Geometry: DRAW It. Every Time.

Here is a scene I watch play out every week. A Test Taker reads an Executive Assessment geometry question about a square, a point on one side and a triangle. They stare at the screen. Their eyes go up and to the left, which is where people keep their imaginary drawings. They rotate the square in their mind, lose track of which corner is which, and go back to read the question again. Then again. Ninety seconds later they have nothing on paper and a guess in their hand.

I'll bet you have done this. I'll bet the question you 'couldn't do' took MORE than two minutes, and I'll bet you read it at least three times. Here is my verdict: refusing to draw is not a time saver. It is the single most expensive habit you can bring to geometry.

Your head is a TERRIBLE piece of scratch paper

The Quantitative Reasoning section of the Executive Assessment gives you 14 questions in 30 minutes. That is a little over two minutes per question, on average. The questions come in two types: Problem Solving (a normal math question with five answer choices) and Data Sufficiency (more on that below). Each section is scored from 0 to 20, and all three sections count the same toward your total of 100 to 200. You can check all of that on GMAC's assessment structure page.

Now think about what that means. You are a working professional. You have a job, maybe a family, and maybe an hour a night to study. You do not have time to waste on a habit that makes questions SLOWER. And working a shape in your head is exactly that habit.

Why? Because a geometry question is just a set of facts about a picture. A side length here. A right angle there. A midpoint. When you hold those facts in your head, you have to keep all of them alive at once while you also try to solve the thing. When you draw, the paper holds the facts and your brain is free to think. That is the whole trick. It is not about being 'good at geometry'. It is about not making your memory do a job that a pencil does better.

This is the same idea behind why we tell you to make a table for rates and work. Get it OUT of your head. Every time.

Watch what a drawing does

Try this one before you read the solution. And yes, draw it.

Stop and think about that for a moment. The 'hard' part of that question was never the math. The math was half of 6 times 6. The hard part was SEEING it, and the drawing did that for you.

Data Sufficiency: draw it TWICE

Data Sufficiency (DS) questions give you a question and two statements. You do not have to find the answer. You have to decide whether the statements give you ENOUGH information to find exactly one answer. The five answer choices are always the same, so learn them once.

On geometry DS, one drawing is not enough. You want to draw the shape, then try to draw a DIFFERENT shape that still fits the facts. If you can draw two shapes that fit and give two different answers, the statement is not sufficient. This is testing values, just with a pencil instead of numbers.

Notice that the habit there is the same one that saves you on number properties questions: don't trust the first case that pops into your head. Try a second one on purpose.

4 drawing mistakes I see all the time

1. Drawing only when the question gives you a picture. Plenty of geometry questions are just words. Those are the ones that need a drawing MOST. INSTEAD: any time a question names a shape, a side or an angle, your pencil moves before your brain does.
2. Drawing tiny. A shape the size of a thumbnail has no room for labels, so you end up re-reading the question to remember which side was which. INSTEAD: draw it big, and write every number from the question right on the picture.
3. Trusting the picture you were given. A figure on the test may not be drawn to scale. If an angle looks like 90 degrees but the question never says so, it is not 90 degrees. INSTEAD: redraw it yourself using ONLY the facts in the words, and mark what you actually know.
4. Drawing once on DS. One drawing tells you a statement CAN work. It never tells you it MUST work. INSTEAD: draw it a second way, stretched, squashed or flipped, and see if the answer changes.

But I don't have TIME to draw

Yes, you do. A rough sketch takes about ten seconds. Re-reading a geometry question three times takes a lot longer than that, and that is before you guess wrong. You have to decide what you want MORE: a higher Quant score, or the pride of 'doing it in your head'. You do not get both.

The EA is a standardized test. It uses the same handful of shapes and facts again and again. That means you can train for it, and drawing is the training.

Here is your challenge for today. Pull out five geometry questions you have ALREADY done, including ones you got right. Redo every one of them, and draw a full, labeled picture before you do any math. Time yourself. Then compare those times to what you did the first time. I'll bet at least one of them gets faster, and I'll bet you find at least one 'right' answer that was really a lucky guess.