Rebalancing your prep to reach your target score
Many of you are experiencing frustration that your progress towards your GMAT target score is slowing.
There are lots of things going through your mind:
— am I just not cut out for this test
— can I actually get the score I need
— should I just work harder or longer
Those questions are NOT ones that shouldn’t be the first you should be asking yourself first
The first question should be: Am I prepping smartly (quality)? Should I rebalance my prep plan?
Rebalancing
The GMAT is unlike any other test you’ve taken before. It brings elements of executive reasoning to familiar question types in verbal, quant and DI that layer a complexity that requires a better balancing of your prep.
Most test takers focus their prep on concepts. But that’s only half the game. The other half is bustling your test taking skills (those reasoning skills that require you to better manage and process the information that’s given to you, especially on the harder questions that you need to conquer to hit a score in the 90th percentile or higher.
So how do you shift that focus.
- Simply focusing on it is a big step forward. Think about how your prep goes. You study concepts, then you do practice questions of increasing difficulty and then see where you went wrong by reviewing solution sets. Here’s where the balancing thing comes in. You need to focus on the ‘best way’ to answer every question — there will often be multiple paths to answer easy to medium questions — those that are very concept centric and take longer and the more efficient executive reasoning approach which is always faster and more reliable. It’s not just about the questions you got wrong. It’s also about reviewing those you got right but did the harder way — and finding the most efficient path to right answer.
- Cross question strategies. As you shift your focus towards the most efficient approaches to questions, you’ll start to notice patterns that you can apply across multiple question types. Breaking out of the topic silos and starting to see quant, verbal and DI questions as siblings that have some common strategies is critical to your rebalancing your prep.
The big benefits rebalancing your prep?
- Increase your score potential by making hard questions more solvable
- Address timing problems by eliminating unnecessary effort
- Running your brain less hard — saving sharpness and focus for key stages when your score potential is tested by the adaptive nature of the test.