The Analytical Writing measure assesses critical thinking and analytical writing capabilities. It evaluates your ability to communicate and support complicated ideas, design and test arguments, and engage in a clear and intelligible discussion of an issue. It doesn’t assess how much you know about a specific topic.
Grammar may be something you wanted to avoid by taking the MAT instead of the ACT, SAT, or GMAT. But the way that the MAT tests grammar is based on the relationships between punctuation marks and what they actually indicate from a definition standpoint, rather than sentence completion as seen on the GMAT.
A “Pivot term” is a term that cannot relate to the blank in the analogy; it helps you correctly determine the relationship between the given terms in the original analogy before evaluating answer choices. It’s imperative to identify this relationship before looking to the answer choices, as you will be better able to narrow your focus to pair the blank to one term vs. anything in the list of choices.
It’s an increasingly common question given the growing acceptance of the GRE. 10 years ago, very few MBA programs accepted the GRE as part of their admissions requirements. 5 years ago, a growing number of schools accepted the GRE in theory, but it was still a clear minority of students who were in fact applying to MBA programs with a GRE score instead of a GMAT score.
Master’s degrees are becoming increasingly common, and it’s not hard to see why. In some fields, an advanced degree is necessary for even entry-level jobs, and for others, like STEM fields, it can mean an even higher salary, more and better prospects and more exciting work. But, it’s also not hard to see why many professionals are reluctant to take the plunge into traditional graduate school. Doing so means leaving the workforce, moving to a new city and going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
This is the first in a multipart series on how to go about studying for the GRE or GMAT. We don’t plan on going into detail on specific concepts covered on the GRE or specific test-taking strategies in this series. Instead, the intention is to cover higher level, foundational issues around preparing for these exams, such as what type of support to get, what materials to use, what mindset to cultivate, etc. This article is being posted on our GRE blog, but we’ll switch from GRE to GMAT over time, as the concepts are broadly applicable to both exams.