My Philosophy on Beating the GMAT
What I share with friends on Step 1 of their MBA journey
What I share with friends on Step 1 of their MBA journey
The Do-Over
My first attempt at the GMAT didn’t go so well.
After taking a 10-week test prep course from start-to-finish, I was consistently hitting or exceeding my goal score during my practice tests. I felt confident. I felt ready.
But on the day of the real test, I choked. I choked hard. I scored a good 100 points below my goal: Nowhere near good enough for the MBA programs I had my eye on. I had planned to take the test again 4 weeks later, but, as they say, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. In the week that followed my GMAT fail, I….
…found out our company was being bought.
…was informed that I would be moving from NYC to Boston.
….discovered I needed knee and shoulder surgery from a pair of nagging lacrosse injuries, both of which would require extensive rehab.
My GMAT redo would have to wait. I shut down my studying, put my books away, and made room for dealing with life’s complications. I resolved to revisit the test again when I had the capacity.
That capacity took 6 months to create. Half a year later, my surgeries, PT, a new job, and a move were finally behind me. I shifted my life back into GMAT mode — and I do mean all the way back. I was committed. Perhaps a tad over-committed.
I started by retaking the exact same prep course from start-to-finish. (Charitably, Manhattan GMAT gives do-overs like me a nice discount for round 2.) I scheduled a practice test for myself every weekend at the same time, which I took from my desk in an empty office to mimic the uncomfortable, sterile environment of the test-taking center. I even covered one of my apartment’s walls with chalkboard paint. I filled it floor-to-ceiling with yellow scribbles of equations, geometric diagrams, overlapping sets matrices, and countless other GMAT nuggets. Looking back, it was a bit extreme. I didn’t just make a cheat sheet — I lived in one.
But hey, it worked. I got the score I needed on attempt #2, got into Wharton, and had two of the most full years of my life. I met the woman I married, traveled the world, and left school with an offer at the management consulting firm I had always dreamed of working for.
Over the years, plenty of my friends have gone through their own GMAT crucibles, and it’s been fun to share advice, see their triumphs, and hear what worked.
So what works? Below is the stuff that passes a simple test — it worked for me and my friends. Maybe it’ll help you, too.
#1: Take an In-Person Prep Class
Maybe you’re one of those people. The ones who can simply study the book, take the practice tests from the comfort of your apartment, and nab the score you need on your first try. Congrats, your brain is built better than the rest of us. Also — we all hate you a little bit. I needed to learn this stuff live. I needed both the instructor and the classroom.
Steven Pressfield, one of my favorite authors, has this saying: “Put your ass where your heart wants to be.” Paraphrasing a bit, here’s Steven’s POV:
“If you want to get strong, go to the gym.
If you want to get fast, go to the track.
The point is: where the body goes, the spirit follows.
Therefore, move thy butt.
Put your ass where your heart wants to be.”
Something sort of magical happens when you decide to not only learn something, but when you go somewhere new to learn it. If every action you take is a vote for the person you want to become, then maybe the short commute from my apartment to the Manhattan GMAT classroom each week served as a kind of subtle beacon of reinforcement. We’re serious about this, my subconscious may have been saying. Hobbyists paint at home. Real artists drive to the studio.
I’m not convinced you actually learn more in a classroom. You don’t get better facts sitting in a classroom with other people. The curriculum for most GMAT prep courses is exactly the same regardless of setting. I think the benefit of learning around other people is far more subtle, and more powerful.
Here’s the #1 benefit: It’ll force you to focus. Not unlike hiring a personal trainer, the real good from an in-person class is that it replaces your willpower with someone else’s. It’s hard to get distracted by the TV or your phone or your roommate or significant other when you’re sitting in a classroom with 20 other people. And the social pressure of an in-person class doesn’t hurt either. That subtle mix of collaboration and competition can do you a lot of good. You can’t help but wonder — Who among your classmates is going to walk out of this thing with the highest score? And why shouldn’t it be you?
#2: Know Your Strengths
Nobody nails this thing start-to-finish. Everybody discovers a few GMAT topics that they just naturally “get,” and everybody struggles with a few. Don’t hide from this fact. Embrace it. Start by identifying the subjects you’re naturally good at — and try to get GREAT at them.
If you know the tricks the GMAT uses to make a simple problem harder, the problems become much easier to crack. Let’s illustrate with a bit of technical example: The two-way overlapping set problem examples below, organized by difficulty level.
5–600 level problem: The 7th grade French and Spanish classes each have 15 students in them, and there are five students in the 7th grade taking both languages. If everyone in the 7th grade is in at least one of the two language classes, how many students are taking just one of the two classes? (HOW TO ANSWER IT: 5 students in the Y + Y box, no students in the N + N box. Then just add up the columns. Straightforward numbers.)
6–7 level: One-sixth of the attendees at a certain convention are female students, two-thirds of the attendees are female, and one-third of the attendees are students. If 150 of the attendees are neither female nor students, what is the total number of attendees at the convention? (HOW TO ANSWER IT: Still pretty straightforward numbers, just worded a little weird.)
7–8 level: Of the attendees at a conference, 100 are male, and at least 50 are male non-students (and so on and so on)…what is the greatest/least number of students that could be in [insert box here] → (HOW TO ANSWER IT: Here you need to take a derivation of an outside box, and then calculate a maximum/minimum value.)
The point is, there are certain topics that they can only make so hard. What makes it tricky is that the definition of “hard vs. easy” is completely relative. It’s different for everyone. My strengths were overlapping sets, consecutive integers, and maybe a few other types of quant problems. Yours will be different. That’s ok.
