GMAT Strategy

Hello, everyone:

As I was discussing with a group of Veritas instructors yesterday in one of our instructor development sessions, there are a lot of GMAT strategies that I've learned over the years that I now wonder how I ever took the GMAT without! In discussing the curriculum for our new strategy-heavy Essentials Course, we all agreed that there are quite a few strategies that make taking the GMAT infinitely easier that we wish someone would have told us from day one.

So I thought it would be a good thread if people want to chime in with the one GMAT strategy/tip/concept that they've learned recently that they wish they had known all along. Who's with me?

Probably my personal favorite is Prime Factorization. The more I break numbers down into their primes, the more useful I find that whole thought process.

For example, on a problem like:

How many unique factors does 36 have?

Instead of trying to list them all, you can break 36 down to:

2*2*3*3

And then build up from there with combinations of those numbers:

2
3
2*2
2*3
3*3
2*2*3
2*3*3
2*2*3*3
And, of course, 1, which is a factor of all numbers. So 36 has 9 factors, and there's a systematic way to arrive at that. And using the Prime Factorization technique has taught my how to break down a lot of questions that have "factor" or "divisible" in them somewhere - it's a guiding principle that so often works.


Does anyone else have a favorite "wow, I wish I had known that all along" GMAT strategy? I'm interested to hear yours...