Nate is a content developer at Knewton, and he loves thinking up ways to help students with their GMAT prep.

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Geometry is an important part of any GMAT test-taker’s conceptual toolkit. On Data Sufficiency geometry questions, it’s especially key to have an intuitive feel for what is and is not solvable given certain bits of information. Consider the following difficult problem:

A circle having center O is inscribed in triangle ABC. What is the measure of angle BAC?

1. The radius of the circle is 2.
2. Segment OA has length 4.

(A) Statement (1) ALONE is sufficient, but statement (2) alone is not sufficient to answer the question asked.
(B) Statement (2) ALONE is sufficient, but statement (1) alone is not sufficient to answer the question asked.
(C) BOTH statements (1) and (2) TOGETHER are sufficient to answer the question asked, but NEITHER statement ALONE is sufficient to answer the question asked.
(D) EACH statement ALONE is sufficient to answer the question asked.
(E) Statements (1) and (2) TOGETHER are NOT sufficient to answer the question asked, and additional data specific to the problem are needed.

There are two ways to attack a problem like this. At the end of this article is an extremely well-thought out, coldly-reasoned, logical, academic explanation. While interesting, in terms of the GMAT it is an absolutely useless way to think about the question. It just takes too much time! Instead, you should train yourself to approach problems like these intuitively. Here’s how:

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Anxious about test day? Use these four steps to "zone in" (photo by DJane88).

You have prepared for months, perhaps even years for an important exam. Days and weeks before the exam your understanding grows to the point where you are sure that you have a complete mastery of the material. Your scores on GMAT practice tests are consistently good, your grasp of the exam format is secure, and there is nothing imaginable that could get in the way of you and a great score on this test.

Nothing, that is, except yourself. On test day, your pulse quickens, your hands sweat, and your mind races. You find yourself concentrating on everything that isn’t the test in front of you. You actually begin to worry about the fact that you are worrying, until you realize that you have just spent 5 minutes staring at the first question on the GMAT quantitative section without even beginning to find a solution.

Sound familiar?

If it does, you are not alone. Everyone, at one time or another, has felt the negative effects of test performance anxiety. It’s a horrible feeling — both during the test and afterward — knowing that you and only you were the direct cause of your subpar score.

Despite what you may think about your innate test ability (“I’m just bad at taking tests,” “I always choke,” etc. etc.), there are ways to deal with this. Check out this concrete plan, after the jump.

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Nate Burke is a Content Developer at Knewton, specializing in GMAT prep.

In Part I of this series, I talked about approaching wordy GMAT questions as a businessperson would–by carefully reading these questions the first time around in order to absorb all information. The following GMAT problem has inspired me to expand this approach questions to include the actual process of decision-making:

A square countertop has a square tile inlay in the center, leaving an untiled strip of uniform width around the tile. If the ratio of the tiled area to the untiled area is 25 to 39, which of the following could be the width, in inches, of the strip?

I. 1
II. 3
III. 4

a. I only
b. II only
c. I and II only
d. I and III only
e. I, II, and III

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Nate Burke is a Content Developer at Knewton, specializing in GMAT prep.

Are you stubborn? There are many situations in which stubbornness would help a human being. A stubborn nature can be extremely useful when trying to accomplish a complicated goal over an extended period of time. Building a house, traveling a long distance, hunting for food, and courting someone are all activities central to human history that require, at least to some degree, a knock-down, drag-out, brick-headed resolve to get the damn thing done NO MATTER WHAT.

It is natural, therefore, that you would want to spend 5 minutes on the first question in the GMAT quant section. It’s okay. Natural and cultural forces have optimized our problem-solving heuristics in a certain way; recognizing which ones actually are optimal in certain situations is the key to good performance. In any situation in life OTHER than the GMAT quant section, thinking really hard and creatively about a problem until a solution is found (even if it is for an extended period of time) will usually be of value. Not on the GMAT.

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Nathan Burke is a Math Content Developer at Knewton, specializing in GMAT prep.

The GMAT quantitative section is different from most math tests. You don’t usually see Data Sufficiency questions outside the GMAT, for one thing. They’re tricky, and mastering them requires a high level of familiarity. The good news is that the answer choices are the same for every question, and precise calculations are often unnecessary.

Then there are the word problems. All that text takes a long time to read. With 37 questions to do within a scant 75-minute period, you have an average of about two minutes to answer each question. It can be nerve-racking to spend almost half of this precious time just parsing out questions that are essentially prose versions of a company’s balance sheet.

photo by stuartpilbrow

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Nate Burke is a Content Developer at Knewton, specializing in question creation for the Quantitative section of Knewton’s GMAT prep course.

“The best way to win at Russian Roulette is to not play at all. Or you could just have the other guy go first and then run away quickly.” –Unknown

In the heyday of paper-based tests, the cure-all for the common ill of “getting stuck” on a question was simple: Skip the question and simply move on.  The rationale behind this strategy was that work done for other questions on the test might illuminate simple key concepts that were overshadowed by things like early-morning drowsiness, test anxiety, tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, etc, etc,.

Things have changed. The GMAT, like many other standardized tests, is administered on a computer. Though the question formats have remained roughly the same, the switch to computer-based-testing has rendered the “skip the question” strategy obsolete. On a computer-based-test, it is impossible to skip a question. The best that a time-constrained student with a total conceptual block can do is to guess and hope for the best outcome of what is essentially a game of Russian roulette with a 5-chambered revolver.

An ideal strategy for “getting stuck” within the context of a computer-based test is thus constrained to the narrow confines of the maximum time allotted per question. Consider that at the beginning of this time interval, WITHOUT EVEN HAVING READ THE QUESTION, a test-taker has already been granted a 20% chance of answering correctly by guessing randomly. This fact alone has consequences. If the student is still at a random-guess level of confidence at the end of the 2-3 minute maximum-time-per-question-interval, then all that the student has accomplished on this question was to lower his or her score. Every second that passes without progress lowers the score incrementally (and that’s not even accounting for the added adverse effects of things like stress-induced second-guessing, etc. etc.).

What is a student to do then, should he “get stuck?” If the path to the correct answer is obscured and overgrown, how does one trim the hedges?

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