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When it comes to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this weekly blog series, Manhattan GMAT’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.

In early December, I attended the biannual GMAC Summit, a special conference for test prep companies that is put on by the makers of the GMAT. I have various important pieces of information to share! The most important one is first.

Scoring and Timing

When we were discussing the scoring algorithm, someone asked the age-old question of whether certain questions are “worth more” than others. Dr. Lawrence Rudner, chief psychometrician of GMAC, indicated (as he always has in the past) that the earlier questions are not worth more than the later ones. He did, however, indicate something that we suspected but had never heard officially confirmed: “outlier” questions ultimately count less toward your score.

What is an outlier? Briefly, an outlier is a question for which your performance was unexpected. Read on to understand what this means.

An outlier is always relative to your own performance. Most of the questions you answer will be within a certain range of difficulty. As a general rule, you will answer more of the easier questions in your range correctly, and you will answer more of the harder questions incorrectly. This is the expected behavior.

There are two types of outliers:

(1) easier questions that you get wrong

(2) harder questions that you get right

If you were answering 70th percentile questions mostly correctly but answered a 50th percentile question incorrectly, then that question will ultimately count less toward your overall score.

The Takeaway: Do not stress over missing a question that you think is easier (but note that you cannot let this happen too many times, or those questions will no longer be outliers!)

If, on the other hand, you were answering 70th percentile questions mostly correctly but answered a 90th percentile question correctly, then that question will also ultimately count less toward your overall score.

The Takeaway: Do not waste a bunch of time and mental energy trying to get a really hard (for you) question right.

Now, some of you are thinking, “But what if I can get a lot of those really hard questions right? Then they will help my score!”

Can you spot the problem with that line of thinking?

If you were already capable of answering that level of question effectively and efficiently, you would not need to spend extra time or think, “Oh, I really need to get these right!” You would already know how to do them.

Plus, spending extra time on a hard question does not actually guarantee that you will answer it correctly. Even if you do happen to get one right periodically, that question is going to end up being an outlier for you—and you will miss other, easier questions later in the section because you will have mismanaged your time.

It gets even worse. Those easier errors are no longer outliers, because there are too many of them, so your entire score is pulled down. (And the farther down the overall score is pulled, the more the couple of harder questions that you got right turn into outliers, so they will not help pull your score up!)

What to do? What we have been telling you all along: maintain a steady performance throughout the test, neither rushing nor spending too much time, and letting go of a question when needed (everyone will need to do this!).

If you want to learn more about outliers in general, I recommend reading Malcolm Gladwell’s fabulous book Outliers: The Story of Success.

Check back in next week, when I will share news about Integrated Reasoning.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when choosing a business school, but the educational experience is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we focus on Prashant Kale from the Indian School of Business (ISB).

Prashant Kale teaches “Competitive Strategy,” a foundational economics and strategy course, in Term 2 to four—as we were told—“lucky” sections. A PhD from Wharton and an associate professor at the Rice Jones Graduate School of Management, Kale reportedly brings a dynamic international perspective to the subjects of competitive strategy, particularly mergers and acquisitions. In this case-based course, students act as decision makers seeking to create or strengthen the competitive advantage of their case companies, primarily through strategic investments. The course subsequently tackles global advantage, exploring the differences in strategy required for different markets. Part of the course’s aim is to empower students to develop critical and integrative thinking skills.

When mbaMission asked students to name their favorite professor, Kale was frequently at the top of the list. “He makes the class really great,” said one student. “He actually does consulting for most of these things, so he speaks from experience.” Added another, “He knows how to engage the whole class.” And a third student made special note of Kale’s rigorous classroom style, observing that in some other classes, “you can pretty much put your head down and not even look at the time, but in his class, you can’t afford to do that. You know you’re going down if you haven’t done your work.” Apparently, students worldwide agree that Kale is top notch: he won the Professor of the Year Award in 2009 at the ISB and the Best Teacher Award at Jones the same year. He was also featured among Bloomberg Businessweek’s “Most Popular Profs at Top Business Schools” in 2011.

For more information about the ISB and 15 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.

