GMAT Ninja 13-Week Study Plan (2024-25 ed.) Week 1: Start Here

Most of you probably didn't do a practice test this week, and that's great. In many cases, your time is best spent elsewhere right now.

If you took a full mba.com test in Week 1:

• Don’t spend time reviewing the questions! You’ll probably want to retake this same practice test in a month or two, and you’ll get more from the experience if you don’t remember much.
• Track how far you are from your goals on quant, verbal, and DI. Why? Well, if, for example, you’re 15 points from your target score on verbal but 3 points away on quant and DI, then you’ll need to spend more time on verbal right from the start. In each week of the study plan, you’ll need to make decisions about how to allocate your study time – and your quant/verbal/DI split should be the single biggest factor in those choices.
• Do a quick check of your verbal performance by question type (RC, CR). If you performed MUCH worse on one question type, just take note of it for now. We’ll give you plenty of optional resources and homework over time, and you’ll want to spend more of that “optional” time in your weak areas – and skip it for your strong areas.
• Do a quick check of your Data Insights performance by question type (MSR, TPA, TA, GI, DS). If you performed MUCH worse on one or two question types, just take note of it for now. We’ll offer some optional resources and homework over time for DI too, and you’ll want to spend more of that “optional” time in your weak areas – and skip it for your strong areas.
• Count your careless errors on quant. No, really: please count them. In the long run, you’ll need to completely eliminate those careless errors on quant – and very little matters on quant until you do.
• Most importantly: don’t overreact. It’s Week 1. You have plenty of time to improve.

Benchmarks for Your Week 1 Quant Results

Before you do anything else:

• Count the errors that make you go "whoa, how the 🤬 did I miss THAT one?!?" No really: count them, for EVERY quant set you completed. Then divide that by the total number of questions to get your careless error rate.

If your long-term goal is to score in the 80s, here are the metrics I’d like you to hit in Week 1:

Careless error rate: < 5%. If you make careless errors on 5% of questions now, you’re going to make far more under the pressure of the actual exam – maybe three times as many, which means that you’d make 3-4 goofy errors on your actual test. And that will destroy your score. So let’s get this careless error rate down to 1-2% at most.

• Basic algebra drills (#3 & #4 on the list): 100% accuracy, please, ideally in under 90 seconds per question on average. If you're not quite there, keep practicing.
• OG & Quant Guide sets (#6 on the list): 85-90% correct is excellent, 80% is probably good for now. Just remember that WHAT you miss is more important on the GMAT than how many you missed: careless errors are apocalyptic. If you missed OG questions on topics that you haven't studied, that's totally cool -- you'll have time to learn those things.
• Randomized batches of forum questions (#5 & #7 on the list): 85-90% correct is good on the sub-555 questions, but if you did mixed difficulty sets, you’ll have to take the results with a grain of salt. If you happened to see nasty, strange questions, 50-60% might be pretty good. Don’t overreact if the percentage wasn’t great, though – the quality of questions often varies considerably.
• Speed: On the OG and topic-based sets, you're in good shape if you’re reasonably close to 2 minutes per question. If you're slower than, say, 2:30 per question on average, it might be a sign that your basic skills are rusty, or that you're not choosing efficient paths forward -- and you'll be able to improve those things over time.

What Should You Do About Your Quant Weaknesses in Week 1?

First, a public service announcement: you can miss 20-50% of the quant questions on the GMAT and still get an excellent score. The goal of an adaptive exam is to find the level of question at which you get roughly 40-50% of the questions wrong. So even if you score in the 80s on quant, you might miss a TON of questions – that’s just how the GMAT works. What matters is WHAT you miss – not just how many you miss.

Related: if you make careless mistakes on easier questions, the GMAT will eat you for breakfast. You might already know that from watching this short video on time management. It was produced for an older version of the GMAT, but the messages are definitely still relevant for the current version of the GMAT.

The punchline: when you study, you’ll need to pick your battles wisely. If you’re painstakingly reviewing every single question you missed, you’re probably missing the point. Yes, you’ll want to look for signs that your foundations are shaky, and you’ll also need to stamp out careless errors.

But if you’re getting beat up by harder or more obscure questions? That’s cool. Don’t waste too much of your precious study time on that stuff, particularly in the first few weeks of the study plan.

Here’s what to do after you’ve analyzed your results:

