Integrated Reasoning Is NOT the Warm-Up Act
It is 9:40 on a Tuesday night. You finished work, ate dinner standing up and opened your prep. Quant again. Maybe some Sentence Correction. And Integrated Reasoning? You'll 'get to it' the week before the test. It's the warm-up act, right? The little thing before the real show.
That is a TERRIBLE plan. The good news is that it is also an easy one to fix.
Do the math on your own score
The Executive Assessment is the test GMAC built for Executive MBA programs. It has three sections, and each one lasts 30 minutes. Integrated Reasoning (IR, the section where you work with tables, charts and written data together) has 12 questions. Verbal has 14. Quant has 14. Each section is scored from 0 to 20, and those three scores add up to a total between 100 and 200. All three are weighted the SAME. You can see the breakdown on GMAC's page on the test structure.
Stop reading for a second and let that sink in. Twelve questions carry a full third of your score. A point you earn in IR counts exactly as much as a point you earn in Quant. Not less. The SAME.
Now pull up your study log. I'll bet the IR line is SHORTER than you want to admit. Count your hours on Quant. Count your hours on IR. If the second number is close to zero, you've decided to give away points before you ever walk into the test center.
What IR actually asks you to do
IR is the part of the test that looks most like your job. You get data in pieces: tables, charts, emails, short reports. Then you pull the right pieces together and make a call. You'll see Multi-Source Reasoning (facts spread across several tabs), Graphics Interpretation (a chart with statements to complete), Two-Part Analysis (one prompt, two linked answers) and Table Analysis (a sortable table with true or false statements).
None of that is fancy math. It's organization. And organization is TRAINABLE. The people who score well on IR aren't geniuses. They're the ones who practiced a process until it was automatic.
Here's one to try. Take notes. On paper.
Five ways people hand IR points away
'I do this at work every day.' Maybe you do. At work you also have all afternoon, a spreadsheet and a coworker to double-check you. Here you have 30 minutes and a pad. That's pride talking, and pride is a ceiling.
INSTEAD: Put IR in your plan from week one. If it's a third of the score, it deserves real, regular time. Not leftovers.
Reading every word before you know the question. IR prompts are long on purpose. Read everything slowly from the top and you'll burn minutes on facts you never use. We dig into this in Multi-Source Reasoning, but it applies to every IR type.
INSTEAD: Skim the data to learn what's where. Read the question. THEN go hunting for only the pieces you need.
Doing the work in your head. IR throws more numbers at you per question than almost anything else on the test. Holding them all in your head is how a $0.18 turns into a $0.20.
INSTEAD: One short line of notes per fact. Every question. Even the 'easy' ones.
Checking one part and assuming the rest. Many IR questions ask for more than one answer. People nail the first part, feel great and rush the second.
INSTEAD: Treat each part as its own question. Check every answer against ALL the facts, the way you checked both print jobs above.
Treating the clock like a per-question deadline. Twelve questions in 30 minutes is 2.5 minutes on AVERAGE. An average is not a rule. Some questions take one minute. A tabbed set might take longer. If you're always short on time, the clock isn't the disease. Re-reading, head math and the long route are.
INSTEAD: Fix the cause. Notes, a set order of steps and the shortest route. The time shows up on its own.
Here's another. Same deal: paper first.
Stop studying IR. Train it.
Here's the forced choice. What do you want MORE: to keep feeling comfortable in the sections you already like, or a higher total score? Because the points you skip in IR don't come back. You can't make them up with a few extra Quant questions. Each section is scored on its own, from 0 to 20.
And it's a standardized test. The question types are known. The format is known. That means you can walk in having seen every kind of IR question many times. You'll get the score you EARN, so earn the IR third too.
Your challenge for today: do six IR questions with no timer. Take notes on paper for every one, even the ones that feel easy. Then write one sentence for each miss saying EXACTLY why you missed it. 'I don't know' isn't allowed. Tomorrow, redo all six cold and compare your notes to today's. If your process got shorter and cleaner, you're training. If it didn't, you just found your next fix.
