GMAT Strategy

How to Build GMAT Mastery One Topic at a Time

Possibly the most common reason why people don’t get the results they want from their GMAT prep is that the way they’re practicing isn’t effective.

One issue is that doing just a handful of practice questions for each topic may not be sufficient. Instead, you may need to answer many questions involving a topic to master it.

At the same time, quantity of practice questions isn’t the only variable that matters. In fact, you can answer hundreds of questions without strengthening your skills significantly because how you answer questions matters as well. For instance, if you take the approach of simply answering many practice questions timed, and then checking to see which questions you missed and reading explanations, your results may be unsatisfactory.

The solution if practice is the weak link in your prep is to improve the way you’re practicing. To get the results you want from your GMAT preparation, practice in the following way:

• Practice one GMAT topic at a time.
• Start practicing a topic by doing easy questions untimed. Do easy questions untimed until you achieve high accuracy. In other words, keep answering as many easy questions as you need to in order to become skilled enough to get easy questions correct 90 to 100 percent of the time.
• Do the same with medium questions. Answer them untimed until you’re achieving high accuracy, such as 80 to 100 percent.
• Do the same with hard questions, achieving accuracy of at least 60 percent in Quant and at least 70 percent in Verbal.
• Once you’re achieving the above accuracies consistently, work on answering questions involving the topic at test pace. You can do so by working the time per question down bit by bit or by simply seeking to answer questions in an average of 2 minutes each.

Possibly the most important of the above steps is practicing untimed with as many questions as necessary to become skilled enough to achieve high accuracy. Any time you miss a question during this step, identify the reason you missed it. Then, address the issue, so that it doesn’t cause you to miss questions going forward.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep