GMAT Strategy

Bond777 wrote:some say they had to start from the ground zero when they return from the vacation because they forgot everything they learned before the vacation.

i'm sorry, but this is basically impossible. the gmat is, by design, the sort of test on which you can take a much longer period of time -- months, even, if not years -- away from studying, while losing very little, if any, progress.
think about the sorts of things that are actually tested on this exam, and it should become clear that "forgetting" is basically a non-issue.

* in CR and RC, there's nothing to forget in the first place, because those two sections don't require any knowledge in the first place -- they are essentially pure tests of reasoning.
(clearly you aren't going to forget what it means to strengthen or weaken an argument, or what an assumption is, or etc.)

* in SC, the principles that actually play major roles are simply not the kinds of things that one could forget in a couple of weeks, or even in a couple of months, if one has actually internalized them in the first place.
for instance, just to name a couple of examples:
-- the principle of parallelism is, basically, "if you have things that can be called A and B, or #1 and #2, then they should be written like each other." this is not something you could forget, even over several years.
-- you aren't going to forget that pronouns have to match nouns, or that subjects have to match verbs.
etc.

* finally, there is a pretty sizable amount of knowledge involved in quant, but it's not advanced knowledge. the gmat quant curriculum doesn't extend past first-year algebra and geometry (except in the case of a few minor topics, such as combinatorics, that americans learn in second-year algebra classes). if you have a solid background in these things then you simply won't forget them, unless you actually walk away from them for a period of years.

i'm going to turn the question back around to you -- what, exactly, are you afraid that you would "forget" in less than two weeks?

What's your view on this? Let's say you have a 5 months study plan. Is it wise to take a, let say 10 day, vacation in the middle of your study program?

not only is it wise, it's essential.

How about practicing some GMAT stuff ~2 hours each day while you are on vacation so you get the best of the both worlds?

that is still a pretty full load of studying, so, in essence, that's not a vacation at all. (... and what does your vacation partner think of all this?)

Ron, thoughts please!

i have one thought to offer here, and it's not something that most people here will love. but, here it is anyway:
if you actually can't bring yourself to take a few days, or a couple of weeks, away from studying for this test, then that's not a healthy habit -- that's an addiction. like any other addiction, it's unhealthy, ultimately limiting, and likely to hurt you more than to help you in the long run.

one further thought:
if you do take an extended period of time (months or years) away from the exam, then it's quite possible that your timing habits will be impacted -- i.e., that you won't be as good at time management when you come back. but, (a) that's not what the previous poster was asking about, and (b) after you get back into the rhythm of things, that shouldn't be too difficult to fix.

Bond777 wrote:Ron,
Thank you for your response. Your responses are always very insightful.

My worry is that some new concepts that you just learned but are not wired permanently into the brain yet might just go away. You will not forget what the median is and how you calculate it, but the concept such as "Median of a combined (AUB) set will never be lower than the lower of Median of A and Median of B" that you just learned from doing a problem the other day might just disappear from your memory.

so, thanks for this explanation. it makes sense -- in a certain way -- and, now that i've read it, i have a much greater understanding of why many people here believe what they believe (e.g., "you have to study for this test for hundreds and hundreds of hours", etc.)

this is not a perspective i ever would have come up with, because, well, it's the exact opposite of my own.
i don't know ANY "rules" as esoteric or specialized as the thing you wrote up there for combined sets. when i look at these problems, the only concepts** in my head, at the outset, are the basics (e.g., "here's what the median is, and here's how you calculate it"). there's just no way i could possibly remember something like what you wrote up there.

moreover, i simply don't see any point in trying to remember these sorts of "rules", and, on top of that, i think they will actually work against you on an exam like this one.
i.e., if you are still scoring pretty high with this kind of approach, then you're almost certainly scoring high despite the approach (because of a largely natural affinity for mathematical logic or whatever), rather than because of it.

let me illustrate what i mean, by means of an example that you'll (hopefully) find rather extreme.
here's a "rule":
if you start walking with your left foot, then all the odd-numbered steps will be with the left foot, and all the even-numbered steps will be with the right foot.
--> i think (and hope) you agree that it would be rather silly to try to remember this "rule", since anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the concepts of "left foot/right foot" and "even/odd" could just figure it out in about two seconds.

so, here are my points / criticisms / complaints about "rules" like the one above:

