I’m pretty sure I re-learned long division tonight as I helped my daughter through her homework assignment.

That was a skill that bedeviled me when I took the GMAT twenty years ago. The GMAT, at that time at least, did not allow for the use of a calculator. To make it worse, none of the figures on the math problems divided evenly. Many of the math problems were painful to get through, not because I didn’t know the math, but because I could not remember how to calculate the final answers with long division. At the time, I was a recent college graduate, and I hadn’t done long division since the seventh grade. I’m pretty sure I got a bunch of questions wrong because I had forgotten how to perform long division. In the end, my math score paled in comparison to my language score, all due to me not remembering, or at least reviewing, long division.

I got A’s and A+’s all throughout business school. I concentrated in finance. Never once did I have to perform calculations without a calculator. Sometimes life—or at least the typical qualification exam—is not fair.