Students start preparing for the GMAT once they have worked out a clear career plan and are sure that they need the test score to get admitted into their dream business schools. But all schools have a score requirement – mostly high – and this means serious pressure on preparation efforts. In fact, the crucial connection between getting a high GMAT score and securing admission is an intimidating one and, if not attended to with seriousness and sense of purpose, can jeopardize one’s career plans and result in waste of time and effort. As professional experts training students for the GMAT will vouch, the first and foremost thing to get in place for securing admission is to secure a high GMAT score. That sets the ball rolling and definitely makes the chances for admission brighter.
Here are 4 practices that go a long way in helping you make the most of the GMAT experience:
#1 Keep a learning notebook/diary
It is advisable to keep a small and handy learning diary or notebook to pen down every new trick for the quantitative and verbal so that you don’t have to go through all your notes and books over and over again. In fact, flash cards are a good idea too. They can be organized in topics and labeled to enumerate each trick. Though constructing this kind of study resource sounds cumbersome, the truth is that in the long run a ready reckoner is a handy tool for last minute revision.
#2 Learn a bit, practice a whole lot
Simply learning all the rules and tricks of the game isn’t enough for playing the real game. For playing the game well and coming out victorious you need to practice, practice and practice! So, learn what is essential but do not confine yourself to too much theory and learning and don’t burden yourself with too much information. Instead, practice a whole lot so that exposure to the test question types builds up in you a large reserve of resourcefulness. This allows you to think up intelligent ways to negotiate tricky questions and sometimes to take calculated risks when selecting an answer. Whether it is the critical reasoning part, the sentence corrections, the reading comprehension or the quantitative analysis, just don’t give up practicing.
#3 Take mock tests
Once the preparation modules are over and all the aspects of the test have been studied and practiced sufficiently, get down to evaluating yourself in terms of the whole test. Doing just math or verbal questions, or simply writing an essay requires a limited attention span and specific skills. But taking on the whole GMAT test requires the ability to be at your best for near to four hours and to exhibit a range of skills. So as soon as you are done with all the topics, start taking tests to know how good you are at using the tricks you have learnt. With every test, speed and confidence levels will increase and scores too will improve till they plateau and a predictable outcome is reached.
#4 Do not fully depend on the GMAT prep test results
So, you took a test and got a really good score and now you think you’ll be doing exactly this in the real exam too? Hope so…but don’t be sure! Every test has a different level of difficulty. Besides, the conditions that you have in a typical classroom are always different from those in the test room. So, although practice test scores are a fair measure of your ability to perform on the real test, don’t depend on the results unrealistically. The best way is to observe performance over a series of tests and identify typical and atypical trends in the scoring and to take an average of all the scores - that should be close to what the real day outcome will be. It is also advisable that the tests are picked wisely and are from different sources so that you are exposed to different versions of the test. Take a mix of Kaplan ( the best yardstick to measure your readiness), Princeton and the OG tests.
So, no matter at what stage of the preparation you are, sum up the situation, plan the preparation and take the GMAT bull by the horns!!!!
Good luck!
