How to Ace the GMAT

Disclaimer: I had prepared for CAT 2019 and that helped me for the quantitative reasoning section and the reading comprehensions.

Resources Used: Magoosh self study premium plan, GMAT official guide, GMAT official practice tests (1-6), Prepscholar YouTube channel and free tests from Manhattanprep, Veritas, Kaplan, e-GMAT, Princeton, GMAT Club and Experts global.

Before reading further, you should get to know everything about GMAT online from here. It'll help you understand what follows.

Step 1: Take the First Practice Test Available on mba.com

I started my preparation by doing this. I scored a 640 (Q48, V31). After which I analysed each and every question thoroughly. Analyzing whatever you solve is going to be the most important part of your preparation. The answer explanations of the official practice tests are not provided by mba.com so you will have to look these questions up at forums such as GMAT Club.

What I mean by "analyzing" is to understand exactly what logic, formula or thought process was used to solve the question and to make notes about the same.

Doing this will help you understand your weakness and strengths, thereby helping you to devise the best possible study plan for yourself.

Step 2: Preparing a Study Plan

Making a personalized study plan requires you to consider a lot of factors such as time constraints, application deadlines, target score, etc. Most of the online GMAT coaching institutes would offer a personalized plan but none can be as personalized as the one you create for yourself (unless you take private tutoring). Hence, I'd recommend you to make one for yourself. This will help you achieve your target score in the least amount of time.

One of the things that helped me the most was that I used to study everyday. Even if you're working or busy with any other thing, I'd strongly suggest you to spare at least 1 focused hour for your GMAT preparation.

You should also make sure that your study plan allows you to get enough sleep every night. 7-8 hours of sleep worked for me, but again, it's subjective.

What I'm going to provide you with is the structure of the study plan that helped me get 740. Your personalized study plan's structure should have two parts:

1. Concept Learning

After taking the first mock, you'll know exactly what are the problem areas and you can start working on them. A major portion of our errors are because we are not familiar with the concepts and hence it is impossible for us to solve these questions. That is why this first step is very important. For me, sentence correction was a huge problem. I had an accuracy of less than 50%. So, I started off by watching the concept videos on Magoosh and solving about 10 questions after every topic. I did this for every topic in which I faced a problem.

While learning the new concepts, you should keep solving about 10 questions from each section of the official guide every day and analyzing them. You can also choose to do 5 from each in case you've got lesser time every day since learning the concepts should be the focus right now.

2. Practicing and Testing

GMAT has a confined syllabus. After you're done with learning all the concepts, there's not even one concept on GMAT which you will not have come across in your preparation journey until now. So, now it's just about learning how to tackle the apparently tougher questions, attaining higher accuracy, building the stamina to stay focused for the entire test duration and finding a test taking strategy that works for you. The best way to achieve these goals is to get timed practice daily which covers all the sections and obviously, analyzing the questions. I used to solve about 31 questions of quants and 36 questions of verbal. I did this with the help of Magoosh, it has a huge question bank and extremely customizable tests. Any other reliable source should also be fine.

At this point, you also need to make a schedule for your mock tests. I would recommend you to at least give all the mocks that I've mentioned in the beginning of this article. Spread them out evenly until 2 days before your actual test. Again, analyzing would be the the most important thing to do after giving a mock. You should also keep on revising the notes that you've been making all this while every 4-5 days.

You might be wondering, how many hours should you study or how many questions should you solve or how many weeks or months will it take. Well, there's no-one-size-fits-all answer for that. It completely depends on how much time can you put in everyday, how efficient & consistent you are and your clarity of the concepts. After every test or set of questions that you analyze, you'll be able to assess yourself and answer these questions yourself.

Step 3: Implementing the Plan

Although this is obvious, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind here.

