Put your GMAT study schedule on a calendar, and make it specific.
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It’s a new year, and many of you are working on establishing new routines and habits. Now is a perfect time to start (or re-start) a GMAT study schedule. We’ve got some advice to help get you on the right track.
Studying for the GMAT is a serious commitment, and usually takes 2-3 months or more. While most of you prepping for the GMAT know what to study, you probably have many questions about how to study. Study schedules can definitely vary depending on your particular variables, including:
- goal score
- starting score
- work schedule
- school schedule
- family obligations
We have a long history of working with students and studying how you learn, which has allowed us to develop some general rules of thumb to remember as you begin to form your personalized schedule to study for the GMAT.
Create a Detailed Study Schedule
The first thing to know about studying for the GMAT is that this is not a test that you can cram for. Studying for the GMAT is like preparing for a marathon. You want to build up to test day with a plan that builds your skills and stamina. Because the GMAT tests your critical thinking skills and various content skills, you need to know how to think flexibly and thoroughly about the material tested. Flexibility and critical thinking are skills that ideally require knowledge of the patterns in the GMAT. Therefore, it is best to build this type of depth and flexibility in a gradual way.
Next, remember to be deliberate in your study schedule. Make dates on your calendar with your GMAT books and practice tests and keep them! It’s easy to procrastinate when the deadline is weeks away, so find a way to stay accountable by setting a date reminder and/or having someone help you stay on track with your schedule.
Along with deliberate study times, be purposeful with your GMAT dates. Instead of just putting “study GMAT” on the calendar, add specifics about the purpose of the session; for instance, June 13th could be your night to spend some quality time with right triangles in geometry and subject-verb agreement in sentence correction. At the beginning, the purpose of your session should be aimed at mastery of specific topics. Closer to test day, start to incorporate pacing and mixed practice into the goal of your sessions.
How long does it take?
Studying for the GMAT takes time. Plan to spend about 2-3 months and 100-120 hours studying for the GMAT. The top scorers on the GMAT spend 120+ hours, on average, studying for test day over a period of time. The length of each study session will vary based on your specific situation; however, most students aim for sessions between 1 and 3 hours in a sitting. If you take the average 120 hours of studying for a top scorer and divide that over the course of the average 10 weeks of studying, you get approximately 12 hours per week. This includes time spent in class sessions and tutoring sessions for the GMAT. If you spread those hours equally, it’s best to do about 2-3 hours per day, 6 days per week and to take one day off per week.
The post How Do You Study for the GMAT? Set Up a Calendar appeared first on Kaplan GMAT Blog.