Here’s my point: Play to your strengths. Use your early practice/diagnostic tests to understand which topics come easy to you, and then shoot to become an expert in that topic. You should be able to at least identify what a question is asking for every single time that topic comes up. That will go a long way towards you either getting the answer, or at least being able to make a better-than-blind guess on the really hard stuff.
#3: No Easy Misses
For the problem types that come easy to you, it’s worth the time to learn the tricks that make an easy problem (5–600 level) a hard one (700+ level). But only for the problems that come easy to you. It is absolutely not worth it for topics you struggle with. For your harder topics, just focus on the fundamentals and nailing the basic problems. Don’t try to hit a home run. Just get on base.
For your areas of weakness, you should strive to be able to get ALL of the easy (3–500, 5–600) questions right before you even allow yourself to get stressed about the hard stuff. It’s ok to do the harder problems, but don’t spend any extra time on them (or beat yourself up about missing them) if you don’t have the lower skill-level foundation first.
Here’s a way to test if you have the basic understanding down: Look at your assessment reports from your official practice test (or “CATs”). If you can follow a logical pattern of right and wrong answers (i.e., I got most/all of the easy ones right, and the hard ones wrong), chances are your foundation is in place. If you either get a ton wrong, or get a random distribution of right and wrong (i.e., equal numbers of 3–500 wrong vs. 7–800 wrong) then your foundation is probably a little wonky and needs more work at the basic level.
#4: Train Your Recognition
When you study for the GMAT, you’re trying to build a bunch of little algorithms — a set of processes or rules you automatically follow when you encounter a specific type of problem. These algorithms always take the same form:
“When I see ____, I need to _____.”
Here are a few real-life GMAT examples:
When I see a two-way overlapping sets problem, I need to draw a matrix. If it gives me percentages, I should pick 100 as the TOTAL number and work from there.
When I see an equation with something/x = x, I know I’m dealing with a quadratic (bc you have to multiply that x to get it to cancel out, giving you x² on the other side.)
When I see a problem with two triangles in it, I will always ask myself “is this problem about similar triangles?”
When I see a “shape within a shape” question dealing with a shape inscribed in a circle, I will always start to think about arc lengths, diameter of the circle., etc.
If you’re started studying for the GMAT, you probably have a bunch of these in your head right now. Write them down. Once you do that, try going through the GMAT Official Guide and do the following exercise. Pick a specific algorithm — a type of problem and the “When I see X, I need to do Y” guideline, ideally written on a 3x5 card. Then go through a few pages of the Official Guide and just look for the problems that would test you on that algorithm. Don’t actually do the problem — just focus on recognizing it and what it’s asking for. The GMAT is a time-pressure test. Your speed-to- recognition can sometimes matter just as much as speed to completion. Once you know something, it only helps you if you can recognize when to use it. Rookie QBs in the NFL face the same problem. Even if they can make all the throws, they spend countless hours learning to quickly read defenses before they’re ready for their first game. Don’t forget to exercise those recognition muscles.
#5: Frequency > Intensity
If I could pick one phrase that leads to success in test-taking and in life, it’s this:
That’s what we’re going for here. Frequency over intensity.
When I talk to my friends that over-perform on the test — the ones that surprise even themselves with how well they did — I ask them the same question: “What did you carry with you while you were studying?” Seems like a strange question, right?
But invariably, that question gets me a smile and an admission. Everyone I know who beats the GMAT has some sort of reference guide on them at nearly all times in the final weeks before the exam: A cheat sheet, pile of 3x5 cards, or a series of notes on their phone. They have something physically with them that helps them turn “alive time into dead time.” Something that helps them find little moments throughout the day for light review.
I don’t think this pattern is an accident. Frequency matters. Yes, you’re going to need to put in the hours of heads down studying time, and yes, you should mimic the test environment and avoid giving yourself “outs” when you’re in dress rehearsal mode. But I’m convinced, looking back, that it wasn’t the marathon sessions that got me over the hump. It was these little 5-minute “study tonics” that etched the exam’s most important concepts in my brain and made me more comfortable on the day of the test. So yes, do the deep work. But also — just find a way to get a bunch of little touches in. Glance at what will show up on the test just for a few minutes at a time, over and over.
Make a review worksheet, or use a sheet of problems from your test-prep provider or from an online resource like MGMAT. Look at them while you’re walking to work, while you’re on your locomotive device of choice at the gym, or any of the other thousand in-between moments in your day. Any time you can, get your touches in. Those reps add up. And, if you pay attention, I bet you will feel their solid, accumulated heft — and the confidence that heft provides — when it really counts.
Final Thoughts
If you’re thinking about getting an MBA (or, as one of the founding partners at our fund would say, “Entering the witness relocation program for smart people”) the GMAT is an important first step. It’s also a special kind of torture. We’re talking about a three-hour, time-pressured test that forces you to code-switch between the linguistic and mathematic poles of your brain. A test that requires months of focus, sacrifice, and studying to conquer. And in a sadistic flourish of mind-fuckery, the thing is designed to literally feel worse the better you perform on it.
It’s also one of those weird rites of passage that really matters… until it doesn’t. You devote a couple of months of your life to learning to crack the exam, the big day comes… and then if you do well enough, you never have to think about it again.
That’s where you want to get. You want the the GMAT in your rear-view, and you want to be encumbered with a wonderfully different kind of stress: The stress of deciding where to apply and where to spend the next chapter of your life and career. And you want to get there as quickly as possible.
I hope something in here helps you get it right — the first time.