Owl Test Prep’s guide to all the fundamental skills you need to ace the quant portion of the GMAT.
There are a number of fundamentals guides on the market and I’ve used most of them at one time or another when working with my private students. All of them have their pros and cons, but most of them have one significant problem – they are math books, not GMAT books.
The quantitative portion of the GMAT is a skill based on a body of knowledge. It is not a math test. Just “knowing the math” is not enough. You need to know how the GMAT presents the math, so I’m going to include as many GMAT style problems as possible while introducing you to the basic concepts you need to know to solve those problems. I will also present the basic strategies and tactics that experienced test takers use to solve these questions quickly and efficiently.
IMPORTANT:
I am assuming you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide with positive and negative integers, fractions, and decimals. You should also be able find 23% of 17 without a calculator. If you can’t do all of these things quickly and accurately, STOP RIGHT HERE. Rationalizations like “I’m sure it will come back to me” are first class tickets to an economy class MBA programs.
If someone has to hold an RPG to your head to get you to do math by hand, you need to fix this by getting an account on Khan Academy, and working your way through the arithmetic module (advice about how to use to Khan Academy for maximum benefit can be found here). If you don’t know what Khan Academy is, you should fix this by watching the TED talk Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education. If you don’t know what a TED talk is, I don’t know what to say… There’s no TED talk about TED talks.