Announcing – Multiple Solutions! Review All Possible GMAT Solutions

We’re excited to announce the release of a new feature on examPAL – Multiple Solutions. From now on, we let you look “under the hood” and see not just the best solutions to match your own way of thinking, but also other possible solutions and their match to you. That’s what our PALgorithm has always been doing, and now you can see it as well.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the PALgorithm, here’s a brief introduction:

The PALgorithm™ is the patented technology that empowers the practice system at examPAL. Its main benefits include:

1. Tracking and analyzing all possible solutions to each question.
2. Creating personalized practice session that provide you with the right questions at the right time.
3. Scanning through all possible solutions and finding the best solution for you for each question based on the crowd wisdom and collected solutions of over 10,000 students from more than 150 countries.
4. Analyzing each student’s learning profile, strengths and weaknesses.
5. Combining the wisdom of the crowd with the personal data of each student in order to match each student with the right solution for every kind of GMAT question.

Until now, most of what the PALgorithm knew about you and about other solutions was “under the hood”, but we’ve now decided to bring it into the open, so all students will be able to see the best possible solution in each category (when there is one): Precise, Alternative, or Logical.

So, starting today, in the Improvement phase, in which we expose to you the best solution you should be aware of, you’ll be able to see how many of those who answered correctly used the specific solution and how long it took them to answer, on average.
In the Optimization section of the practice, in which we scan all possible solutions to find the best one for you, you will see the different possible solutions and a percentage representing the likelihood that each specific solution is the solution YOU should be using.

This is what it’s going to look like:

We expect this change to empower our students in many aspects of the GMAT prep:

• Help students understand better all the possible ways to solve every question, thus helping them assimilate and grasp the PAL method more thoroughly.
• Enlarge the student’s tool set when solving questions and dealing with memory blackouts. So in case you forget what the best way to solve a specific question is, you might be able to remember the other tools that will allow you to do it. It might take more time, but as long as you are able to solve the problem, it’s worth it. As you see in the screenshot above, the system will automatically tell you what other solutions you should look at and add to your tool set.
• Help students become aware of their own strengths, weaknesses, and problem-solving patterns. We expect this change to help you visualize better and see more clearly what kind of solutions are right for you for each kind of question/topic.

The importance of personalization in GMAT prep

This update takes us another step towards complete personalization of GMAT prep and test prep in general.

The answer to the question ‘why is personalization important?’ may seem like an obvious one, but the problem is that many people neglect to even take personalization into consideration when choosing a GMAT prep. We get that. After all, GMAT personalization wasn’t an option before examPAL. We want to remind you all that the GMAT is a standardized test with the main goal of testing how fast you solve different kinds of questions. In most cases, there is more than one way to solve each question, but since we are all different, and come from different backgrounds with different skills, we all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and we might use specific tools better or worse than others do.

On top of that, the GMAT is an adaptive test, which means the questions you will see on the test are questions that are at your own level. If you are a ‘600 score student’, you will not see a lot of 700+ questions on the test.

So if the test is going to be different for each and every student, why should the GMAT prep be a one-size-fits-all experience?

How to take advantage of Multiple Solutions

This update has rolled out to all active examPAL accounts. However, since you will see it only in the Optimization section of the practice (where the system offers personalized solutions), you will need enough credits in your account in order to experience it.

If you have a free examPAL account, you can go right now to the Integers section, where the entire practice section is available and unlocked.

When you upgrade your account, you’ll be able to go to any section of the course and experience this feature.

What’s next?

We will keep working hard to change the test-prep industry and close the gap between what is currently being offered and what technology can do.

We have a few more surprises that will roll out in the next few months, and in a few weeks’ time, we expect to release our GRE course(!).

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