If you're still working on your business school application, you may be facing some tough decisions, such as whether you should hurry to finish your application in order to make second round deadlines, give yourself more time by applying in the third round, or eschew the third round and wait to apply next fall. 

A new year brings with it new goals, new opportunities and new challenges, and for countless business school applicants, 2014 will hopefully bring acceptance and entry into an MBA program.  However, the new year is also the perfect time to reflect on the personal and professional experiences of the previous 12 months, and in this spirit we've complied some of our top GMAT blog posts of 2013 to help you achieve your GMAT goals of 2014.  

In the first post of this series, we outlined how to spot inefficient trends in your answer choices and time management throughout the test.  We'll now build on these previous steps by showing you how to combine your pacing categories with other test metrics in order to establish your specific GMAT strengths and weaknesses and discover the concepts and question types behind them.

With second round application deadlines rapidly approaching, there's no time to waste in your GMAT prep.  However, working hard and working smart can often mean two different things, and with time at a premium, it's important to get the most out of your efforts.  If you take practice tests without analyzing the results in order to optimize your studying, you're losing the essential value of these tests and wasting time and effort.

Obtaining useful feedback from a practice test is akin to extracting gold from the earth.  The initial task of taking the test, like mining gold-rich rock and ore, is necessary but not valuable in itself.  It takes another step to refine and extract the value out of the raw material.  For mining, this means separating the gold from the other rocks and minerals, and for practice tests, this means distilling actionable information from your test practice metrics.  This actionable information outlines what you should study and what strategies you can implement to best improve your score.  

The Chinese version of Prep4GMAT will now be the exlusive GMAT study app for ShareWithU members, one of China's largest and most popular standardized test forums.  Over 70 percent of Chinese students and professionals studying for the GMAT rely on ShareWithU's quality articles, forums and services to prepare for the test.  Read the official press release below!

"If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in 100 battles.  If you do not know your enemy nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."  Sun Tzu wrote these words in reference to war, but they could just as well be applied to GMAT prep.  If you don't know what you're up against, your setting yourself up for danger.  And for the unprepared, the GMAT verbal section can be a real danger to their total score.

Where there was one, there now is two.  For over half a century, students took the GMAT as part of the application process for business school, but today there's a choice.  Business schools, including many top-ranked programs, now accept the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, in lieu of the GMAT.  This super-charged SAT tests the same skills as the GMAT -- verbal and quantitative reasoning -- yet its format and test sections differ significantly, possibly to some testers' advantage. 

Testers whose verbal abilities outweigh their quantitative skills often score higher on the GRE than on the GMAT.  While both exams only cover high school level math concepts, the GMAT's math problems are more demanding and complex since math is a critical component of business education and practice.  The GRE, on the other hand, is the entrance exam for a wide range of graduate programs, including many in which math is never used, so questions are generally less complicated.

Wouldn't it be great if there was some way you could break down a verbose Reading Comprehension passage into just the essential information needed to answer the questions?  No longer would you need to slog through extemporaneous details or stumble over abstruse vocabulary.  Instead, you could quickly discern the important facts and arguments while discarding all the excess detail.

Essentially, this is the idea behind GMAT Reading Comprehension.  The passages and questions are designed to test your capacity to sort dense text and extract the underlying logic. And this skill doesn't end with the GMAT; it's a fundamental skill you'll call upon throughout business school and in your professional career as executives and entrepreneurs need to make quick and efficient decisions based on a variety of written information. 

Data-Sufficiency questions look like the evil offspring of the Problem Solving section and Critical Reasoning section: Math question stems are followed by a series of logical constructions in the answer choices.  It's no surprise then that this strange combination worries most test takers, especially given the absence of discrete answer choices as found in typical math questions.

However, because you don't have to solve for a specific answer, you can eschew a lot of the computational headache involved in some Problem Solving questions, and with a little know-how and practice, you can use the format of Data-Sufficiency GMAT questions to your advantage.   

If you're considering retaking the GMAT, you're not alone.  Nearly 20 percent of the thousands of GMATs proctored each year are given to people who have attempted the exam at least once before.  The reasons for trying again are many.  Perhaps in your own case your first exam resulted in a score lower than you expected after months of studying and high marks on practice tests, or perhaps you hardly studied at all, expecting all along to take the test more than once.  

Taking the test at least twice has become as much of a strategy as it is a necessity for many test takers, especially as many management programs will now aggregate your best scores across all your tests.  Despite the commonality of taking multiple exams, questions remain about the advantages and gains of taking the GMAT more than once.