4 Steps to Your Complete GMAT Study Plan - Part 5
Welcome to the second half of Step 4: Set Your Plan in our GMAT Study Plan series. During the first half of Step 4, we talked about what to do during the first segment of your primary study phase, when you are first learning all about the question types, content, and strategies that you need to know for the GMAT.
Today, were going to talk about all of the rest!
Step 4: Set Your Plan (Part 2)
Youve made it through the first half of your primary study phase. Now what?
- Primary Study Segment 2
Its time to take a CAT and analyze the data thoroughly. (This is your second CAT overall, if youre counting.) Make sure you analyze appropriately! If you bomb geometry on that test, but you also havent studied geometry yetthen you should expect to bomb geometry. :) Thats okay!
If, on the other hand, you bomb something that you did study and thought you knew pretty well, then youve got some reassessing to do. Are there underlying content or skill issues that held you back in that area? Or did you make a lot of careless mistakes? Did you mess up the timing and get stuff wrong simply because you were rushing? Etc.
How was your timing? Chances are, you messed it up at least a little bit. (Everybody does!) Learn more about how to manage your time per-question or per-section here. (Also: if you have access to our Interact lessons, make sure to do the Prepare to Face the GMAT 2 lesson in session 6 of your Interact classes.)
- Adjust your plan
Use all of this data to tweak your study plan. This can include content and skill-building, but it can also include your study processes. For example, if you realize that youre learning all the rules and formulas just fine but not learning well enough how to apply that information to GMAT-format questions, then you may need to adjust the proportion of time youre spending learning new rules / formulas / etc vs. the amount of time youre spending practicing the application of that material to GMAT-format questions. If you realize that you are taking too long to answer a certain kind of problem, you know that future work in that area needs to include an attempt to look for more efficient ways to work.
Now, repeat! Work through the remaining material in the 40% to 50% of time you have left for your primary study phase, taking into account any major trends / priorities that you uncover from your practice test analysis.
- Review Phase
At this point, you will have been through all of the material once and youll have taken two CATs. Its time to assess where youre at and determine the best path to increase your score further.
Take your third CAT (analyze it thoroughly again!). Make sure to take it under 100% official conditions, including the essay and IR sections. Take one 8-minute break after the IR section and another 8-minute break after the quant section.
(I know you dont care as much about your essay and IR scores. You do care, though, that your quant and verbal scores fully reflect what you would be likely to get on the real test. On the real test, you have to do the essay and IR sections, so do them in practice, too. Skipping them can artificially inflate your score, since youre less mentally tired when you get to the later sections.)
Now that youve been through your test prep books or other lessons once, youll need to do two things:
(1) Improve certain* weaker areas
(2) Practice more problems to get (even) better at thinking your way through new problems
Lets talk about both of these, and lets start with that asterisk in item 1.
Your goal is not to learn everything that could possibly be tested on the GMAT. Your goal is to get whatever score you want to get on the test. Be strategic: you want to learn the stuff thats easiest for you to learn that can get you to your goal.
So youre going to focus on medium weaknesses, or what we call low-hanging fruit. These are things that are pulling your score down, yes, but they also represent some good opportunity.
- Made a careless mistake? Careless mistakes are the lowest of the low-hanging fruit; you already know how to get these right! You just need to fix your processes somehow. How?
- Got it right but took too long? How can you do it more efficiently next time?
- Didnt know how to do this one but the explanation makes complete and total sense to you? Great! Learn how now!
Do not start with your worst weaknesses. If you got something wrong and the explanation is confusing, or if it takes you 4 minutes and you have no idea how you could possibly do it any faster, then your goal on this one (for now, anyway) is to get something like this wrong faster in future.
Later, after youve tackled lower-hanging fruit, you can see whether you now have to learn this other, harder-for-you thing. You may discover, though, that you can get to your goal score while never learning how to tackle the worst of your weaknesses. And thats pretty awesome!
