Help needed: how to avoid stress and panic during the test?

First thanks for asking this question and being so open about your challenges. I can tell you that, as a GMAT performance coach focusing on helping people with retakes, a big part of my time goes in helping people overcome exactly this problem.

Let's look at each of your "stress symptoms" one by one:

1) My brain starts to “freeze” and I suddently don’t know how to attack the simplest questions. Even questions that are usually my strength suddenly look like an abstract painting.

The antidote to this is having a consistent process for approaching each question. It may sound obvious but very few people do this correctly. When you don't follow a consistent process, each question can feel like you're starting from scratch (driving up your anxiety and error rates). The first two steps of any question (especially quant) are capture / preprocessing and visualization. If you follow consistent approaches to these two steps, you'll narrow your focus when it comes to solving the question. Focus always reduces anxiety.


2) I constantly think that I’m behind and start to rush. In reality, that is almost never the case: I can see my timing in the Manhattan CATs and I’m almost always within +-2 minutes of the targeted time. My brain just makes me 'feel' that I’m behind because I panic.

There are multiple approaches to addressing timing anxiety (as well as timing issues) on the GMAT. One is practicing "marking to the clock". I mean really practicing it. During practice tests and even question sets, set time mileposts and know where you should be. For example on the test, at 40 minutes remaining, you should be past Q11, at 20 minutes remaining you should be past Q21. This shouldn't be vague. Put your quant skills to use and do regular timing checks.

The second is having a skipping strategy. The truth is, unless you're aiming for a 800 score, you can get a significant number of questions wrong and still do well. If you can get a 720 with as low as 65% right on quant and verbal questions, should you attempt every question? No. you should skip ones you have a higher likelihood of getting wrong so you have enough time to do well on the ones you are better at.

3) I make careless errors, such as overlooking important information in the question, or mess up easy calculations and because of that, I don’t find the correct answers (and start to panic even more).

Remember, no one will ever see HOW you took the GMAT, only your score. That means you should follow methods that I call "resilient' -- with built in safety nets for the pressure driven mistakes that happen to everyone on the GMAT.

Recognizing that you're under stress (let's face it, the stakes are really high), you should adjust your way of doing calculations. Assume you might make a math error -- so write down more so it's easy to debug your calculations and find the mistakes (or better avoid them completely).

Look it all comes down to better process in taking the test. That's the key to managing your stress. All the other stuff (while useful) is only helpful if you're attacking each question in the smartest way.

We do FREE diagnostic sessions with a GMAT performance coach (no signup obligation) that will unearth the key process gaps that are causing your stress and error rates. It's what we specialize in -- we help clients (1500+ and counting) to make their last 30, 50 or even 100 points to their target score on the GMAT.