| Welcome to the GMAT. Were we saying this to you in person, we might duck after speaking those words. For many people, there’s nothing remotely welcoming about the GMAT. To many business school applicants, the test appears to be the most painful hurdle they must clear in their admissions process, and the one for which their work experience has left them the least prepared.
Yet still they come: tens of thousands of people take the GMAT every year, subjecting themselves to three and a half hours of questions about linear equations, statistics, logic, English syntax, and just what the writer of that obscure passage meant by “shibboleth.” The GMAT can be irritating, but like it or not, it’s an unavoidable bump on the path to an MBA. And it doesn’t have to be your enemy; a high score on the GMAT can help pave the way to a spot in a top business school, which could lead to a very lucrative and rewarding career in brand management, consulting, investment banking, starting your own business . . . but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You know why you have to take the GMAT. It’s our business to help you make your GMAT score a strong point on your application.
The GMAT tests skills that you use all the time; it just tests them in ways that you probably never encounter in the real world. Every day of your life, you seek out information, analyze arguments, and compare quantities and values. If you’ve graduated from college, you should have been exposed at least once in your life to almost all of the mathematics and syntax concepts that are tested on the GMAT. Your success on the GMAT will be determined in large part by how well you can marshal these skills and half-forgotten concepts for the very specific types of problems presented by the GMAT. This book will help you do just that. |