How GMAT Prep Benefits You After Test Day

GMAT prep isn’t arbitrary—those skills come in handy during business school and beyond.

One of the questions many students working on their GMAT prep ask is: “Why do we have to take this [insert colorful word] test anyway?” There is despair and frustration evident in the question—”I want to be a management consultant, for heaven’s sake. Why am I studying exponents?”

Below, one MBA student explains just how useful the skills she learned in her GMAT prep turned out to be during her first year of business school:

GMAT prep is relevant

Although I believed that the admissions tests were indeed relevant even before becoming an MBA student, I lacked the business school experience to know first-hand how GMAT content would prove useful. After less than a semester of business school, knowledge of many GMAT (and GRE) topics have already proven indispensable to my success.

Here’s a few examples of GMAT skills that I’ve found to be useful in business school:

• Fractions: Oh yes, it’s third-grade math back to haunt you! Specific example? In Accounting, we study various financial ratios that determine the health of the business. For instance, the current ratio, a measure of solvency, is calculated by dividing current assets by current liabilities. A question that appeared on my midterm read as follows: If a company sells land for cash at a loss, how does that affect the current ratio? To answer this question, you need to know how a fraction changes when the numerator goes down and the denominator stays the same. My professor could ask this question about any financial ratio, numerator, or denominator.

• Reading Comprehension: In my management class, we are assigned anywhere from 20–70 pages of reading each week, most of it dense theoretical stuff, some of it highly-detailed case study. There is very little review of the material in class—you are expected to come having read it and ready to discuss your analysis of the work. Woe to anyone who comes underprepared or having focused on the wrong details! (I’ve seen it happen—it’s ugly.) Reading lots of dense prose quickly and being able to cut through the detail to get at the important bits—sounds a lot like Reading Comprehension to me.

• Essay Writing: My final in the aforementioned Management class will consist of 10 short-form essay questions, such as “Discuss the structural changes that typically occur as small start-up firms grow and mature. Explain why these changes typically occur. Explain how management needs to adapt its leadership style as their firm grows and matures.” It’s a three-hour test, so I will have 18 minutes to read, digest, formulate a response based on four months’ worth of course material, and write up a reply to each. At least the essay writing section of the GMAT gives you 30 minutes!

• Order of Operations (PEMDAS): This might actually be first-grade math, back again with a vengeance in business school. In learning about the time value of money, we learned an equation represented by the following (take a deep breath): PVannuity = (FVannuitypmt /i)∗[1-1/(1+i)n]. Can you guess what happened when my classmates attempted this equation? Yep, quite a few of them got zero. Why? Because when the equation is written horizontally, the numerator of the rightmost fraction appears to be 1-1, or zero. But, if you recall the order of operations, or PEMDAS, from your GMAT prep, you’ll remember that division comes before subtraction, and will divide 1 by (1+i)n before subtracting the whole thing from 1. Could the prof have written the equation more clearly? Sure, but knowing my order of operations made the problem a heck of a lot easier. Oh, and by the way, that particular equation also contains exponents—also relevant GMAT knowledge.

So, I’m not even done with my first semester, and already these topics appear completely relevant to what I’m studying. I can now say without a doubt that the skills I learned in my GMAT prep map onto the skills needed to flourish as an MBA student.

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