Gmat moc test frequency

Question

Hello,

I have recently started my gmat journey. I have taken the #1 official mba.com test as a cold diagnostic (495 score) and I have completed the 1st week of gmat ninja study guide.

I was wondering what should be the frequency of me taking moc tests.

I am planning to take the exam around September to October and I am aiming at 600s.

AllisonBell · Answer

Hi!

Great question! First of all, kudos for taking your first official practice test. That’s a really important step for establishing a baseline and understanding what you’re up against on the GMAT!

During the initial period of your study, when you’re learning all of the content for the first time, I recommend spacing out your practice tests like this:

Mock Test 2 : When you’ve completed about 40% of the content in your study program
 Mock Test 3:  When you’ve completed about 75% of the content in your study program
 Mock Test 4 : After you’ve completed your full study program and done about a week of review
 Mock Test 5 : 2-3 weeks later, assuming you’re maintaining a consistent schedule of study and review. Ideally, this would fall two weeks before your scheduled exam.
 Mock Test 6 : 2-3 weeks after Mock Test 5, and ideally about a week before your scheduled exam.

This approach will give you space to primarily focus on learning content during your study program, while still giving you opportunities to rehearse test-day time management strategies and executive decision making techniques. And it’ll leave you with half of the practice tests available once you’ve completed your studies and are focused entirely on review.

It’s pretty common for students to extend their study period such that they run out of mock tests. If that happens to you, it’s really okay to retake the official MBA.com exams (in the order you originally took them). Since the test is adaptive, you won’t see exactly the same questions. And you’ll be so deep in your studies that you’re unlikely to remember the details of any questions you did on Mock Test 1, anyway.

Effective review of your practice tests will be a really important part of your score improvement! You can find a Practice Test Analysis spreadsheet to guide you through that process in ManhattanPrep’s  Free GMAT Starter Kit .

Best,

bb · Answer

I would recommend for you to get something else to help you learn the material and strategies besides the official guide. You’ll notice the official guide has extremely basic principles and rules and it’s far from complete and has zero strategies that would help you with timing, question approach or test strategies.

The Manhattan books are a great source. You can also consider one of the inexpensive online courses

PS. The official guide is great as a source of questions but not as a strategy book or source of fundamentals.

ChristosXiro · Answer

Thanks for the response! 
Isn’t 40% a bit late? I was thinking maybe to have my second moc at 25%-30% while taking 2-3 unofficial tests such as the gmat club ones for instance. In this way I can maintain an exam readiness while keeping track of my progress. What do you think?

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi Christos,

Your 495 baseline score is useful for setting timeline expectations, but it doesn't tell you which topics to prioritize or hand you a study plan. That comes from the work itself, not the mock.

That's the key thing to understand before I answer your question about frequency. Mocks are measurement tools, not study tools. They tell you whether your skills are translating into a score, but they don't build those skills. Early on, you shouldn't be taking them often at all. A full-length test before you've learned the content mostly just confirms gaps you already know about, and official tests are a limited resource. Burning through them in the first month is a poor use of them.

So here's the sequence. The first and longest phase is content. Work topic-by-topic, learn the concepts, formulas, and techniques for one area thoroughly, then practice only that topic, untimed at first, until your accuracy is consistently high before moving on. Prioritize getting questions right over getting them fast. Speed is a result of mastery, not something you train separately. For every miss, figure out why: a concept you didn't know, a misread, a careless error, or a trap answer. Then re-solve those questions from scratch later without the explanation. If you can't get them right on your own the second time, the topic isn't solid yet.

Mocks come after that foundation is largely in place. Once your accuracy is climbing across topics, full-length tests become genuinely useful for testing timing, stamina, section management, and accuracy under pressure. A reasonable cadence then is one test every week to ten days, with deep review before the next. In the final month, one per week under realistic conditions. Space your limited official mocks across the back half of your prep, and save one for roughly ten to fourteen days before test day.

On timeline: September or October gives you about three to four months, a workable window for a jump of this size if you study consistently, on the order of fifteen hours a week. The constraint isn't time. It's whether those hours go into structured content work rather than scattered practice. You've started a study plan, which is a good instinct. Just make sure it takes you through the material systematically, one topic at a time, and lets you track your accuracy, because that structure is what moves the score.

This article covers how to use practice tests strategically rather than just often:  GMAT Practice Test Strategy .

AllisonBell · Answer

Hi!

I can definitely understand why you would feel that way. But it’s important to save the practice tests for when they can make a meaningful contribution to your studies, either through assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, time management practice, or both. Taking a mock only a quarter to a third of the way through your studies, you won’t have covered enough content to meaningfully assess your progress.

Taking it closer to halfway through your studies gives you an opportunity to stay in-tune with your long-term goal of developing time management strategies (see   Everything You Need to Know About GMAT Time Management   for some guidance) and executive decision making skills that will improve your score. That’s the main point of a midway(ish) test — not to necessarily see a ton of score improvement, but to start trying out time management and decision making skills that will take a lot of practice to master. For most people, it doesn’t go perfectly, but it serves as a helpful reminder of what to prioritize during practice in terms of skills and strategies.

If you have extra tests at your disposal, I’d save those for after your full study program so that you can take practice tests more regularly in the month or two leading up to your official test.

Best, 
 Ally

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