1/ they're not necessary.
if you understand the basic concept of a median, and then think about its consequences for combining two sets, you can figure out pretty quickly that taking one set, and then throwing in the elements of another set with an equal or higher median value, can't make the original median go down. it's not as obvious as the right foot/left foot thing, but, to me, it's still a zillion billion thousand times easier than trying to memorize "rules" like the one above.

at this point, i know that someone is going to come up with a time-based rejoinder ("if i know that from memory, i can save time!")
i understand the thought behind such a response (if indeed you have one in mind), but, on this test, there's not that much time pressure -- there just isn't.
if you only had 30 seconds per problem, you might have an argument for trying to memorize vast swaths of facts like this -- but you don't. there's actually plenty of time to play around with the basics and use them to figure out the more specialized patterns, provided you don't sit there for minutes upon minutes upon minutes just staring at the problems you don't understand.

2/ they are very unlikely to be useful.
what do you think are the odds that you're going to encounter a question about the lower of the medians of two sets that are eventually combined?
i mean, i would be willing to bet a very large amount of money that you will not see this idea on the gmat.

... now, the MOST important issues with trying to memorize these "rules":

3/ they're limiting.
see, the real problem with this kind of thinking is that, the more "rules" you memorize, the more difficult it will be to think outside the boundaries of those "rules".
here's what i mean: you have a fact, above, about the medians of combined sets.
...but!
that's only ONE fact about this kind of situation. what about all the other things that can happen, or that you could potentially be asked to analyze?
when will the new median be the median of the two old medians?
when will the new median be the mean of the two old medians?
when will the new median be the lower of the two? when will it be the higher of the two?
when will it be a number that was in one of the two original sets? when will it not be?
how does the size of the original two sets affect the issue?
etc.
etc.
there are literally hundreds of things that i could ask about just this single, vanishingly rare, situation. no matter how ambitious you may be, you won't be able to formulate a complete set of rules to cover all (or even most, or even a decent fraction) of them.

on the other hand, if i just mosey into the situations above, armed with nothing but my basic understanding of what a median is and how it works (which is the only thing i know here to start with), i can investigate any of these situations, with an open mind and lack of bias.
this isn't something you can do if you have the "i have to memorize 10,000 rules" approach, since you would have to go through all 10,000 of those in your head before you could even start to THINK about the situation. not ideal.

... and finally, and perhaps most importantly:
4/ they will prevent you from addressing the REAL issues.
what i see here is, to a certain extent, a "security blanket" phenomenon -- people in an unfamiliar situation, desperately clinging to familiar ideas for some sense of reassurance.
obviously, this is not a test of obscure rules. i don't know ANY obscure rules -- i don't really know much at all, beyond the basic concepts** of the math that's tested here -- but i scored an 800 on the exam, and would most likely get the same score if i were eligible to re-take it. so, that pretty much disproves the idea that you have to know reams of obscure facts.

so, WHY?
why do people spend so much time -- literally hundreds of hours, time that you could have been spent taking up a hobby, or with loved ones, or just taking naps -- trying to memorize thousands of obscure, all-but-useless rules?
what i've found, in just about every case i've probed, is that it makes people feel good, because it's familiar.
see, exactly 100.00000% of people with the "memorize thousands and thousands of facts" approach come from countries and/or educational systems in which they ... you guessed it ... memorized thousands and thousands of facts.
every single one of them. you will not encounter a student who didn't come from one of those systems yet still takes this kind of approach.

the real issue here isn't what you are doing. it's what you are NOT doing.
granted, a lot of people here have pretty high quant scores, but they're not Q51 or whatever. but -- and here's the most important thing -- you are not going to get to Q51 by memorizing even more rules.
most of the people on this forum, to improve their scores, need to learn STRATEGIES and FOCUS.

e.g.
- very few people here make consistent use of techniques like "plug in your own values" and "backsolve", even though those techniques solve fully 50% of the official math problems (versus, say, 0.005% with the rule about medians above). yet, people still ignore those techniques -- which are basically the holy grail of the multiple-choice section -- and instead waste hundreds of hours on memorizing thousands of obscure facts, when just one or two hours of practicing backsolving/plugging/estimation would lead to a much greater score improvement than a thousand hours of memorizing stuff.

