Put your GMAT study schedule on a calendar—and make it specific.
As you start planning for the business school admission cycle, you may need to work on establishing new routines and habits to ensure everything is in order by the time the application deadline rolls around. Now is a perfect time to start (or restart) a GMAT study schedule. We’ve got some advice to help get you on the right track.
How to study for the GMAT
Studying for the GMAT is a serious commitment, and it usually takes 2–3 months or more. While you may already have an idea of what to study, you probably have many questions about how to study. GMAT study schedules can vary depending on particular factors, including:
- goal score
- starting score
- work schedule
- school schedule
- family obligations
We at Kaplan have a long history of working with students and observing how they learn best, which has allowed us to develop some general rules of thumb you should keep in mind as you begin to form your personalized plan to study for the GMAT.
Create a detailed GMAT study schedule
The first thing to know about studying for the GMAT is that this is not a test that you can cram for. Effective GMAT study is like preparing for a marathon. You want to build up to Test Day with a plan that improves your skills and increases your stamina. Because the GMAT tests your critical thinking abilities and content knowledge, you need to know how to think flexibly and thoroughly about the material. Flexibility and critical thinking are skills that ideally require knowledge of the patterns in the GMAT questions. 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 GMAT study times, be purposeful with setting dates. Instead of just putting “study for GMAT” on the calendar, add specifics about the purpose of the session; for instance, December 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?
Learning how to study for the GMAT in a way that works for you takes time. Plan to spend about 2–3 months or 100–120 hours studying, reviewing, and taking practice tests. The top scorers on the GMAT spend 120+ hours total, on average, studying for Test Day over a period of time.
The length of each GMAT study session will vary based on your specific situation; however, most students aim for 1–3 hours per session. 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 each week.
Ready to put your plan into action? Start with a free GMAT practice test to see how you’d score on Test Day.
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