Whether you’re shooting for a fall 2016 matriculation to business school or are a junior or sophomore wanting to lock in a surefire test score for future enrollment, the GRE or GMAT could be your key to acceptance. With several months still to go, we continue to offer helpful planning tips in the fourth part of our “Kickstarting Your GRE or GMAT Prep” blog series.
Falling short of your goal score?
You’ve tested yourself against a GRE or GMAT practice test (or have already gone through Test Day) and know that you’ve got work to do in order to achieve your goal score. You may even have to set up a daily practice regimen that exposes you to regular GRE or GMAT problem solving behaviors.
So, how do you go about growing towards your goal score before Test Day? Here’s how to bring it up a few notches.
Test Day distractions
Both the GRE and the GMAT specialize in heaving at you all kinds of Test Day distractions: reasons not to focus on the most efficient, work-smarter/not-harder behaviors that lead to a higher score. But distractions aren’t limited to individual questions or to taking the test itself. In closely examining your practice test performance, you might also get distracted by dwelling on your test management weaknesses instead of focusing on ways to port your already-winning behaviors to other aspects of the test.
All or nothing in your GRE/GMAT prep?
At first glance, a big picture approach—as in prepping in any and all areas in which you think your performance is lacking—might seem most logical. Although you may feel like you’re covering all your GRE or GMAT prep shortcomings, this approach amounts only to spreading yourself too thinly, and with little or no payoff.
Yes, you might feel desperate and think you have an impossibly steep hill to climb in order to hit your goal score, but even the tallest height is surmounted only one step at a time. Work smarter—not harder—by pinpointing the path that’s the shortest distance between you and your goal score:
- Regularly missing a frequently occurring question type? Focusing your GRE or GMAT prep efforts on that question type to harvest some immediate points.
- Regularly leaving blank (or guessing on) three or more questions per section, regardless of the section? Assessing your time management techniques may help you gain the time you need to actually get to point opportunities that you’re otherwise missing.
- Does one section in particular lead to little more than a minefield of incorrect answers? Look at how your successful management of another section of the test can be transferred to that problem section.
Grow your performance
Regardless of where your biggest Test Day problem area is, always zero in on the improvements that can translate into the largest point growth. Indeed, you may take it as a personal affront that you’re getting zero “Idiom/Usage” Sentence Correction questions correct. Because those questions don’t appear as often as Sentence Correction questions testing you on verbs and pronouns, however, working yourself to a frazzle just to earn a better performance on a lower-yield question topic will simultaneously lead you to neglect the more readily available low-hanging fruit offered in more common question topics.
Remember: Getting just four or five more questions correct on Test Day can raise your score and effectively position you to hop over a substantial number of your competitors in the business school admissions pool.
Arm yourself with your own performance history
Unfortunately, dwelling solely on the greatest point-growth areas will not in and of itself win you your goal score; instead, focus on how to practice that particular area in order to win the GRE/GMAT prep war:
- Don’t practice the same question type or section repeatedly, expecting miraculously different results. Review your performance history to understand why that particular question type sets you back in terms of time management or in terms of accuracy.
- After you diagnose unproductive tendencies like these, delve into practices that do lead to wins in those areas.
- Now practice those questions again in a contained environment rather than in a full-length practice test. Once you master 70–80% of that question type/area, then take another GRE or GMAT practice test to see how well you employ your newly learned strategies within the greater testing experience.
Prep smarter, not harder
Admissions tests are not crammable. They demand at least four to six weeks of a concerted and strategic regimen through which you’re exposed not simply to memorizable facts but to replicable behaviors. The sooner you identify the biggest areas of behavior in need of modification in your GRE or GMAT prep, the sooner you can address them with approaches that reward you with points.
Ready to hit that goal score? Exercise your problem areas with our free GRE and GMAT prep workout questions.
The post Kickstarting Your GRE or GMAT Prep, Pt. 4 appeared first on Business School Insider.
