Hi everyone. Hope everyone is doing well. As our series of Round-1 webinars has been going on successfully, we thought why not continue the trend of helping students by sharing a tip every week. So, from now, we will share a tip every week from the GMAT experts. The tips can range from the most basic thing to do in GMAT preparation to profile-building for B-Schools. Here comes the first tip.
If someone asks me - "
What is that one tip you would give a student who has started aspiring for GMAT?". My answer would be
Do not time yourself to check how much time you're taking to solve a Question when you are learning.Timing themselves is the biggest mistake students do. Even when they have just started learning they worry about solving a question under 2 mins. Hence, their focus shifts from learning the key skills to improving their timing. What they don’t realize is that change takes time! Shedding your old strategy and inculcating a new one will definitely take a certain time in the initial stages.
Train your conscious mind so that the skill comes to you sub-consciously:
This happens because, while learning a new skill, you have to constantly train your conscious mind. And training a conscious mind will take a lot more time than it takes to train a sub-conscious mind. For example, while learning a car, everything looks haywire. The application of brake, accelerator, clutch and changing the gear would seem very confusing because you didn’t do them before. During the initial stages, you might even apply accelerator mistaking it to the brake. These mistakes happen because you are in the process of training your mind. But as you keep doing the same every day, those things start coming sub-consciously to you. You don’t apply a brake saying that “
Okay! I’ve to apply the break now, so let me do it carefully” or you don’t change the gear by putting a conscious effort saying that “
The speed has crossed a 40, so let me change the gear!”. All these things come to you sub-consciously.
Initially you might be worried whether you’ll be able to reach to that level of doing everything sub-consciously but that is something that will happen eventually! Even the person who teaches you the driving came from the same level. It’s just that you need to be patient and have perseverance. Now you might be wondering why are we even discussing about driving a car in the middle of a GMAT preparation tip. Let me explain it to you from a GMAT perspective.
The importance of learning the right methodology:
Since childhood, we are accustomed to reading a sentence in a certain way. So, whenever we come across an SC question on GMAT, we tend to solve the question by reading it in the same way we are used to. Most sentences seem correct when you read them in the general way. And a few students use grammatical rules to find the errors and select the answer choice which is grammatically correct. But GMAT doesn’t test you on grammatical rules. The main motive behind SC questions is to test your ability to convey the right meaning without any ambiguity. When you become a manager, it is really important to convey the right meaning to your employees. If not done properly, there are high chances that an employee might take away a different meaning and that might impact the whole project.
So, to solve SC questions, it is important to approach them from a meaning stand-point. You will come across a few answer choices which have no grammatical errors and even convey a logical meaning. So, it is important to identify the meaning the sentence is trying to convey and then identify the grammatical errors if any and eliminate the answer choices which do not convey the intended meaning. This would obviously take a little more time during the initial stages. But that shouldn’t be a major concern in the learning stage. What students don't realize is that Timing is an Outcome of High Skill Level, and it takes time to achieve that skill.
How do you go from learning to mastering the skill?
Once you learn the skill, you cannot let yourself to take the same amount of time in the actual test as well. It is really important that you master the skill and in the process of doing that, you gradually reduce the time taken to solve the question. Let me tell you a few steps how to do that.
- Once you learn the skill, start practicing a few questions and make sure you use the method you learnt. There are chances that you will be inclined to using that old method, but train your mind to use the new one.
- Start taking practice quizzes of 10 questions each with a time of 30 minutes, then 20 questions each with a time of 40 minutes. Doing this will help you gradually reduce the time you take to solve a question.
- Just taking quizzes wouldn’t suffice. The most important step to master a skill is to nullify the gap between your approach and the right approach. This can be done by referring to the detailed solutions step-by-step.
Following these steps will help you master a skill and next time you solve a question, the skill comes automatically without putting any additional effort. By this I mean, it would be something sub-conscious and comes to you as did the old method.
So, from now on, do not worry about the time you take per question while learning. Ensure that you learn and read each explanation well to understand the method used to solve questions. Remember GMAT is an application driven test so you need to focus on the application.
I hope you found this tip helpful. Look out for this space for many more useful tips which help you in your MBA journey. All the best!
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