- most people here don't ORGANIZE problems very much. sometimes, not at all.
for instance, if you think that "word problems are harder than non-word problems", then that is a 100% ORGANIZATIONAL issue. see, the actual math content in word problems is substantially easier than that in non-word problems; the only factor that's more intense is the organization that's required to get through the problem statement, make whatever charts/organizational devices are necessary, and translate the words into math.
but, how many posters here are interested in learning to ORGANIZE problems better?
i don't mean "memorize how to make a chart that someone else tells you how to make" -- that would suffer from the same issues mentioned above. i'm talking about adopting a different mentality toward word problems, in which you learn to see the situation in the problem as a whole before trying to scribble down a bunch of equations; in which you use as few variables as possible, because you've already noticed the relationships between the quantities; in which you can decide by yourself how to make organizational charts, based on the stuff that's actually in the problem; etc.
again, not very many. it actually amazes me how many people here are willing to try memorizing literally thousands of different templates, rather than just learning to think about the situation and invent a chart themselves.
(this is not something you couldn't do. for instance, if you were doing your end-of-year taxes, or the carb/fat/protein breakdown of your diet, and had to make a spreadsheet, i very much doubt you would have to be told how to make the spreadsheet and/or follow someone else's exact template. instead, it would be pretty easy to just make up your own -- and those two situations have way more stuff happening in them, and more quantities, than GMAT math problems do.)


in any case...
vouching for myself, i can tell you that my memory doesn't contain any math rules other than (a) fundamental bedrock basics, such as "here's what the median is, and here's how to find it", and (b) things that HAVE to be memorized because they just aren't intuitively accessible, like the pythagorean theorem or the 30-60-90 triangle ratios.
i also work with a whole lot of people who have scores between 770-800 on this exam, and i can tell you pretty much for sure that that's all that is in their heads, too.

at this point, there are two things i'm wondering about.

1/
i'm really, really curious as to your idea of what's going on in my head. specifically, it seems you guys might think i'm walking around with thousands and thousands of these obscure rules banging around my head, and that i'm some epic god of memorization.
in fact, exactly the opposite is true; i really don't know anything except the basics, and my memory is so lackluster that i have trouble remembering a three-item grocery list.

2/
i sincerely hope you guys aren't taking the same approach to critical reasoning, because, well, that's actually impossible.
if you could come up with a set of "rules" that would consistently solve even a small fraction of the CR problems, then you could call it "strong artificial intelligence" and sell it to the government for billions, maybe even trillions, of dollars.

3/
finally, (this is the "**" from above)
i think there's a fundamental disconnect between your use of "concept", above (for the weird median rule), on the one hand, and what the word "concept" usually means, on the other.
that may just be a random word that you're using innocently/carelessly -- but, on the other hand, it seems you may actually think of stuff like this as "concepts" on the same level as, say, the actual definition of a median.

if the latter is true, then that's the central issue here. see, a "concept" is supposed to be a basic idea that you intuitively understand and directly manipulate in your head to create more complex ideas.
for instance, "even" and "odd" and "median" and "left foot / right foot" are concepts.
if that's all you have, then it's like having a Lego set, or an acrylic paint set -- you can pretty much use it to build whatever you want to build, or to paint whatever you want to paint.
on the other hand, "the median of a combined set is blah blah balh xxxxxxx" is NOT a concept. it's like a finished painting, or like a big dinosaur made of Legos. that's all fine and good ... until you want to paint something else, or until you realized you wanted to build an airplane instead of a dinosaur. then, well, it's useless. and, if you've spent hundreds of tedious hours memorizing how to build the dinosaur, then you'll have a HARDER time building the airplane than the kid who just walks in and understands the basics of how the pieces fit together.

oh, and this:

Also, by not being in the constant touch with GMAT, you might lose that "being in the zone" thing and bringing the brain back to the GMAT with sharp focus might take some time.

Thoughts?

well, i can't speak for you in particular, but this is the exact opposite of the collective experience of most human beings.

in fact, it's been well known, for about 150 years now, that the single best way to let learning "sink in" is to ... wait for it ... regularly walk away from it for days at a time.
here's just one of many thousands of sources you can read for some of the background there:
https://septstart.org/gilden.pdf

Bond777 wrote:Ron,

Thank you very much for such a detail post. I might be beating the dead horse here, but you are truely amazing.

well, thanks.
none of these ideas is anything radical, but, it's true, i don't see them written down very often (other than in the research surrounding educational initiatives and so on).

