having trouble.

I think the way to be able to take your score from a very good score, or a well above average score to the higher score you feel like you deserve or you’ve earned is to be a little bit more self-analytical. Ask the question of “why” a lot more than you asked the question “what.” They’ll look for “What is the rule again?” “What do I do with these exponents in this situation?” Ask yourself why that’s the case.

And if you ask yourself “Why did I make this mistake?” “Why did I like the wrong answer choice?” “What was it about answer choice D that enticed me versus B?” Again, understanding yourself, understanding the test that way, learning to think like the test maker. “How did they trap me into this?”

One of my favorite verbal questions — favorite types of verbal questions are critical reasoning questions in which you can tell exactly why a student picked B instead of D or vice versa. Usually, it’s because they misread the conclusion. One fact about human nature is that if you read a conclusion that says that “Ancestors of modern humans lived in Western Asia between 2 and 1.5 million years ago.”

Your mind wants those to be the earliest, the first ancestors of modern humans. It’s just for whatever reason we think in terms of superlatives. And so, whenever people miss a question, that’s an exact conclusion from an assumption-based critical reasoning question that we teach, whenever someone gets that wrong, they pick the answer choice that would be correct if they said those were the earliest ancestors or the first ancestors.

And when you explain back to them why they got it wrong, they can almost always agree, “Yeah I did think they had to be the first.” Or in other questions, “I did think it had to be the tallest, the fastest, the strongest.” And so if you’re really asking yourself “Why did I miss that?” “Why did I like this answer choice?” “What was embedded in my thought process?” The GMAT is really good at understanding where your mind wants to go.

If you understand where you’re mind wants to go, if you understand how they’re writing those questions that way to take advantage of that, that’s where you get those last 50 points. That’s where understanding your test and understanding the material from a much deeper perspective, probably knowing less things or fewer things but knowing them a little bit deeper and being able to use them to prove anything you don’t need or you don’t know, that’s where the true mastery comes from.

Yue Xu: Well, that’s it for this episode of MBA PodTV. I’m your host Yue Xu. Visit us at mbapodcaster.com and register for our video and audio shows. Join us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up-to-date with the latest news and insights on your MBA application.

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• Graduate Management Admissions Council
• Integrated Reasoning set overview by Veritas Prep