There's a ton of information out there on how to study for the GMAT, just check out the GMAT Club forums. I'm not going into details, but thought I'd offer a few tips for what worked for me.
Let me just start by saying that the Official GMAT Guide (a.k.a. OG) is essential so make sure you borrow/buy a copy. I worked off the 2013 version (OG 2013). I started by doing the diagnostic problems in the guide to get a feel for what GMAT questions were like. I noticed straight off that they were very different from the kinds of tests I'd taken previously. The questions are more about strategic problem solving (especially for quant) that doing Math problems. I call it "doing Math without really doing Math". Basically unless you're a human calculator, if you solved the quant problems like you would do at high school, you're stuffed.
Tip #1: There's more than one way to skin the cat when it comes to quant. Focus on learning these different methods.
How I did it was to do a problem in the OG, then look up how other people solved the same problem. My go-tos were GMAT Quantum, GMAT Pill and the GMAT Club Forums. For critical reasoning, I found the Powerscore CR Bible immensely helpful.
This way I found out other ways and alternative strategies for solving the problem and if one of those ways resulted in reduced time spent on the problem, I adopted that strategy for any similar problems going forward. Spend the most amount of time reviewing your answers and always ask yourself: "Was there a better/faster way to get the answer?"
Tip #2: Time Management is key. You can skip questions and still get a high score.
The GMAT does actually penalise you quite a bit for not finishing all the questions so make sure you do, even if you have to skip one or two in the middle or towards the end. For perfectionists like me, this was a tough obstacle to overcome. I'm persistent when it comes to problems and this meant I had a hard time letting go and would end up spending far too much time on a particular problem. Initially I would do poorly on the quant part of GMAT because I'd run out of time and miss answering 1 or 2 questions. I had to learn to be strict with myself - any problem that I was still somewhat far from solving after 2mins 15 secs I skipped. In business you need to know when to cut your losses and move on after all. The GMAT forum has some other great tips on timing here.
Tip #3: Time yourself when doing practice questions.
Once you have a decent level of accuracy, make sure you do this every time, even if you're doing short "runs" which gives you practice problem-solving under pressure. I'd do say 10 questions at a time and give myself 20 mins to do all 10. I focused on doing the questions in the OG from back to front. The best tool I came across was the GMAT timer created by GMAT Club's walker. I would run through a set of questions and mark my answers on the timer. Then at the end of the practice run, the timer lets you copy and paste your answers along with the time of how long you took to finish the question. I then marked my practice and noted down which questions I had taken longer than ideal for and also the ones that I potentially could've cut down time on. Then apply Tip #1 :)
Tip #4: Practice practice practice.
GMAT thinking is not natural. So it needs to become a habit. For any questions that you've gotten wrong answers for, guessed or aren't too sure of, after analysing the best way to solve them, do them again on the spot (timed!) and once more the next day before you do new questions. It's about practicing the same methods over and over and making them a habit. You should then find that when you tackle a new problem, you can automatically think of more ways of solving it and can pick the quickest one.
Tip #5: Use a process of elimination to work out answers for the verbal section.
Often there should be 1 or 2 options that are obvious "outs". Especially for sentence correction, it helps to eliminate the obvious incorrects first so that you can then focus on the answers that are quite close. Then work out the differences between the two and what they're actually saying. Tip #1 and Tip #4 are definitely key for verbal - after all exposure to lots of questions and strategies will train your eye to spot the incorrects,
Tip #6: For Reading Comprehensive, skim read when you first get the passage.
Don't bother spending time reading in detail because when you read the question you usually have to go back and read in detail anyway. What you want to do initially is to work out what the passage is about and get the gist of what each paragraph is covering so that you can quickly navigate to the right part to answer the question. Practice speed reading a lot and with everything you read.
What I've written above might be slightly skewed towards improving quant rather than verbal since this was the section I found a bit more challenging with my background. However, Tip #1 and Tip #4 are definitely key for all sections.
No comments:
Post a Comment