Kickstarting Your GRE or GMAT Prep, Pt. 3

Whether you’re shooting for a fall 2016 matriculation to business school or are a junior or sophomore wanting to lock in a surefire test score for future enrollment, the GRE or GMAT could be your key to acceptance. With several months still to go, we continue to offer helpful planning tips in the third part of our “Kickstarting Your GRE or GMAT Prep” blog series.

Start your GRE or GMAT prep with a practice test

You might think you need to prep in order to take your first GRE or GMAT practice test, but doing so puts the cart before the Test Day horse. In truth, taking a practice test ought to be your first step in preparing for one of the most challenging exams you’ll ever take.

 

Look under the Test Day hood

Sitting for a practice GRE or GMAT empowers you to discover what you need to prep for. Without such reconnaissance, you ride blindly into Test Day. Think of it this way: would you trust an auto repair specialist who hands you a quote without ever assessing your vehicle? A practice test is an ideal means of looking under the hood at your testing behaviors.

True, taking a practice may feel as if you’re entering the ring with an opponent sight unseen, but a practice test is your chance to “spar” with the champ—without sustaining bruises—and to learn a lot about the test. Doing so at the start of your GRE or GMAT prep is a work-smarter way to avoid having Test Day knock you out cold.

Practice your testing behaviors

Both the GRE and GMAT are content-neutral tests, meaning that you need little prerequisite coursework beyond early high school level math and a college level vocabulary. As an assessment of cognitive behavior (and not a math or English test), the GRE and GMAT use problem solving scenarios that reward work-smarter/not-harder behaviors and punish unsavvy ones that are not indicative of successful business students.

Starting your prep with a practice test not only acquaints you with the test itself but, more importantly, also renders a diagnosis of how you behave under the adversities imposed by the testing situation:

• How do you respond to the stresses of the GMAT/GRE?
• What strengths do you bring to the various sections of the test?
• If you underperform in a particular area, why do you respond unproductively?

Keeping it real

But do not take your GRE or GMAT practice test in a flippant, roughshod manner. As much as possible, recreate the Test Day conditions you’ll face on the GRE or GMAT. If at all possible, take one administered in a group. If that’s not feasible, self-proctor your own practice test, adhering as strictly as possible to the time limits and eliminating any distractions or tendencies to give yourself a break.

Remember: You’re doing this to learn about what behaviors you deliver under Test Day conditions. Simulating a practice test in any other fashion reveals little to nothing about how you react to what the GRE or GMAT will throw at you in a cubicle-filled room with people pecking away at computers, all of whom are battling their own Test Day dilemmas.

A practice test preps out the dilemma

Again, don’t worry that you haven’t done any GRE or GMAT prep yet. Taking a practice run is itself GRE or GMAT prep. Your classes, work experience, and life up till now most likely have not let you experience the particular critical thinking marathon that is Test Day. Taking a practice test familiarizes you not merely with the array of questions on the exam, but the entire problem solving situation.

Learn from the results

Taking a practice test is a great start to your GRE or GMAT prep, but it’s just that—a start. The next essential step is to learn from the information you’ve retrieved about your behaviors when taking the test. If all you do to prepare is take successive practice tests without thoughtfully analyzing your behaviors and your opportunities to grow your score, you do nothing to grapple with your reactions to the problem solving clues and prompts built into the test.

Instead, you need to meticulously break down the results, searching for trends in your behavior across the test:

1. Before you dwell on any incorrect answers, analyze in detail why and how you were successful on the questions you got correct. Understanding your strengths is an ideal way to optimize your GRE or GMAT prep, and it’s the first step to applying those strengths to the areas of the test where your performance leads to missed point opportunities.
2. Did you leave a lot of questions blank or enter random guesses? Maybe time management is the issue. Whether your answer to particular questions was correct or incorrect, were you spending so much time on a question that you won that particular battle only to lose the section management war? You’re being tested not merely on how you respond to individual questions, but also on how well you manage each section in order to bring your full talents and attention to all the harvestable point opportunities in that section.
3. Spot trends. If you get certain question types correct or incorrect, can you pinpoint a pattern in your responses that might indicate how the test triggers you? Pattern recognition—not just among the question types but also in your own testing reactions—is one of the most critical skills to sharpen in preparation for Test Day.

Go back, prep, do it again

Before you take another practice test, exploit what you’ve analyzed about your behavior in the three arenas above. Practice the question types that confuse you and address the triggers that make you linger where you shouldn’t. After at least a week of doing drills in these areas, take another practice GMAT/GRE, analyze your performance, then rev up the cycle once again. One by one, you will spotlight the rewarding behaviors and apply correctives to the unproductive ones, until you are fully equipped to face off against the test.

Practice makes perfect. Start your GRE or GMAT prep by taking a free live practice test.

 

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