Biggest GMAT and Application Mistakes - Add Yours!

Pardon the delay in my response, bb. I updated my Mac last night, and the new whatever-it-was is causing my browser to crash repeatedly, sometimes mid-post. (Apple is typically good about releasing fixes within a day, but such has not been the case this time.) You do me a great honor by calling me a humble member. From the time I became an Expert on the site, some of my worst moments have come about through a lack of humility, and this dovetails into the topic at hand, specifically my own GMAT™ mistakes. (To be clear, I never had any interest in pursuing a business degree. I have always approached the GMAT™ from the perspective of a tutor.)

1) Do not be afraid to learn from others who know the material at least as well as you do (and probably better)—Throughout my academic career, I liked to think of myself as an autodidact, a maverick who could figure out whatever needed to be solved. And I prided myself on attacking issues, never the people who voiced opinions I disagreed with. But often, I would understand after a disagreement, when it was too late, that people took my points to heart, as a personal attack. I have crossed swords, as it were, with a few fellow Experts since last year, and I have never felt particularly good about the exchanges. So, in an effort to speak to the point I have outlined above, I will list many individuals below—not businesses, although the person may work for a test prep company—whose posts I relish the opportunity to pore over and learn from. The list will be in alphabetical order, lest anyone accuse me of favoritism.

Quant:

BrentGMATPrepNow—His streamlined, often less formulaic approach to questions is a breath of fresh air for someone like me who likes to get creative with Quant questions, someone who looks to solve the same question in two or three ways as a personal challenge. The logic behind the method is always outlined step by step, so the reader is less likely to become confused.

Bunuel—Do I really need to say anything? Bunuel has a knack for making even the toughest Quant question or advanced concept seem so simple. If I am open to listening to what is in one of his explanations, I feel as though I could conquer anything Quant-related on the GMAT™.

chetan2u—I echo my sentiments from above. I also appreciate that he takes the time to address questions that Bunuel may not have gotten to yet.

GMATGuruNY—My secret wish is that more people would call on this Expert to post. The responses are easy to read and understand, and I have full confidence that the person writing them knows exactly what he is talking about, as the saying goes.

IanStewart—I enjoy the way his posts are written, striking a perfect balance between verbal expression—i.e. sentences—and mathematical language—i.e. symbols. The logic is flawless, the posts fun to read.

VeritasKarishma—A tireless Expert who can spell out how to crack anything you can think to throw her way. I enjoy reading her articles that are reposted under the Ultimate GMAT Quantitative Megathread.

Verbal:

AjiteshArun—You can spot many of his posts by the backwards arrows, ←. And when you see them, you are getting into the mind of a master. He can explain something deftly in as little as a line, but my favorite posts are those in which you get a few paragraphs. Every sentence is crafted. Bonus: He will sometimes go against the OA and explain why.

AnthonyRitz—Another hidden gem of GMAT Club. When he expounds on a topic, you feel like an eager student at a desk in a classroom.

ChiranjeevSingh—The mention of the Mega Compilation of official questions (accessible offsite) would be enough of a GMAT Club contribution, but when Chiranjeev posts his own breakdown of questions, the analyses are top-notch, and I enjoy the related discussions at the bottom of such posts.

daagh—Narendran left behind a legacy. His terse responses to SC questions are amazing.

DmitryFarber—The points he makes look so simple, yet sometimes the SC question under discussion gets so tangled up that you have a hard time believing you could spot the same thing.

generis—The Bunuel of SC in my mind, someone who does not need a GMAT™ score to reveal both breadth and depth of knowledge. Confession: Sometimes I veer into Project SC Butler territory just to read the explanations by generis. Every talking point is teased out and given full treatment.

GMATGuruNY—Yes, the same one from above. Just read any Verbal post by the user, and I think you will see the point.

GMATNinja—Many of my early kudos went to Charles. And it is no coincidence that my own posts, those in which I break down a question in full, resemble his answer-by-answer analyses.

GMATNinjaTwo—The apple does not fall far from the tree, and Charles above chose an excellent sidekick to continue the GMAT Ninja legacy. I most often encounter Mike's posts in the RC forum, and they are every bit as on point as I could hope for.

IanStewart—Another repeat tutor. Whether he is talking about CR or SC, you know you can place confidence in the reasoning behind the words on the screen. I particularly enjoy the posts in which he goes against the OA. You walk away feeling as though you will be sure to catch the same problem the next time you see it.