• If your careless error rate is too high: you need to address this problem ASAP. Nothing else matters on quant until you do. Check out the resource list in the study plan for help.
• If you struggled on the basic algebra sets (items #3-4): these are boring sets, but basic algebra underpins a whole lot of quant questions. If you need to spend extra time on your fundamental algebra skills, do it – it’ll be worth it in the long run.
• If you struggled on the OG sets (item #6): don’t panic. Ask yourself WHY you struggled. If you’re at, say, 70% accuracy, that’s not ideal right now. But context matters: if nearly all of those errors are on topics that you’ve never really studied, you’re in GREAT shape, since you have plenty of time to study those over the next couple of months.
• If you struggled on the randomized, topic-based sets (item #5 & #7): again, don’t panic. It’s far too easy to overreact to a few errors, and study these problems until your eyeballs burst. Instead, put your struggles into context: did you miss hard or strange versions of these questions? Were your errors careless? If so, you probably don’t need to do much studying, exactly. But if you missed basic questions because your foundations are shaky, then you might need to do some remedial studying in these topics – but don’t assume that you need to do so unless the data is very, very clear about your weaknesses.
• If you got absolutely CRUSHED by ALL of the quant homework: if you’re nowhere close to the benchmarks on quant – and if your long-term goal is a score in the 80s – then maybe you need to back away from the study plan, and invest some time in rebuilding your basic quant skills. If that’s the case for you, tag us in the thread, give us as much detail as you can about your situation, and we’ll try to help.
• How much time should you spend reviewing individual quant questions? Not much, please! Because it can take SOOOOOOO much time to review a question, it should be your absolute last resort. That’s why we want you to redo questions first – sometimes, you’ll see your mistake right away, and that’s the best way to learn. If you miss a question a second time, then maybe it’s a sign of an underlying issue.
• No, really: resist the temptation to obsess over individual questions. Instead, look for patterns in your errors – an error on one question might be a fluke (or a weird, hard, or badly written question), but if you miss several related questions, you have an opportunity to get a good ROI on your study time by addressing a general weakness via a video or articles or books.

First, another public service announcement: LSAT sets are HARD. If you’re not in pain, you’re probably not doing it right.

Benchmarks for Your Week 1 Verbal Results

• Accuracy on LSAT CR & RC sets: if your goal is a 90th percentile score on verbal, we eventually want to see 80% accuracy on LSAT CR and RC. It’s OK if you’re not there in Week 1. It’s even OK if you’re not terribly close yet – there’s plenty of time to improve.
• Efficiency on LSAT CR & RC sets: if you can complete full LSAT sets in under 60 minutes, you’ll have a good shot at finishing the GMAT verbal section on time. If you’re in the 60-70 minute range right now, that’s still OK – you have time to become more efficient and energetic. If you’re slower than that, we might be worried. More on that below.
• Consistency on LSAT CR & RC sets: your errors and times should fall within a fairly narrow range across ALL of your LSAT sets. LSAT sets (~25 Qs each) do not vary much in difficulty, so if your errors or times fluctuate wildly, that’s a sign that you’re doing very different things at different times – and that’s not cool. You’ll certainly struggle more on some passages than others, but the results on the full sets of ~25 questions should be pretty stable.
• GMAT OG & Verbal Guide RC & CR questions: we can’t give you a benchmark, because it just depends on the difficulty level of the questions that you happened to do. All I can say is that you’ll want to look for HUGE patterns in your mistakes: are science passages freaking you out? Are you overwhelmingly missing a certain question type? If the patterns are CLEAR, they’re worth addressing, but don’t overreact to a question or two.

What Should You Do About Your Verbal Weaknesses in Week 1?

• Don’t panic. CR and RC progress often takes time, and if you’re far from the benchmarks, that might be totally fine. Learn as much as you can from the videos and articles in the study plan, and understand that improving on verbal is usually a marathon, not a sprint.
• Look for “careless” errors. As with everything on the GMAT, pay close attention to anything that seemed to be an “unforced error.” Did you miss questions that felt easy to you? If so, you might want to revisit the videos and articles in the assignment list.
• If your results are significantly better on RC than on CR: that’s not a bad thing! There’s no reason why you can’t bring your CR results to the level of your RC, but something is probably funky with your approach to CR. You might want to invest time in some extra CR sets or videos – we’ll provide some recommendations each week.
• If you’re better at CR than RC: that’s not a bad thing, either! You’re 100% capable of bringing your RC up to the level of your CR. Maybe you’re obsessing over details when you read RC (missing the “big picture”), or maybe you’re struggling to stay focused on longer RC passages. Maybe you’ll want to err on the side of getting a bit of extra practice on RC in the coming weeks. We’ll keep feeding you videos that might help, too.
• If you’re slow ( > 60 mins per LSAT set): I wish that I could tell you exactly what’s happening, but there are a ton of different reasons why your times might be high. Maybe you’re still learning new approaches, and haven’t fully integrated them into your process yet – if that’s the case, your times will drop naturally. Maybe you’re not doing each set with test-like intensity. Maybe there’s inefficiency in your process – which means that you’re still struggling to fully incorporate the techniques taught in the videos. It’s also possible that you’re a slow reader, and that’s a hard thing to fix. I wish I could tell you which of these things is happening – but you’ll have to figure that part out for yourself, unfortunately.
• If you’re getting impatient with your results: hey, it’s Week 1. Again, if you’re above 80% on your LSAT sets, you’re doing GREAT. If you’re in the 60-80% range, you still have time to improve.
• If you’re getting CRUSHED on CR & RC: my heart hurts for you, because that’s a terrible feeling. If your goal is something like a 80V or less, our benchmarks are too aggressive – so 60% accuracy (or below) on your LSAT sets might not be too bad at this stage. But if you have ambitious goals (84V+) and you’re truly struggling to understand the passages, it’s possible that you need to spend some time working on your fundamental reading skills before returning to GMAT-specific verbal prep. This article and this one will give you some ideas for how to improve your reading precision over time.