4 Steps to Your Complete GMAT Study Plan - Part 4
Youve made it all the way to part 4 of our series! In part 1, we talked about determining both your starting point and your goal score. Next, we talked about developing your timeline and gathering your resources. We followed that up with a discussion of how best to learn and maximize your study time. If you havent read those earlier installments yet, start there.
All of those steps allow you to take the final step now: lets develop your study plan! Note that Ive split step 4 into two separate installments because there are a lot of things to do. This installment covers what you need to do right now; the next one will cover what you need to do later in your studies. You can read both parts now if you want to get an idea of whats coming, or you can come back and read the last part later, when youre ready. Your choice!
Step 4: Set Your Plan (Part 1)
You know your goal score. You know your strengths and weaknesses, and youve gathered your materials. You also know how to study: you have to learn and memorize content, yes, but you also need to focus on how to think your way through GMAT problems. Now, its time to put all of those pieces together and create your plan.
This may be a no-brainer, but if you are taking a course, follow your syllabus. If youre working with a tutor, figure out the plan with your tutorthats what tutoring is all about!
If those scenarios dont apply to you, then heres how your plan is going to work.
- Primary Study Phase
This is where youre going to learn all of your fundamentals: how Data Sufficiency works, what a modifier is and how to use one correctly, how to answer inference questions, and so on. By the end of this phase, you want to have gone through all of your lesson material once. (You will not do all of your Official Guide/OG or other official-format questions during this phase. Only some.)
How much time did you decide to devote to this primary phase? (Reminder: wed said most people take about 8 to 16 weeks for this phase. If you take a class, the class falls entirely into this overall phase.)
- Mark Your Calendar
Get a calendar and block off 30 minutes to two hours for 5 or 6 days for the next week. You dont have to do your study all at once; you might do half an hour at lunch and another hour after work. Also, youll probably have some days on which you can study only 15 minutes in 5-minute increments of flash card review. Thats fine. You may then have other days on which you study 3 or 4 hours; thats fine as well, as long as you dont study for more than about 2 hours in one sitting. (Why? Read this.)
In your journal, write down what your focus will be for each of those 5 or 6 study days. Early in your studies, the first 5 sessions might, for example, consist of reading various chapters in various books and doing practice problems associated with those chapters. Estimate how much time you think it will take but be flexible; some study will go faster and some will take you longer than you expect.
The last day is a review day; you might do some sets of random problems, review what you did during the first 5 days, do a few problems from older areas that you havent studied recently, et cetera.
Now, lets talk about the first segment of your primary study. Youre going to split your primary study phase up into 2 distinct segments that consist of the following sequence of activities:
- Study a subset of your material
- Take a CAT
- Analyze the data and adjust your plan, priorities and processes as necessary
- Repeat
- Primary Study Segment 1
Take the first 50% to 60% of your total number of weeks to work through whatever material you think is the most important to do first. Use your first practice test results to help you decide, as well as your gut feel as to what is easier or harder for you. This period should include the following basics:
- Processes for all question types (PS, DS, CR, RC, SC), including how to work systematically and efficiently
- Some amount of math content and SC content (the actual facts, rules, formulas, etc that you need to know)
- Wherever needed, Foundation-level content (the type of material covered in Manhattan Preps Foundations of Math and Foundations of Verbal guides)
- Where appropriate, test-taking strategies (e.g., the ability to Test Cases* on quant questions, especially DS)
- Creation of flash cards to help you better Know the GMAT Code
- Regular entries in your GMAT Journal to summarize your major takeaways for how to get better at this test (just the major ones!)
(*For more on this particular strategy, search our blog for that term or look at the Test Cases strategy chapters in our Algebra, Number Properties, or Fractions, Decimals, & Percents guides.)
- Individual Study Sessions
When youre learning new topics, pick an area of focus. Perhaps youll be working on linear and quadratic equations, or Find the Assumption questions, or Smart Numbers techniques for math. If youre learning this material for the first time, start by working through whatever material you have that teaches you about that topic.
For example, if youre using our materials to study CR Find the Assumption, you would read through the first Assumption Family chapter in your CR book. Do some exercises to test your understanding of the material youre learning (in our book, these exercises are already built into the chapter).
When you feel youve got a grasp of the material, try a medium-level OG problem; then, move to a harder or easier one, depending on how you did. Review the official explanations as well as any alternative explanations that you find valuablefor example, you might look up the problem in our GMAT Navigator program, or search for a discussion of the problem online. Use your 2nd Level article to analyze the problem. You may even want to return to the Find the Assumption questions you saw on your most recent practice tests to try them again.
At the end of each study session, jot down in your journal what you did that day, what you think went well, and what you think needs more work. (This knowledge will all come from your analysis of what you did that day.) If something didnt go as well as youd hoped, then feel free to adjust your calendar. At the end of the week, review your journal and set up your day-to-day plan for the following week.
If you realize that you were too ambitious in terms of what you can get done in a week, this week leave yourself one day for "overflow:" anything that you didn't get through that week or that you want to review again.
- Interleaving
During a particular study session, mix your learning and practice or drill activities. Spend some time learning whatever the lesson is (via reading, Interact or other interactive lessons, whatever you choose), but take every opportunity to drill those skills as you go. For instance, in our strategy guides, there are Check Your Skills problems throughout most chapters; make sure to do those problems as you reach them.
Then, try some of the problems in the problem set at the end of that chapter. While youre doing those, toss in a problem or two from an earlier chapter; mix it up! If you need to look something up in your book or want to search online for alternative solution methods, do so right then and theredont save that for later! Be curious and follow that curiosity; youll learn better.
Whenever you have a takeaway, grab a flash card and jot it down. If you start to get distracted, take 5 minutes to review flash cards (maybe while standing and moving around), then get back to your prior activity.
In any given block of time during this first phase, approximately 50% of your time should be spent learning and the rest actively practicing / drilling what youre learning to help you create solid memories of this material
Youll spend the first part of your primary study focused more on the underlying content (how does parallelism work, what does inference mean on the GMAT, how do I solve simultaneous equations?). Perhaps 80% of your focus will be on that underlying content for the first few weeks. Over time, though, you'll move more towards application: how to put everything together and think your way through GMAT-format problems.
You will not complete a first pass through all of the material in this first segment. Aim to get through about 50% to 60% of the material, roughly matching the percentage of time youre spending from your Primary Study Phase.
You can go ahead and get started with what weve discussed so far. Next time, well continue to talk about the later phases of Step 4.