More than 250,000 students take the GMAT every year as a requirement to get into the thousands of different MBA, EMBA, MFin, MAcct, and Management PhD programs worldwide. However, due to the complexity of the exam as well as its adaptive difficulty, only the top 12% of test-takers manage to score 700 or above. Here are 8 GMAT test strategies you can utilize to achieve a higher score on the exam, no matter where you currently are on your GMAT preparation journey.
1. Adopting The Proper Mindset
Perspective is everything. It is very important to understand that even though getting in the top 10% of test-takers might seem like a spectacular achievement (and don’t get me wrong, it certainly is), setting your goals on a certain score tends to be counterproductive. Instead, focus on attaining specific skills, knowledge, and command, and the score will follow. Goals lead to expectations and fear of failure, and fear of failure, in turn, results in stress, which can greatly hinder performance.
2. Overcoming Stress
Stress and fear can greatly influence your results, but there are ways to manage these very normal responses to a high-stakes situation. One of the ways to reduce stress and boost your confidence is by beginning your GMAT preparation process as early as possible – ideally 90-120 days before the exam. This provides enough time to fully grasp the complexities of the exam, and more importantly internalize a new set of skills to handle that complexity.
A test taker’s greatest enemy is test anxiety. Understand that anxiety happens to everyone. What sets top performers apart is how they handle that anxiety, and how they direct it back into their performance. Many people use a variety of relaxation techniques for dealing with test anxiety. The most common and easy to use method is to practice deep and controlled breathing in combination with visualization techniques.
3. Prepare Your GMAT Test Day Survival Kit
Are you a coffee drinker? Surprisingly, caffeine can really help your performance on test day. Caffeine is a powerful nootropic that will help keep your senses sharp and will also boost the oxygenated blood flow to your brain, subsequently enhancing your performance.
Remember how we said that it’s important to begin your exam prep early? This “early bird” attitude can be applied in more ways than one. What this implies is that you must (not might, not should) prepare your GMAT Test Day Survival Kit on the previous day and not leave this for the last moment. Everyone has waited for the last minute to do something, and chances are everyone has left something crucial behind. With the GMAT being such an important exam such situations should be avoided as much as possible. Try having a mock exam day. Map out the whole test day and practice it as if it were real, including your trip to the testing center. This will help you normalize the process and alleviate anxiety on test day.
4. Value Your Time and Manage It Efficiently
Since the GMAT is a timed exam one’s planning and strategic skills are put to the test as they have to come up with an efficient time management strategy.
Use mental math tools whenever possible and also try getting used to reading and analyzing charts, graphs, and tables efficiently for GMAT’s Integrated Reasoning section.
Once you’re further along in your preparation and have mastered seeing multiple solution paths before engaging any of them, familiarize yourself with common problems, and built-up test reading and perspective skills, then you can begin dedicating yourself to timed sets: working on a cluster of 10 consecutive questions for each section of the exam when on the clock. This helps you calibrate your timing decisions and more readily notice when they require adjustment.
Remember, just because the GMAT is a timed exam, this doesn’t mean we must learn under a time constraint. Like good cooking, good learning takes time. Give yourself sufficient time to learn, while also making sure the learning time is spent as productively as possible.
5. Know What To Look For
In the Integrated Reasoning section you will be dealing with 12 multi-part questions in 30 minutes. This means that you’re going to be overwhelmed with information, and you won’t have much time to spare. Sorting through large amounts of data and understanding it in a timely manner is key to getting through this section.
A good way to rapidly identify information needed to solve a problem is knowing what to look for. Read the problems carefully (and this applies to all sections) and proactively determine what you want out of the information or solution path. This way, you will sift out most unnecessary information in advance, saving plenty of time along the way. However, this does NOT mean ignoring the text written around the tables/graphs/charts.
6. Always Plan Your Essay!
Failing to plan is planning to fail! Always plan your essay! Set aside 4-5 minutes to plan what you are going to write and how you are going to structure your essay.
Create an essay template in advance! There are many ways you can go about making one but usually, the more you practice your essay writing skills the more used to a specific writing style you are going to get ultimately resulting in your own template.
7. Ask For Help
There is nothing embarrassing about asking for help, especially when it comes to an exam that is so vital to one’s future. There are numerous GMAT forums and courses on the web, where you can ask and get help from people who have already taken it.
However, if you would prefer a more personal and individualized approach you could consider hiring a GMAT private tutor. The benefit of not preparing alone but hiring a tutor is that it allows for direct feedback on what are an individual’s strengths and what needs improvement, while also receiving advice on how to achieve those improvements. As a result, when the exam day comes you will not only be well prepared but will also know it, having built up confidence in your abilities.
8. Practice, Practice, Practice
No doubt you’re familiar with the phrase “practice makes perfect.” There is a reason why this is such a popular saying: it’s true! Not all practice is equal, though. Varied practice that aims at building on existing skills and knowledge is much more high yielding than repetition. No matter how clever you are, no matter how good of a student you’ve been, or how proficient in math you are, if you do not put enough time and effort into your prep you are not likely to be happy with the end result. Even the top GMAT tutors and courses out there won’t be able to help you out if you don’t give your best.
So remember, don’t just go through the motions, but practice by constantly looking at the same problems and concepts in new ways, and trying to use them in novel situations, and you’ll find your GMAT prep vastly accelerated.
To Review
This was the list of 8 GMAT test strategies that can help you score high on the exam. Keep in mind that what works for one person will not necessarily work for another as everybody learns differently. It is only through practice and proactive learning that you will be able to find what are the best methods for your success.
Contributor: Ivan Minchev