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Jennifer Land shares her students’ most beloved Test Day strategies.
In honor of St. Valentine’s Day, I want to share some GMAT prep tips that get a lot of love from my students.
Be patient with your GMAT score
One all-time favorite tip among my students when it comes to GMAT prep is this: Focus on what you can control. You can’t control the score—only the steps you take during the test that lead to a good score. Motivational tips like this are among my students’ favorite things about working with Kaplan, and I have seen students improve their score simply by ignoring it.
You won’t know whether you answered a question correctly, so what matters is that you are confident in your approach. If you choose an answer choice, choose it for a reason; you might know it is correct, or you might have ruled out others. But no matter what, focus on what you can control: how you approach each problem.
Know what you’re looking for
A Verbal Reasoning tip my students love is specific to Sentence Correction: Do not try to correct the problem. If you read the sentence and think about the words you would use to correct the underlined portion, you’ve wasted precious time.
Follow the Kaplan Method and rule out incorrect answer choices instead of looking for the one that “sounds right.” The tendency to trust your ear is something the GMAT expects you to do, and my students love knowing how to outsmart the test.
Learn to pick your battles
For Integrated Reasoning, my students love knowing they can skip the problems that they struggle with most. As noted in an earlier post, scoring well on Integrated Reasoning demands guessing on some of the questions; knowing which question types take too long or are too difficult allows a student to move through the section efficiently and results in a higher score. My students always find this little tidbit to be a huge relief.
Healthy GMAT prep is about balance
By far the most-loved tip I ever share with students is this one, from Quantitative Reasoning: Balance averages to solve quickly.
Most people are pretty good at finding averages using the average formula: the average equals the sum of the terms over the number of terms. If a question requires determining the score needed on the final test to result in a certain average, it isn’t difficult to plug the information you’re given into that formula and solve. But my students LOVE knowing the balanced average approach. Here’s an example:
Jason scored 88, 94, and 87 on the first three tests in his course. What must he score on the fourth test in order to earn an average of 90 in the class?
Put the known scores on the left side of a “scale” and the unknown on the right. The balancing point is the average, so it goes in the fulcrum:
Ask yourself how much Jason “missed” his goal by in each of the scores on the left, and write them under those scores. The first score is -2 points, the second is +4, and the final is -3. The sum of the missing points is -2 + 4 – 3 = -1. That means for the tests to “balance around the average, Jason needs to make the goal average plus the missing point.
This means x must be 90 + 1, so he needs to score a 91 on the last test. This sometimes takes practice to master, but it is my students’ absolute favorite Test Day tip.
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The post Land Your Score: GMAT Prep Tips Students Love Most appeared first on Business School Insider.
