Sometimes, it feels that even after months of GMAT preparation, your performance is not up to your desired level. To get a 740+ GMAT score, you will need to make as few mistakes as possible and ensure that you do justice to your hard work. Sometimes following simple practices can help you do that.
The GMAT, more than any other test, is a standardized test that rewards smart shortcuts and quick thinking. Since it is a time based test, it incentivizes approximations and eliminations. Using these techniques, in addition to clever methods of checking, you can cut down your silly errors by as much as 90%. Here are some useful tips:
- Develop the skill of eliminating options that are clearly impossible. A large part of your quest to reach a 740+ score will relate to mastering topics, but you should spend as much time developing tangential skills. In the vast majority of questions, you will be able to use simple numerical logic to eliminate at least two options. In some cases, you will be able to eliminate all odd or even numbers; in some, you will be able to strike out everything which is not an integer. Using these shortcuts immediately reduces the chance that you will get an answer wrong.
- Ballpark your answer. The skill of approximation is a great one to have for two reasons: it saves a whole lot of time, and it is less likely that you will make a mistake while approximating than while trying to reach an exact solution. This skill is usually developed when you try to do small mental math exercises with problems you have just solved, and see if you could have rounded off numbers to reach the same answer in less time.
- Practice accurate and quick reading. Speed reading is always something that people aspire to do well on the GMAT. But a lot of people chase speed without balancing it with checks so that understanding is not compromised. The best way to get better at speed reading in a sustainable fashion is to increase speed in very small steps, and stop whenever your accuracy goes down. Remember that you need to choose a speed that you are comfortable with and that optimizes both time and accuracy.
- Practice the skill of drawing logic diagrams and flowcharts. A lot of the GMAT is about logic, rather than knowledge retention. If you can identify the central thread of a question, and keep track of it throughout, irrespective of the details that the question throws at you, your chances of getting the correct answer increase. For this, it is critical that you keep track of information well, and use information maps and flowcharts to build a logical bridge to the correct answer.
These are just a few of the many tips that we share with our students to get them through the GMAT successfully. We are conducting a webinar on the 6th of August, to give you more such tips and strategies. To register for this free session, click here.
