GMAT Success Tip - Just do something.

We have all experienced it. We see a GMAT question that seems unanswerable, whether it's a quant question that looks different from anything we've ever seen, a Sentence Correction question with super long answer choices, or a Reading Comprehension question with five answers that seem correct. My first reaction when I see a question like that is to freak, as in, "I don't even want to deal with this," and maybe yours is pretty much the same.

But our first reaction isn't what matters. What matters is what we do next, and the thing to do next is to just do something. After all, we have some time to work with. So, we might as well do something.

For the quant question, if it involves variables, we could start plugging in numbers to see what happens. Maybe a pattern will start to show up. If it involves real numbers, we can start estimating or doing some rough calculations that may lead somewhere. Will they? Who knows? But even if they don't, we've learned something about the problem.

For that SC question that looks like something we don't even want to read, we can start scanning choices for any kind of error. If we can find even a few errors, we can at least whittle down the number of super long choices we have to deal with.

For that RC question, if we can eliminate even one choice, we've made some progress; we've turned a crazy five choice question into a crazy four choice question.

Imagine a kid playing high school football. He might not be the biggest kid on the field, but he starts hitting the guy across from him. The other player might be bigger and stronger, but OK, the kid hits him to the left, and then to the right, and keeps slamming the opposing player with all he has in one way or another. After all, he might as well. And the thing is that, while doing that may not always work, a lot of the time it will. Eventually, the opposing player gets off balance or something, and the kid will slip by him and make a tackle or block a punt, not because he is super big, strong, or fast, but because he went ahead and did something.

The same thing works for GMAT questions. Once you start doing something, what seemed like a big, bad problem starts to get solved. Maybe you don't even know what your second move will be, but no matter what your first move does to the question, it somehow represents progress. After all, even if your first move doesn't work, you then know what doesn't work, and you can try something else.

Then, you take the same attitude with your next move. You do something, and if it works it works, and if it doesn't, you'll make another move.

You take the positive attitude that something is going to work and keep hitting the question relentlessly from every direction, rereading the passage, looking for clues in the answer choices, doing anything you can to find a path to the correct answer, and eventually, most of the time, that question that looked so unanswerable gets answered correctly, and you've put some points on the board.

Of course, if you're well prepared for the test, not every question will go this way. Many questions you'll quickly see how to answer using a strategy that you've applied many times when practicing. However, as we all know, the GMAT is an adaptive test that presents us with harder questions as we answer questions correctly. So, at some point, we're likely to see a question that we're not sure what to do about, and that's when the "do something" mantra kicks in, and if we apply it, we're likely to get some or all of those hardest questions correct and take our score to the next level.

I should know. The "do something" mantra got me all the way to 800, and by applying it, you too can get those seemingly unanswerable questions correct and ace the GMAT like a pro.