The mbaMission Podcast

Ep 37 | GMAT & GRE Expert Shares Her Pet Peeves

• mbaMission • Season 2 • Episode 37

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In this episode of the mbaMission podcast, Stacey Koprince of Manhattan Prep is back to talk about her biggest pet peeves when it comes to the GMAT and the GRE. She discusses tricky quant problems, her favorite (and least favorite) vocab words, and when it's appropriate to make a guess and move on when taking the GMAT or GRE.

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hi this is Harold Simansky back with Stacy Koprince. hi Stacy hello I have a fun game to play with you today let's do it which is what part of the math section of the GMAT do you like the least my least favorite that that hits on both exams is what are called Combinatorics questions and these questions are like Mara and Jan and Cindy and Bobby and Peter and Greg are sitting around a table but Marsha and Jan won't sit next to each other and Cindy must sit next to Bobby and what are all the number of ways that they could sit around the I hate these totally totally hate these questions right yeah usually I will just guess a random unless it's something that's easy enough that I can literally just write out the different combinations it's like that that few number of combinations I literally will just guess and move on okay and if you move on what happens to your score uh really nothing I mean I've scored the 99th percentile on both of these exams so yeah okay so there's the answer let's talk about vocabulary words we both hate and I find certain vocabulary words particularly insipid and what sipid me is you really hate them what vocabulary words do you find particularly ubiquitous uh well ubiquitous is a different question you wanted to ask me what I hate or you want to you want to ask me what what's common on the test well let's go with what you hate so the thing that I hate is when they give us they give an obscure word that's like nobody's ever going to use this why are you testing me on this word right I want to go granted J is used for more programs than just business school but seriously if you're going to go are there programs in PhD and vocabulary I have no idea so they do sometimes get into quite obscure words um even on the uh the jry so in the old jry scoring scale the time that I got a perfect 800 when it when that was the scoring scale something uh on the verbal section there were still two vocab words I had literally never heard the words before right right right right and yet you still got an 800 and yet I still got an 800 I had sort I had sort of a vague idea like oh is this a positive connotation or is this a negative connotation i s I was like I might have sort of heard this word before I've never heard anybody use this word before um and when that happens first of all you can really can't just guess you don't need to get everything right to get a good score on these St as I just said I still got a perfect score even though there were two words that I didn't know but sometimes you sometimes it's enough just to know oh it's it's positive or it's negative or it's you know and at that point you've gone from five answers to three answers and then third chance exactly terrific and your favorite word uh I'm a fan of the word sence I don't know what that means it's just a uh I don't know why I enjoy that word it's not about the it's not about the meaning of it now I'm blanking on the meaning of it I like the way that it sounds that's part of it right there listen there are certain words that I like vernacular oh vernacular is a great word again it's the it it rolls off the tongue nicely right it's a it's it's got a good a good yeah yeah sound to it that's it exactly and at the end of the day do I understand you can actually go online and get a list of what is it500 words with the promise of bumping up your Jerry score by two or three points yeah so there are commonly there are words that show up frequently on the GRE we've done our homework so that so that you can do your homework with us uh and so yeah there are basically words that are are likely to show up we've got a list of actually 500 harder and 500 regular so 500 we call them 500 essential and 500 Advanced okay wow so start with the essential ones okay if you're then when you're good on those go to the 500 Advanced this is Harold Simansky with Stacy Koprince of Manhattan Prep thank you today for joining us with the mbaMission podcast