• After learning the concepts, you should at least be able to solve the easy questions from all the topics. GMAT punishes you hard for messing up easy questions whereas you can afford to get some of the tough questions incorrect and still get a 700+ score.
• Everyday practice is extremely crucial. An hour of studying everyday would make more difference than studying long hours on weekends. It's okay if you start a week late but make sure that you practice everyday once you start.
• You're not going to be 100% productive everyday and it's okay. I guarantee you that I must have wasted more time than you do so don't stress yourself over it.
• There is a lot of material available out there. I've still got so much unsolved material that I could start all over again. It's not about how many questions you solve, it's about how well you analyze the ones you've solved. So, don't overwhelm yourself over not solving everything.
• There will be tests in which you score very poorly. Trust me, I've been there. You will have to stay motivated. The following are the scores from all my mocks. After each such test, you should figure out what went wrong. Did you end up spending a lot of time on one question? Did you give the test casually? or whatever. If you do this, you can make sure that it doesn't happen on the test day.

Step 4: Taking the Test

• Do not practice anything a day before your exam. Just go through the notes that you've made and relax.
• Make sure to run the system test a day before.
• Do not worry about the internet connection. Even if your internet stops working in the middle, you can get up and fix it. You just need to be in front of the camera once the test starts again. You won't lose any time.
• Stick to the strategy that you have been practicing in the mock tests. Do not experiment here.

Pacing Guidelines

Quantitative Reasoning

• You've got 2 minutes for every question. If you're confident that you can afford to spend more time on the question, and compensate for it on another, then you can do so. Otherwise you should make an estimated guess and move ahead after 2 minutes.
• It's a little inconvenient to look at the timer after every question. So you can do remember this for quants: At question 11, you should have at least 40 minutes left. At question 21, you should have at least 20 minutes left. At question 31, you should have at least 2 minutes left.

Verbal

• This is a little more complicated than quants and will obviously vary according to your strengths and weaknesses but there's an ideal case.
• Sentence correction: 1-1.5 minutes, Critical reasoning: 1.5-3 minutes, Reading Comprehensions: 6 minutes for a set of 3 questions and 8 minutes for a set of 4 (including 2-4 mins to read the passage).
• At question 11, you should have at least 45 minutes left At question 21, you should have at least 27 minutes left At question 31, you should have at least 10 minutes left.

Miscellaneous Tips:

• There is no point in trying to figure out the algorithm. No, the first 10 questions are not the most important. There is no specific number of questions that you need to get right in order to reach a particular score. Thinking about all this would just waste your time.
• Official practice tests are a true representation of where you stand only when you attempt them as you would attempt the actual test. Practice tests from other sources are not as accurate as the official ones but they are an important resource.
• You need to organize your rough work properly. You might end up making silly errors and taking longer time if you don't. Especially in data sufficiency questions.
• Give the practice tests at the same time you plan on giving the actual tests. This will train your mind to perform well in the test.
• GMAT is a test of logic and not just rules.
• The best way the to reach the answer is by elimination (except for few problem solving questions).
• √ 4 = +2 only, not ±2 whereas if x2=4, x= ±2.
• In data sufficiency problems in which you need to substitute values, make sure to substitute 0, -1, 1, negative & positive decimal numbers and anything else that might seem relevant. With practice, you'll understand when do you have to substitute what.
• Make a list of all the idioms that you come across in sentence correction.
• Focus on understanding the meaning of each and every thing that you read on the test. If you're facing problem in RC and CR then reading slowly might help.
• Magoosh has this idioms application on the play store which is really helpful.
• For the IR section, I just used the official guide and mock tests. If that doesn't work for you, you can look for other sources online (IR doesn't contribute to your total score).
• GMAT online does not have the AWA section so I'm not the best person to help you with it.

That's all I've got. I've mentioned everything that I had a tough time figuring out so that it's easier for you. I'm sure that if you follow this sincerely, you'll score a minimum of 700. This is, not very precisely, what helped me score a 740 (Q50,V39) on the GMAT. In case there's anything else that you're facing a problem with, do not hesitate to message me on LinkedIn. Let me know if this article helps you. All the best!