MartyTargetTestPrep—I enjoy crossing paths with Marty, and I even changed my writing style somewhat in response to reading his posts. (I now put a comma after "so" when I am seeking to summarize one of my own points.) I trust his advice, and I appreciate that his posts reflect a mind that is grappling with an issue—i.e. you do not get some recap of a grammar manual or a CR guide, but you can see how one thought leads to another, and even a great trap answer suddenly looks like nothing more than what it is.

nightblade354—Often in the chatroom, but if you can get him to comment on a CR question, you are in luck. The extra depth of analysis that may come from someone who has an LSAT background, the way he can pick through a subtlety that in more formal logic separates one answer from another, is much appreciated.

RonPurewal—I sneak a peek every now and then at his profile to check the "Last visited" date. I think I speak for just about everybody when I plead, Please post on GMAT Club again, Ron. I have gone through plenty of his posts on the Manhattan Prep forum, and there is a reason people are still quoting them in this forum today.

sayantanc2k—There is a daagh quality to his posts that I appreciate. The explanations cut right to the heart of the matter, and I find myself thinking that I would not have thought to tackle the question in such a way.

VeritasKarishma—Nothing is out of bounds: CR, RC, SC. She is active on all fronts, and once again, her thought process is well explained.

VeritasPrepHailey—She may not be the most prolific Expert, but she is great about responding when called upon, and she provides many keen insights on CR questions in particular.

Phew, that was a long list, and I could have added others, but these are the individual Experts who came to my mind in the moment. Regarding the original point, it can be hard, especially if you are good at something, to turn to others for help. But when you acknowledge that you do not know everything, you open the door to learning something that may prove useful down the road.

2) A shotgun approach will not help you reach your best level of performance—Marty of Target Test Prep talks about this a lot in his posts, and I agree with him. Tackling a bunch of questions at large will not help you master the material. A focused approach is superior in every way. I liken the process (of preparing for the GMAT™) to learning to play the piano, something I have experience with in my own life. You learn the home keys, then you learn short songs or parts of songs, but you add, bit by bit, to your arsenal, and you do it through practice. How do you practice? By growing comfortable with repetition. You play the same song or ditty over and over, until you have perfected it. You do not jump from "Mary had a Little Lamb" to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and work in some études, the equivalent of 600- or 700-level questions, just for fun, or to see what happens. You work your way up to the more challenging material, where Rachmaninoff, the 700+ question, awaits.

3) Mental stamina, not just acuity, is vital to success—You can practice question sets all you want, but until you sit down for several hours and crank out a full CAT, you cannot appreciate how the test wears you down, mentally, and backs you into a corner. At a certain point, you will harbor doubt, and you have to have the strength to let go of such thoughts and recenter your focus on the question in front of you. In the early going, that is not so hard; two hours later, after a nightmare of a question, that is not so easy. Here, I invoke a sports analogy. An endurance athlete builds up base miles to ensure that her legs will not abandon her when it counts. When you watch a world-class marathoner, the running looks almost effortless—and we are talking about mile times hovering around five minutes or under for the entire race. But these athletes trained hard for the events, and I am not just talking about their bodies. They have to battle those same kinds of doubts you will face when you sit in the hot seat for the GMAT™: Why am I here? I messed up back there. Should I throw in the towel? You have to learn to trust in your process of arriving at the correct response, and you have to train yourself to be able to put in your best effort question after question, hour after hour. If you need to calm your mind, try meditation or breathing exercises. Or maybe you need to rise to the challenge by going to a dark place in your mind, like endurance athlete David Goggins. (The title of his book says it all: Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds.)

4) Review is just as important as practice—Particularly in Verbal, sitting down and spending time with questions you have already completed is crucial to achieving that next level of understanding. All too often, I see newcomers in the forum say that they have already gone through the OG and need to find more questions to practice. I can think of zero instances in which such students said they had spent even one day a week doing nothing but review. If you read over the explanation for each correct answer and maybe the one for the incorrect answer you selected, then you have not adequately studied that question. You are way more likely to stumble into the same pit the next time you are faced with a similar question or trap answer. If you look at the right answer and tell yourself, I get it now, then you do not get it; if you can look at each of the wrong answers and put a finger on what makes them incorrect, then you are getting somewhere. There are no shortcuts to perfection.

