GMAT Strategy

Greetings Everyone,

I have put together a study plan, as I am just starting my preparations for the GMAT. I am hoping to take the GMAT in March, and looking to get 700+.

I'd appreciate any critiques of the attached file from some of you experience gurus out there!

My overall prep plan can be summarized as follows:
- 1 MGMAT Book per week reviewed and concepts studied. Complete problems in MGMAT book, UNTIMED.
- Complete associated OG and supplemental problems, TIMED
- 1 Practice CAT test per weekend, including review of all errors and weaknesses, starting after Geometry.
- Light review of flash cards containing concepts and examples on off-days.
- Weakness review at end of both Quant and Verbal, as well as right before the GMAT.
- Reading Fiction and Non-Fiction literatures (The Economist, Scientific American, Classic Novels, etc...)

Thanks for all of the help.

A terrific study plan indeed. It is so much easier to study for the GMAT when you have a plan of attack other than, "I guess I need to learn everything." A few thoughts for you:

1) I like that you want to take a diagnostic test tomorrow to give yourself a starting point. That said, I think that most students benefit more from using GMAT Prep closer to test day, when they are really in a crunch to find GMAT-like questions. I'd recommend that you take a test prep test to give you a general idea of how much improvement you need to make and use those GMAT Prep exams to help fine tune your studying closer to test day.

2) The other thing I notice about your practice tests is that you have a lot of practice tests planned between now and March. Practice tests are tremendously useful at helping you perfect your test-taking strategy. But if you are just taking test after test without (a) recognizing and fixing problems in your timing, strategy, or approach or (b) heavily reviewing your tests to find questions that you struggle with and spending time on correcting those weaknesses, then those practice tests aren't helping you much. I always say that you can do 100 addition problems and get them all right or you can do 100 advanced particle physics problems and get none of them right, but neither of those approaches will help you get better on the GMAT. The key with all of your studying needs to be finding areas where you struggle and learning things that will help you be more accurate and efficient. Which leads me to...

3) Review. You mention it on certain days of your study plan, but I recommend that you have a specific plan of exactly what you are going to review. Are you just reading the books a second time? Highlighting things? Or do you have something more specific in mind? Personally, the best thing I ever did while studying for my GMAT was to do every question in the OG that I ever got wrong, spent too long on, or was not 100% sure on, a second, third, and fourth time. In fact, every study session for me began by reviewing the list of questions that I kept on questions that I had previously had trouble with. I still remember one question in Sentence Correction where I neglected to find a pronoun at the end of the sentence after three different times trying to solve it, but once I finally got it through my head what I needed to notice in that question, I became much better at noticing the same mistake in other questions. Again, the whole purpose of studying for the GMAT is to be able to do something better tomorrow than you were able to do today.

4) Another small point, but you said you were going to use the OG 13 for quant and OG 12 for verbal. Note that these two editions both have Q & V sections and share about 80% of the same questions in the two books. I'd recommend using just the OG 13 (b/c it also has some IR information). If you have already purchased OG 12, feel free to use it as a review book once you've done most of OG 13, but it's definitely not necessary to study from both of these books.

5) Finally, and probably most importantly, don't burn yourself out. I'm impressed with your planning and (tentative) dedication, but you've got a long ways between now and test day. Many students share your same enthusiasm in the first few weeks of studying but it's easy to get worn down by 20+ hours of studying on top of your other obligations. Is there a reason you have your test date set for March, do you have some sort of deadline? If not, don't feel as though you need to do 14 straight weeks of studying. If you start to feel worn down, take a weekend or even a week off if it helps you refresh your mind and rededicate yourself to your studying. The GMAT will still be there when you come back. In fact, some of those days away will help your brain realize the things that you really do understand and the things that you were memorizing for certain problems but not knowing how to use elsewhere on the test. Just be sure to not let those days off stretch into months...

Best of luck to you!