Thus far, the “new” Integrated Reasoning (IR) section of the GMAT (added in June 2012) has been almost an afterthought for most applicants. We can hardly blame test takers for focusing their studies on the “traditional” elements of the GMAT—the Verbal and Quant sections—because admissions officers have been quite clear that candidates’ IR scores would not be immediately relevant. Admissions representatives were candid in explaining that they would need to wait and see how a few cycles of students fare in their selected MBA programs before determining whether a correlation can be drawn between their IR test results and their subsequent academic performance.

By May of 2014, some students with IR scores will have completed a year of business school, and admissions officers should be able to start data mining. We are most likely still in the earliest stages of the IR section’s relevance, but conscientious/conservative applicants should assume that its value will only increase for admissions committees. Meanwhile, some MBA employers—consulting firms in particular—are considering using students’ IR scores as a factor in hiring decisions, which means that your IR score might be more relevant on your way out of business school than it was on your way in.

Recognizing that the significance of the IR section will likely grow, our friends at Manhattan GMAT designed “GMAT INTERACT for IR,” a five-lesson curriculum for test takers that is free. Yes, FREE! After an introductory session, applicants engage in four lessons, each focusing on a type of IR test question: Graphics Interpretation, Table Analysis, Multi-Source Reasoning and Two-Part Analysis. Manhattan GMAT’s INTERACT is not just a series of video recordings—it is truly… interactive! It engages students the same way a tutor would and allows them to make choices that direct their learning.

Students who have taken the “GMAT INTERACT for IR” modules thus far have given enthusiastic feedback about the experience. We are encouraging our clients to try it out as well, so it only seems fair to let you in on the “secret.”

When it comes to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this weekly blog series, Manhattan GMAT’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.

In the Part 1 of this article, we talked about the five-step process to answer Sentence Correction (SC) problems:

1. Take a First Glance
2. Read the Sentence
3. Find a Starting Point
4. Eliminate Answers
5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4

If you have not already learned that process, read Part 1 before continuing with this article.

Drills to Build Skills

How do you learn to do all of this stuff? You are going to build some skills that will help at each stage of the way. The drills are summarized in this post; if you want the full description of each, check out the original article on the Manhattan GMAT blog.

Drill Number 1: First Glance

Open up your Official Guide (OG) and find some lower-numbered SC questions that you have already tried in the past. Give yourself a few seconds (no more than 5!) to glance at a problem, then look away and say out loud what you noticed in those few seconds.

As you develop your First Glance skills, start to read a couple of words: the one right before the underline and the first word of the underline. Do those give you any clues about what might be tested in the problem? For instance, consider this sentence:

Xxx xxxxxx xxxx xx and she xxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxx xxx xxxxx.

I have a strong suspicion that this problem might test parallelism, because the word and falls immediately before the underline. When I read the sentence, I will be looking for an X and Y parallelism structure.

Drill Number 2: Read the Sentence

Take a look at some OG problems you have tried before. Read only the original sentence. Then, look away from the book and articulate aloud, in your own words, what you think the sentence is trying to convey. You do not need to limit yourself to one sentence. You can also glance back at the problem to confirm details.

I want to stress the “out loud” part; you will be able to hear whether the explanation is sufficient. If so, try another problem.

If you are struggling or unsure, then one of two things is happening. Either you just do not understand, or the sentence actually does not have a clear meaning, and this is precisely why the choice is wrong! Decide which you think it is and then check the explanation.

Next Steps

Spend the next week drilling these skills for steps 1 and 2. Then come back here to join us for the third part in the series, in which you will learn two more drills for the later steps of the SC process.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school at attend, but the educational experience itself is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we profile William Silber from New York University’s (NYU’s) Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

The Marcus Nadler Professor of Finance and Economics and director of the Glucksman Institute for Research in Securities Markets, William Silber has been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award (1980) and was twice voted Professor of the Year at NYU (1990, 1997). In addition, Silber received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Medal in 1999. In a November 2012 post on Stern’s Full-time MBA Blog, a student referred to Silber as “a Stern legend who consistently finds a way to make ‘Foundations of Finance’ both entertaining and insightful.” Students with whom mbaMission spoke commented that Silber’s class is “almost like a performance,” because he keeps students engaged with stories of real-world situations from his background in industry. Silber was formerly a trader and frequently relies on anecdotes from his experiences at the New York Mercantile Exchange and Lehman Brothers to illustrate complex financial issues for his students.

For more information about NYU Stern and 15 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.