In Quant, review is also a key component to a successful test-taking strategy. Are you missing questions for lack of conceptual clarity? If so, then spend some time with theory. Are you making careless mistakes? Maybe you need to write more down as you encounter information in the problem. The difference between someone who earns a 45 and someone who earns a 50 can be nothing more than organization. Another facet of this issue that often gets overlooked is inefficiency. Maybe you get a question right, but you got lucky, or you solved it through some blunt-force approach that took three minutes when a better method exists that would allow you to solve the same question in under two. You have to be honest with yourself in assessing your relative strengths and weaknesses, and you cannot shy away from challenges. If you find permutations and combinations challenging, then read through everything you can on the topics, practice questions on them until you improve, and, of course, be mindful of number 1 above.

In short, going through more and more questions will not magically make you better at answering them.

5) There is no silver bullet to preparation—Even the highest-rated book, online learning module, or tutor is not going to work for everyone. Personally, I enjoy reading static words on a page over watching a video tutorial. I grow impatient with videos. But does that mean I write them off as a teaching tool, as something from which I can learn? Not at all. GMAT Club is a treasure trove of information, but however you decide to make use of that information, I would suggest you choose some course of action and stick to it as much as you can. Squeeze every last drop of advice from that guidebook or e-course. Rather than focus on the next step, train your mind on what is right in front of you. Maybe it will prove to be your personal key to success.

6) Do not think about what others have done or on what is riding on the test—I have ultra-high standards. I once said of myself that in a room full of perfectionists, I would be the perfectionist among them. But my challenges have long been with myself, not with others. I would not even call myself competitive. I hope you do your best: I demand I do my best. The point is, if you let a bunch of mental baggage weigh you down, you are much less likely to walk away happy with your GMAT™ score. You are waging war with yourself, not with other candidates, not with an offer to Harvard or Stanford or with a scholarship. Sure, you can use goals and dreams to motivate yourself, but ultimately, it is up to you to perform and achieve what you can. One way in which I was able to string together increasingly longer strings of correct answers was to start thinking of the test as nothing more than five questions. If I put everything I had into those five questions, then the task would be done. Once I got to the end of those five questions, guess what? I had another chance to prove myself on a second five-question test. Before I knew it, I could go on a tear and rattle off ten, twenty, sometimes forty questions at a time with no problem. It was just a game to me.

7) Do not let the clock get in your way—Especially early in your studies, it can be tempting to want to put everything together all at once, to solve each Quant question in about two minutes and each Verbal question in less than that. But if your attention is divided, your results will show it. See if you can break down the questions instead. If the process takes five minutes at first, so be it. The more time you spend upfront tracing correct lines of reasoning, the less time you will have to spend thereafter figuring out where you went wrong. And the more often you pursue correct lines of reasoning, the more confidence you will gain, and the less time you will find you need to spend to arrive at the correct answer. It is funny how that works, but trust me, it does. Even when I hit a difficult question and spend, say, four minutes on it, I trust my training, my timing across sets of difficult questions, so one question does not hamper my ability to perform.

I did not intend to write a novella on the topic, but I wanted to write a post worthy of what bb asked of us above. I wish I had known all of these points earlier on in my GMAT™ preparation. I will keep them in mind when I run through the gauntlet again: I am planning to take the test at some point between the publication of the OG 2022 and 2023 editions. I will write more on this in a future post. (I have a challenge in mind.)

Good luck with your studies, everyone. I hope you can learn from my mistakes.

- Andrew

Wow! Many of these are so true AndrewN!

I should do rename this topic as AndrewN’s lessons! 👍👍👍

you have reminded me of my own. Not throwing strategies and trying to cut corners. I’ve done a lot of that in reading comprehension.


Posted from my mobile device

Great post bb. One mistake that costed me dearly before my each GMAT attempt is not revising the topics after every few days, thus undoing grip on the progress made over months of preparation and losing confidence just before the test.

Thanks bb, for another helpful initiative and more for sharing your own experiences insights.

AndrewN,
What a fantastic post...!!... Impressive write up and deep insights...!!
You won't believe that because of this fantatic post, I read this entire thread twice and this post three times - to squeeze the most out of it.
Found asnwers for my mistakes, few I knew I am making, but many I was not even aware.

Thank you very much.

P.S: You should keep writing.

Thank you for the kind words, TheGraceful. I am glad that my post resonated with you. All seven of those points took me time to appreciate, and, as I wrote above, I wanted to rise to the occasion when bb mentioned me right off the bat. (I had to laugh about that "AndrewN's lessons" comment he made subsequently.)

I will keep writing, thank you. I hope to give more to the community this year than I have in any previous year. Stay tuned...

- Andrew

Thank you for the kind words and especially for everyone’s additions!

Just stumbled onto this list of GMAT Tips:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/-post-the-on ... 01141.html. It may be good to start that topic back up. That one is from 10 years ago 😱

Posted from my mobile device

Dear All Experts,

Hope you are doing well!
I have one query that I am not able to comprehend. I am preparing for Gmat from last year and I am working professional too.
I am not sure , if anybody else also had this kind of problem while preparing but I am really struggling because of it.

At One moment of time , I am able to solve 700+ level questions of Quants and another moment I am not able to solve even 600 level questions. As if , I have never read that topic before

I am not sure if this is normal or I need to take care of anything here, However, am trying my best to be regular and disciplined for studies.

Any Suggestions will certainly help me .

Swati

AndrewN, awesome post as always. I'd like to say that you're definitely up there. I can't think of a time where I've asked for your help on a question and you haven't responded. Not sure how you do it, but you're definitely super responsive! Needless to say, your responses are class.

BUMP! Wanted to bump up this post for the latest season

Posted from my mobile device

1.)Not using applicant lab at least 6 months before the application season is a huge mistake. I kept on procrastinating and as the time came near to deadlines, I just skipped many parts.

2.) Getting a cheap consultant is super unproductive and waste of time.

3.) Getting a good consultant who is super objective isn't good either. Instead, get someone who balances emotional aspect with an objective view.

4.) Don't apply or put that much efforts to your safety schools if you are headstrong about making to your desired schools.

5.) CONTROVERSIAL : Fit is a made up thing. B-schools are about pedigree Ranking and hence network matters more than "fit" which is so subjective anyhow.

I agree about FIT!

I mean there are small nuance Aspects to each program … but that also applies to every human being and probably every single product. Everything is a little bit different. Everyone is unique just like everyone else. One challenge with FIT is that it’s so hard to research and focus on the correct elements of the unique features of every program. Should you focus on the student body? Should you focus on the location? Should you focus on the classes? Should you focus on the project structure? Perhaps the mentorship program? Or maybe the career services? Most applicants would not know… and for a school that one may think is a good fit for them, they may not get admitted.

Ultimately, the top 10 programs are all at least 500 students strong each and I don’t think all of them are really fitting in perfectly and if they were, then all of them would really be very one-sided. I have a feeling that the word fit is used as a bit of a euphemism … in other words meaning that the candidate did not make it or they weren’t competitive or perhaps had too much baggage…. Or perhaps that’s an image of a candidate that a school is trying to make and trying to attract. Kind of like me trying to look thinner and more muscular on my dating profile photos and saying I love French poetry. (Both are wishful thinking, dang you Covid)

Posted from my mobile device

6.) More controversial: Just don't do GRE. Schools may or may not convert GRE to GMAT or look at percentiles but GMAT is just so much certain. a 325 can be anywhere b/w 680 to 710 while a 710 is 710. You at least know your stats right. GRE seems uncertain howsoever tempting.

A simple kudos simply wouldn't do this post justice...my favorite post on the forums thus far. AWESOME stuff, AndrewN!!!

Many thanks, ThatDudeKnows. It is always great to hear from another professional, and words of praise and encouragement are certainly welcome (as are candid critiques). You seem to be quite prolific on the site these days—I feel as though I blinked the day after you joined, and you are suddenly up to 200 posts. I imagine that with your experience, you could produce an insightful list for others to peruse. Should you add such a post to this thread or to some future thread, feel free to mention me. You will have at least one curious reader.

Thank you for taking the time to write.

- Andrew

AndrewN

Great post brother. Will try to adhere to the guidelines shared by you.
Keep posting such awesome stuff that could benefit the whole community.

Cheers

AndrewN: Okay, I'll bite.

1. Treating the GMAT like a content test.

When business schools and GMAC put their heads together to create an entrance exam, their goal was to create something that helps them identify which candidates have the highest potential to make awesome b-school students and then tycoons of enterprise. Do you think the skillsets they deemed important were mastery of things like 30-60-90 triangles, participial phrases, RC detail retrieval, overlapping sets, pronoun ambiguity, and exponents? Are those the things that make Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs? Or are things like creativity, identifying elegant answers to complex questions, distinguishing what’s important from what isn’t, logic, problem solving, and thinking outside the box more important? The questions aren’t there to test your content knowledge, they just need some baseline content with which to test the thinking skills. Why, then, do SO many students put in countless hours studying content and give so little weight to learning to think like a test-writer and use techniques that get the right answer faster, with fewer errors, and with less fatigue? Don’t get me wrong, if you don’t know basic content, you’re going to have a bad time, but I’d love to see equal emphasis on technique and content.