One golf instructor told me that teaching golf to a person who does not know anythig about golf is million times easier than to a person who already knows a lot about the golf but in the wrong way.

i mean, yeah, but i don't really think this is the same thing.

when it comes to something like golf, people will have their styles and idiosyncrasies, but, at the end of the day, everyone is basically trying to do the same thing. so, in the example of golf, notions like "the right way" and "the wrong way" can actually have some degree of absolute, context-independent meaning.

the problem, though, is that the kind of stuff you're dealing with here -- basically, general notions of learning and thought processes -- isn't as absolute; it's much more situational, because there's such a variety of possible goals.
i mean, at this point we are basically talking about the entire process of thought and learning -- and, obviously, that's not something with a single goal across the board.
as a (somewhat crappy) analogy, let's say you went to some country where they played golf as though it were a track-and-field throwing event (like the discus or javelin), rather than what golf normally is. in other words, in this hypothetical country, golfers don't really care where the ball goes, just how far.
needless to say, a lot of the "right" ways of playing golf would suddenly be very, very wrong, and vice versa.

that's the kind of thing we're looking at here.
there are plenty of areas of human endeavor in which long hours of memorization are essential. (for instance, if a doctor hasn't memorized a whole slate of common disorders and their symptoms, then s/he isn't going to be able to diagnose patients properly, and so on. as a result, medical school is mostly about memorization.)

on the other hand, creative problem-solving, disruptive innovation, etc. just aren't among those things. top mba programs are not designed to relentlessly train people to memorize the old ways of doing things; instead, especially in the case of top schools, they are largely intended to breed the next generation of creative problem-solving disruptive innovators.
that, to a large extent, is why the gmat tests the kinds of thinking that it tests, and why it doesn't test the kinds of thinking that it doesn't.

I now understand where you going, but what are your suggestions on how to unlearn the wrong ways of studying GMAT and start from the ground zero to learn in the new ways?

well, there's not going to be an easy answer to that question. if i had one, i would have billions of dollars, and our public schools would suddenly be super awesome.
on the other hand, i can definitely tell you what Step 1 is.
Step 1: you need to realize that this is not just about studying for the GMAT -- this is about the whole way in which you think about things.

in other words, to make this happen, you basically have to transform the entire way in which you apprehend situations in general.
here's a thought experiment: let's say you are about to visit a country with which you're completely unfamiliar (just a random visit, not a business trip with billions of dollars at risk). would you rather ...
... 1/ read everything you can about the place/culture/people before you go, and try to remember what you've read as you go through your travels?
... 2/ just go there, wander around, observe stuff, and form an intuition as you go?
see, this isn't just a gmat thing -- the problem is that you're probably at #1 here, too. your challenge is nothing less than to turn around the entire way your mind works, so that your default reaction to this situation is, to some significant extent, #2 instead of #1.

How to make sure that I am trying to understand the forest and not the tree. We are so brainwashed with fruitless hard work that if I do less than 30/50 problems a night I feel like I am cheating myself and being lazy.

see, what's interesting here is that you actually used the word "fruitless" -- meaning that you KNOW this isn't working -- yet those feelings are still there.

if that's the case, then this clearly isn't a rational thing, and so you aren't going to be able to address it by rational means. you're going to have to dig into your own mind and figure out the answers to these questions. why do i have this addiction to doing busy work? what originally caused it? etc.
it may be an interesting journey.

I know I might be asking you to rewrite the Bible, but what do you suggest our (people whose priority is meshed up) study methodology should be?

i mean, again, it's really not just a "study methodology". if you think of it that way, i don't think you are going to have much success in changing things.

you have to decide, on a fundamental level, where you are on a scale of, say, 0-10, where 0 is "i need to be told how everything works and just follow what i'm told" and 10 is "i just play around with concepts / explore stuff, and then see what happens".
if someone is most comfortable at 0, 1, or 2 on this scale, then this whole gmat/mba/business innovator thing is probably not the right path for that person. (the good news is that there are a whole lot of other well-respected career paths -- medical practice, accounting, certain types of legal practice, etc. -- that are totally suited to that kind of disposition.)
on the other hand, if someone is at (or would feel most natural at) a higher point on the scale, then things are different.

sure.

digvijayk wrote:Took the GMAT, not my best score, but not too bad either.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/how-i-went-f ... tml#542558

nicely done.