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Whether you’re shooting to start business school in fall 2017 or are a junior or sophomore planning ahead, now is the time to lock in a surefire test score for future enrollment. With several months still to go before application deadlines, we’ll offer helpful planning tips in our “Kick Start Your GRE or GMAT Prep” blog series.
When to start your GRE or GMAT prep
Business schools and graduate schools each have their own calendars. However, rolling admissions deadlines have become an increasingly attractive approach for schools to fill enrollments. Even if you aren’t looking to enroll in school this fall, your GRE or GMAT score is good for up to five years.
Regardless of whether you’re last-minute or early-bird when it comes to prepping for Test Day, locking in a superlative score is essential to the application process. Once you get the test out of the way, you can better concentrate on acing your application essays and other admissions process tasks.
Procrastination won’t change your brain
So many GRE and GMAT prep plans begin with the best of intentions: You tell yourself that you will set aside time to study—maybe even once a week. But by the time Spring Break hits, you may already be procrastinating, pushing back your GMAT prep until Easter Break or even until after the semester ends in May.
However, when you start your prep matters a whole lot less than how regularly you prep and for how long. A 2012 Berkeley study offers convincing evidence that intense preparation for standardized tests can actually change your brain for the better.
How to prep towards Test Day
Such profound changes don’t come by hit-and-miss efforts, but rather by GRE or GMAT prep that is:
- Daily – Five to six days a week across a lengthy period, optimally eight to 12 weeks (fewer than that is not as ideal, but your schedule may not allow you a choice in the matter).
- Regular – At the same time of day on each study day, preferably at the time of day as the date you’ve registered to take the test.
- Strategic - Prepping towards your point-growth opportunities and learning how to manage the Test Day experience itself.
Daily, regular GMAT prep over a long period
Gaining daily, regular, and strategic exposure to the ways of thinking and behaving particular to the GRE or GMAT is the surest way to train your brain for Test Day.
Many uninformed test-takers mistakenly believe that, like tests they’ve taken in school, they can cram for a standardized test. However, the test does not focus on memorizable content but on cognitive behavior. If your undergraduate education is to help you with the test, it will only be because that education was based on working smarter, not harder (i.e., critical thinking) versus mastering knowledge of certain subjects.
Prepping is not a matter of how many hours you spend memorizing math formulas you haven’t worked since middle school. Rather, you need on a daily basis (as you would, for instance, with music, voice, dance, sport, or military training) to practice the behaviors that the test rewards and to compensate for any tendencies that lead you to not harvest points on Test Day.
Keeping it regular
Consistency does not mean taking practice test after practice test and expecting to magically improve. Instead, prepping smarter/not harder requires that you:
- Make test prep a daily regimen, five to six days per week (leaving at least one day of sabbath from the test, to rest heart, mind, and soul).
- Prep at the same time of day you’ll take the test itself, so as to put yourself in the right state of mind that then beneficently colors all your problem solving activities each day.
- Taking practice tests once every two weeks, graduating to once-a-week around a month before the test (and, if possible, on the same day of the week that you have registered to take your official test).
Immersion leads to points conversion
The point of all this consistency is to immerse yourself in the strategies that the test rewards. Substantial daily prep between practice tests empowers you to examine all aspects of your performance—both the areas in which you are excelling (because you want to port that success to other areas of the test), and the areas in which you are coming up short of grabbing the points that lead to an application-acing score.
Strategic preppers are self-aware, recognizing their tendencies when under the stress of the testing experience. Reflecting on your behavior requires the ability to closely examine your performance on your practice tests and to engage in daily prep that simulates Test Day conditions. For instance, do you know how much writing space you’ll need to create a successful essay and to scratch down all your Quantitative and Verbal work? Do you know when is the best time to ask for more scratch paper? Daily and strategically encountering such realities can change your brain to be ready for them on Test Day.
Similarly, prepping with regularity, consistency, and strategy can change you to a test taker who’s ready for the GMAT or GRE and, ultimately, a winning business school application.
To get a taste of the cognitive behaviors that Test Day demands, take a GRE 20-minute workout or a GMAT 20-minute workout to see where you stand!
The post Kickstarting Your GRE or GMAT Prep, Pt. 1 appeared first on Business School Insider.