2. Making content-based flashcards and review sheets rather than question-based ones.

If your flash cards and review sheets are things like a list of prepositions or what we mean by nCr, you’re doing it wrong. Please just throw those away and replace them with 2-5 of the best example questions you can find for each subcategory of question type. There are only so many twists GMAC can put on each content topic. Rather than learning the content in a vacuum and then having to remember or figure out how to deploy it for a question that pops up on exam day, learn the content in the context of example questions. Take photos of those flashcards and flip through them alllll the time. Delete IG, Facebook, and TikTok for a couple months. Every time you’d otherwise do mindnumbing stuff on your phone, flip through your sample questions. By test day, you should have every one of them basically memorized and be able to copy what you did on each of them when you see a similar question on your test.

3. “Oh, of course! Duhhhh, I can’t believe I missed that. … Okay, next question.”

We all make careless mistakes from time to time. It happens. But most students severely overestimate their ability to avoid repeating the same mistakes more often than they should. What makes these really really bad is that they mean you’re missing a question you could/should get right. You’re GIVING away points. There are a ton of different kinds of careless mistakes. Are you solving for X when the question asks about 3X? Are you bad at testing negative numbers in DS? Do you seem to fall into the same traps on RC main point questions? Do you struggle noticing/applying the NOT in some questions? Catalog them, look back through them, and figure out if you’re repeating any. If you are, you need to change how you approach it because it’s no longer a careless mistake, it’s a habit. A habit that’s keeping you from getting the best score you can.

4. “What if the question/answer said ____?”

It doesn’t. Stop it. You got the question wrong. Stop trying to change the question so you can feel like you were right. You missed it because there’s some sort of disconnect between how you were thinking about the question and how the test-writer was thinking about it. You have two choices. You can ask what would happen if they were thinking about it the way that you did…or you can re-train yourself to think about it the way that they did. One of those is far more valuable than the other. Can you do both? Maybe, but I’ve found that the vast majority of students finish their review of missed questions like this by giving themselves some sort of pat on the back for the “what if the question/answer said ___” part of their review. No way. Don’t give yourself the ego stroke; you missed the question and the best response you can have is to be pissed off about that, commit to never (okay, rarely) missing another question for that same reason ever again, and doing everything you need to do to add whatever tool (either content or technique) to your toolbox that you didn’t have before. The “what if the question said ___” way doesn’t add a single tool to your toolbox, it just reinforces your desire to try to use whatever tool you’re already trying to use when you shouldn’t be.

5. Relying on Official Guide answer explanations, especially for math.

Some OG answer explanations are great, but many (most?) are rubbish. I assume that every OG question ever published is on this forum somewhere, so if you miss an OG question, search for it here. I’m willing to bet that at least 90-95% of the time, someone here has posted a better explanation than what you’ll find in the OG. And if they haven’t, tag an expert or two whose style resonates with you and ask for their input.

6. More more more more more approach to practice questions and tests.

Yes, you need to practice things on new questions, but not until you think you're ready to kick some butt at them. Reviewing 10 questions to death is better than doing 100 and not soaking in any of them. Same with practice tests. Yes, you need to get good at pacing, but most people want to take too many practice tests too early on. I think it's more about wanting to see where they stand rather than about doing the test because they want to practice pacing. That time is much better spent learning rather than testing; only learning helps you actually do better on your real test. Plus, it doesn't make sense to practice pacing until you already know both the content and the techniques.

7. Not using a tutor/course.

This one is self-serving, so I hesitate to put it, but I do think it can be really important. For many students, their GMAT score REALLY matters. There are some things in life where you can just buy a book or watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials and figure out enough to DIY. And there are some things that important enough that it definitely makes sense to hire a professional to either do it for you or coach you through it. How long you have to study is also a factor here. If you want to maximize your bench press by three years from today, you might be able to get away with a DIY approach. If you want to maximize your bench press by three months from today, that’s probably not going to work; you’re going to want to hire a coach.