CJ’s Guidelines to Make the Most of GMAT Club

GMAT Club is, without doubt, one of the most helpful resources an aspirant uses in her GMAT journey. The amount of free useful content available on the forum far exceeds such content available on any other single website for GMAT aspirants. Quite expectedly, I regularly come across GMAT aspirants who have been benefited tremendously by this forum.

However, I regularly also come across people who are not making the most of this forum and are rather using the forum in not-so-helpful ways. So, I thought of coming up with certain guidelines that I think could help them get the most out of the forum. I’m deliberately calling them “CJ’s guidelines” since others may have different opinions on how to make the most of this public forum.

Guidelines on the questions:

1. Official vs Non-Official

Official questions are the questions that are retired from the real GMAT exam (i.e. these questions used to appear on the real GMAT but now do not appear). These questions are released by GMAC, the organization that conducts the GMAT. These questions are the most dependable source of practice for GMAT aspirants.

Non-official questions are the questions that are created not by GMAC but by other individuals and companies, mainly the companies in the GMAT preparation space. These questions try to mimic the logic and scope of the official questions. However, different questions succeed to different extents in mimicking the official questions.

While we can use non-official questions for our practice, we also need to understand their limitations. In verbal, some non-official questions can be wrong i.e. either the correct option in the question will be incorrect or an incorrect option will be correct. In quant, while the non-official questions may not be wrong (since quant, unlike verbal, is black and white – i.e. either an option is correct or it’s not – an incorrect question is easily spotted), some non-official questions may not be representative of the questions you can expect on GMAT, in terms of the knowledge or the techniques tested.

So, as a rule of thumb, you should start with official questions, and when you find a non-official question that is very different from the official questions, do not draw any major takeaway from the question.

2. Do not solve questions from GMAT Prep and Exam Packs

The questions from GMAT prep and Exam packs are part of the official mocks (1-6). If you use these questions for your practice, your mock scores will become inflated and thus unreliable. Thus, as you solve questions, look out for the source of the question. If the source of the question is GMAT Prep or Exam Pack, skip the question.

3. Don’t waste questions

Since you can find a lot of questions on every topic on the forum, people seem to think that there are ‘endless’ questions out there. So, many just keep practicing questions without analyzing their mistakes or trying to learn from them. These people solve questions with the hope that practicing questions will ‘somehow’ make them perfect or at least better.

First, good quality questions are not endless but limited in number, a fact that people eventually realize. In addition, practicing questions may make you better at solving questions but not at solving questions ‘correctly’. Only learning from the questions can make you better at solving them correctly.

Thus, while I understand that solving questions is ‘fun’ and analyzing them is ‘boring’, you need to analyze your mistakes and learn from them if you want an improvement in your score. ‘Fun’ things may not always lead you to the desired results.

4. Revisit the questions you got wrong or were confused in initially

This is in-line with the objective of learning from the questions. When one gets a question wrong or gets stuck in two options, the person generally tries to understand the solution by going through replies on the forum. Many a time, the person will be able to find satisfactory clarification of his doubts.

However, there is a good chance (I can say this based on my experience) that the person will make the same mistake or get confused on the same point if he does the question one or two weeks later. Why? Because the person may not have deeply understood the logic to remember it one or two weeks later. Thus, I recommend that you visit and attempt such questions time and again so that you understand your gaps deeply enough to not make the same errors in the exam.

5. Resist the urge to solve hard questions early on.

Even though our accuracy on medium questions doesn’t go beyond 70%, we feel a strong urge to solve hard questions. Why? Because we feel that it’s the hard questions that can give us the high score we so much desire.

However, if we are faltering on the easy or medium questions, we are not going to face hard questions on the actual exam since it’s an adaptive test. Thus, even from an exam perspective, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time on the kinds of questions that we are not going to see on the exam.

Besides, even from a learning perspective, it doesn’t make sense to solve hard questions. A 70% or lower accuracy on medium questions suggests that we are not able to understand many medium questions as well. In such a case, it’s very likely that we’ll not learn much from the hard questions.

Guidelines on the solutions

1. Not every explanation is correct

While it’d be perfect if every explanation on the forum were correct. However, that is not the case. Many of the explanations are incorrect since any user can post whatever he thinks is correct. Since most of the users are still learning, it’s quite natural that many of the things they consider correct are actually incorrect. At times, even experts are wrong. They are also humans. Besides, not every expert is equally capable or has done the same amount of research.

Given this, whom should you trust?

Why not yourself?

I am serious. Why not trust yourself? In your logic? Okay. I’m not nuts. I know you are on this forum because you are going wrong somewhere. Then, how can you trust your logic?

By not blindly believing in it and not blindly believing in anybody else’s logic as well but by evaluating it and arguing with it.

Question everything. Try to evaluate every logic you come across. See whether the same logic can be applied in other questions as well. See whether the same logic holds in other aspects of life as well. Correct logic holds everywhere (wherever it can be applied) while incorrect logic just applies to the question at hand (why? Because the incorrect logic is generally created just to justify the correct option and reject the incorrect options).

Of course, doing above increases your work. But it also increases your learning. By doing above, you become an active learner rather than a passive one. Additionally, by doing so, you also bring down drastically your chances of going wrong.

2. Reading up a solution or reasoning is very different from coming up with one

When we read the reasoning for a verbal question or solution of a quant question, we seem to think that we have understood it. However, the question is: when a similar question comes up again, would you be able to come up with the reasoning or the solution on your own?

Many a time, when we are reading the solution (or the reasoning), we tend to think we can solve a question on our own the next time. However, I’ve found that it’s not the case in many scenarios. Reading a solution, in many cases, doesn’t equip you with the ability to come up with a solution because reading is passive in nature – you are just consuming content.

The way to avoid passive consumption is to not go through the entire solution at once. Rather, look at the first one or two steps and then, having gotten the right direction, try to create the remaining solution on your own. If you are still not able to do so, look at one more step and then try again. Similarly, you can do with the reasoning in verbal. Rather than going through the entire solution, try to see what the post is directing towards and come up with the remaining reasoning yourself. And after you have come up with your reasoning, you can compare your reasoning with the reasoning mentioned on the forum. Then, if your reasoning is different from the one mentioned in the post, you can feel free to challenge the other person.

3. Figure out 'exactly' where you went wrong

I see that when they get a question wrong, many people completely discard their solution and look up the expert solution. That’s not a helpful strategy if your objective is to learn. Whenever you get a question wrong, your objective should be to figure out the ‘exact step’ where you went wrong. It could be a calculation mistake, a conceptual mistake, a misreading, or something else. However, you should figure out the exact mistake you made and create a record of the same in an error log so that your chances of repeating the same mistake go down.

Guidelines on the strategies

If everybody can have an opinion on how to run a country, it’s not surprising that everybody can also have an opinion on how to prepare for the GMAT. And we know that these opinions are conflicting in many ways. Rather, I think that if we try to find an ‘intersection’ of all the strategies i.e. find what is common to all the strategies, we’ll be left with nothing. Do as you wish!

My thought process is that since GMAT is a test of skills, any good GMAT preparation strategy has to be about building skills. So, if you are just trying to solve questions without understanding them, you are not building your understanding, and thus your strategy is flawed. On this parameter, you can probably measure your GMAT prep strategy. Are you building your skills as you prepare? Would this preparation help you in your everyday life as well?

If your preparation is mainly a mindless application of rules and techniques, my guess is that you are not preparing the right way. And you’ll realize that sooner or later.

I’m sure there are many other tips and guidelines that can help people get the most of this forum. I plan to keep adding to this post more guidelines that could help the community.
I hope this post helps.

- CJ