GMAT Strategy

adilayub wrote:Hi,

I wanted to know how much time it would take to prepare for the GMAT exam. I am aiming to get a score around 700+. I am also working so am a bit confused as how should I make a schedule. Will 5-6 weeks studying 2-3 hours on weed days and 4-5 hours on weekend be sufficient ?

I look forward to your responses. Thanks in advance.

yeah, as you may have anticipated, there's no single answer to this question.

as noted by the previous poster, this question is impossible to answer without knowing your starting point. imagine a dieter asking how long he'll take to get down to 180 pounds, without telling you how much he weighs right now! same thing: if you're currently scoring 690, then all you really have to do is sit down in a nice comfortable chair, relax, and there you go. if you're scoring in the 300-400s, though, then not only will you have to do months of preparation, but you'll likely have te re-learn a great deal of your junior high and high school math and grammar as well, not to mention COMPLETELY reframing the way you conceptualize and approach standardized tests.

also, 4-5 hours of studying in a single day on weekends, and 2-3 hours every weekday, may or may not work for you. that is a highly individualized decision, which depends on your attention span, the degree of your personal motivation and interest in the material, the amount of spare time in your schedule (it's unlikely you'll have that much time if you're a busy professional), and a whole host of other factors.
if you have lots of free time and an exceptional capacity for paying attention, absorbing concepts, and retaining experience, then go for it. if not, plan a less aggressive timeline, with a later test date and fewer hours of studying per day.
and if you are going to study for that long, then you should definitely split it up. i.e., if you're going to study for 5 hours in one day, then make it 2.5 in the morning and 2.5 in the evening, or something similar. i can guarantee you that you won't derive much utility from the last couple of hours if you try to study for five hours straight.

in any case, we'll be better able to answer these questions if you provide the following information:
* where are your current scores on practice tests, or, if you've taken it, on the official exam? (if you haven't taken any practice tests - whether the official ones from mba.com or others from reputable prep companies - you should take at least one, so you know where you stand)
* how familiar are you with the format of the test and the question types? (this is an often overlooked, but VERY important, question: a score of 550 from someone who doesn't really understand the format of Data Sufficiency problems, for instance, is very different indeed from a score of 550 from someone who is thoroughly familiar with the test format)
* what is your work schedule like?
* anything else that's relevant?

Night reader wrote:Ron, I have been studying not 5 but 6-7 hours straight since October last year. No lies - I did this even for longer periods of time on some days. I don't feel that one's studying schedule should be limited in timing at all. If I can study without losing concentration for longer hours, why not?

ok --

check-in question #1: how has that been working out for you?
have you achieved your goal score, or at least gotten close to it?
by this point, you have probably spent more hours of study than most students do in total -- so, if you are not reasonably close to your goal by this point, then, as dedicated as you may be to your beliefs about studying, you should admit that they aren't working. (if you are close to your goal score, then, by all means, continue what you're doing.)

check-in question #2: do you feel confident that you have generalized the lessons you've learned from the problems you have studied so far? i.e., if i took a quant problem that you've studied and wrote three different versions of it, each working in a slightly different way, are you confident that you would get all three of them correct? ... or do you think you would only reliably solve the one that's exactly like the example you saw, and struggle with the other two?
if your answer is the latter -- you'd do well on the problem that looks exactly like the one that you saw, but you'd struggle with the others -- then this is precisely the reason why you shouldn't study that many hours in a day: it crystallizes your thought process into linear patterns, and works against lateral thinking and association-making.
in other words, studying for that many hours in a day makes you into a "memorization machine"; unfortunately, memorization is not a particularly useful way to study for this test.

think carefully about the answers to these questions, especially if your first instinct is to immediately defend your current study practices -- lots of people are committed to irrational strategies, while holding belief systems (quite similar to religious belief systems, in fact) that prevent them from optimizing those strategies.

your goal should be to study smarter, not harder. sure, you should study hard, but there comes at point after which "harder" and "smarter" start to diverge from each other.