Your analysis of individual problems from your CAT will help you to know what it is that you need to make better from your low-hanging fruit categories.
For instance, you might realize from your third CAT analysis that you tend to be a bit slower on math story problems in general, whether the underlying content is rates and work, or percents, or straight-up linear equations. Its taking you longer than youd like to translate the math, set it up, and solve. You might even realize that, when you do get the correct set-up, youre fine; in other words, you dont have a problem with the actual math.
So you need to work on your approach to translating stories in general. What is the best way to take that story and turn it into math that can be solved? How can you do so efficiently? Where do you tend to make mistakes when performing this translation? What skills do you need to practice to minimize those types of mistakes?
- Practice makes perfect (or, at least, better)
As you try to improve this low-hanging fruit, youre also going to start to spend a greater proportion of your time trying problems under timed testing conditions. You may start a study session by doing a timed set of 8 mixed questions (not all the same type), after which youll analyze them all thoroughly and record your major takeaways. That set of activities can easily take 2 hours, even though the problems themselves only took 20 minutes.
As before, analyzing means that youll review any books or lessons necessary to get the most out of whatever problem youre studying right now. You could easily end up spending 30 minutes on a single problem, as you trace the different levels of things you need to study or practice to get better at that type of problem in general.
Spend about 2 to 3 weeks engaged in the above activities, honing in on the low-hanging fruit from your 3rd CAT. When you feel ready, take a 4th CAT and repeat the whole process with your new list of low-hanging fruit.
- Quizzing and Testing Yourself
Periodically, quiz yourself. Your timed question sets are quizzes, but you can do other types, too. Do a 5 or 10-minute flashcard quiz, for example, while youre on the subway or waiting for that conference call to start. Flip open your OG and look at questions youve done before: can you articulate aloud the general approach you want to take with that kind of question?
It's important to keep asking your brain to retrieve and reuse everything that you're putting into it, because that retrieval process is what you'll really need to rely on during the official test. The goal is not to do 8 million different problems, nor is it to learn every last fact that could possibly be tested on the exam. The goal is to learn a decent proportion of the material and skills well enough that you can call on those memories to answer a decent proportion of questions on the real test. That's all!
- The Last Two Weeks
First, lets summarize. Before the last two weeks, your overall process is going to be: take a CAT, analyze it, set up at least 2-3 weeks worth of work based on that analysis (focusing on the low-hanging fruit!), then take another CAT and repeat the whole cycle. You can stay in this review and testing phase for as long as you like (and as long as you don't go crazy!). If you are able to continue making progress and you haven't yet reached your goal score, then keep going.
At some point, though, you're going to decide that it's time to take the real test. Ideally, your practice test scores will be in your desired range when you make this decision. Its also possible that you will have an application deadline that forces you to take the test before you feel youre quite ready. In the latter case, youll have to decide whether you want to lower your goal score or whether you want to postpone your application to give yourself more time to try to lift your score.
When you get to the last couple of weeks, you want to shift over to an overall review of question types, content areas, strategies, and timing. You dont want to try to learn new material right up until the last day; if you do that, youll crowd out lots of other stuff and youll be in danger of forgetting things you already knew when the test rolls around.
Use that last couple of weeks to build your game plan and conduct your comprehensive review. (Note: if you have already taken the real test before, you may be able to do this in just 7 to 10 days rather than a full two weeks.)
- Take the real test
If at all possible, plan to study for the GMAT so far in advance of any application deadlines that you dont have to worry about them. If your timeframe is a bit more crunched, know that its perfectly fine to apply second round. Its nice to hit first round if you can, but its better to postpone to second round if that will make a big difference in the quality of your application (whether thats your GMAT score or something else).
Finally, plan to take the real test twice. You may not need to, but its a good idea to plan for any contingency; people have come down with the flu on test day before! Were required to wait 16 days (as of this writing) to re-take the GMAT, so just make sure that you factor that into your overall timeline.
You made it! Good luck and happy studying!