Introduction
When we tutor students for the GMAT and GRE here at Reason Test Prep, we seek to maximize the progress that they make outside of the tutoring sessions. What follows is a distillation of the advice that we give our students in this regard. While it is geared toward people who are working with a tutor or using an online or live course, there is a wealth of really good information for anyone preparing to take the GMAT or GRE.
Taking Ownership of the Process or Preparing for the GMAT or GRE
If you happen to be using an online course, taking a live class, or working with a tutor, it’s important to take ownership of your progress. Having the mentality of, “I need to complete this homework for my tutor” or “I need to get this done because it’s due for the class” is not really the right way to think about it. You are doing this for you and you should hold yourself accountable to yourself.
Even more important in this regard is HOW you do the work you do. This is critical! Again you should not just go through the motions to complete the assignments you are given. As much as possible, you should try to be your own coach and be as introspective as possible as you work through questions, really examining what you did and thinking about what you could have done differently. Obviously, there’s a limit to what you will be able to perceive on your own. But if the only major insights come during your tutoring sessions or in your live class and if very little progress happens in the intervals in between, it will be difficult to reach your goals in a timely fashion, if you can achieve them at all.
When you get questions wrong (or even when you get them right but feel like you were guessing or just not very effective in the way you approached the question), you really want to ask yourself why. Reading the explanations to the questions will help you better understand what you could have done differently, but it helps to go one step further and really try to be inward looking and be your own coach. “Could I have approached that question in a fundamentally different way? If so, why didn’t I see that? Did I just reflexively start doing Math without thinking about how best to approach it?” Or, on a Reading Comprehension question, “Why was I stuck between 2 answers? Why wasn’t the right answer more obviously right and the wrong answer more obviously wrong? Does this wrong answer fit into a typical wrong answer pattern, one that I’ve either learned about or have started to notice in the questions I have been doing? Or was it something that I missed in the passage itself? Or maybe I misunderstood or misinterpreted something in the question and need to go back to the question and reread it in cases where I am stuck or not sure?”
The above kind of thinking is typical of people who progress at an accelerated rate and who ultimately achieve their score goals on the GMAT or GRE.
Putting in the Time
There is great wisdom in the motto, “work smarter, not harder.” Pouring countless hours into your prep in misguided and ineffective ways is just a waste of time. That said, assuming that the work you are doing is well-thought-out and effective, there is no getting around the fact that there really IS a correlation between how much time you put in and how much you progress. For the GMAT and GRE, there’s just a certain amount that needs to be onboarded (the total amount depends on what your starting point is, but for most people it’s A LOT), and onboarding all of that knowledge and skill takes a lot of time!
It’s difficult to put a weekly number on this because people come in at different baselines and, even more importantly, get through questions and learn from them at different speeds (really effectively going through 20 quant questions and reviewing them may take one person 4 hours and another person 1 hour). But if you have a full-time job, you should probably plan to put in at least 6 to 10 hours of prep per week. If you can put in 15 hours of prep per week, great. That will help. Still, remember that it’s about doing quality work, so just going through the motions and banging through a ton of questions without much self-reflection is pretty unhelpful.
Additionally, it’s best to spread the hours out. It’s understandable that some people are born procrastinators who will always wait until the last minute to do all of their work. But that’s certainly not ideal. A more effective strategy is to do a couple of hours of work on each of 3 weekdays and then do longer stretches of practice over the weekend.
How to Effectively Do Practice Questions and Review Them
What follows might be obvious to you, but it is not obvious to everyone, as years of experience preparing people for the GMAT and GRE have taught us here at Reason Test Prep! The main idea is that you want to learn from what you do, not only what you do wrong or ineffectively, but even what you do right. So you want to have a short feedback loop in which you have an opportunity to learn from every question that you do. Therefore, you DO NOT want to do 20 questions and then see how many you got right. No! You should do one question and then look at the explanation to see if there are ways that you could have approached the question more effectively. If you get the question right, with confidence and very quickly, then you can skip reading the explanation. But sometimes there will be instances in which you get the question right but take more time than you should have or just miss a much easier way of doing it, so it’s helpful to reflect on how things could have gone differently, even in those cases.
By reviewing questions right after you do them, you give yourself a chance to correct your mistakes and inefficiencies while the question (and how you approached it, for better or worse) is fresh in your mind and apply what you’ve learned on the very next question. Again, the order of the day is: short feedback loop! And to echo what was mentioned earlier, you want to try to be your own coach. Yes, there will be a limit to how much you can understand about what you did wrong and how you could have approached the question differently. Still, there is a big difference in outcomes between people who just bang through the questions in an attempt to finish them and those who see each question as an opportunity to learn and improve!
Conclusions
To repeat, if you want to prepare successfully for the GMAT or GRE and if you want to avoid additional months of unnecessary pain, you would be wise to try to embody the above mentality. Don’t just rely on your tutor or online course – take ownership of the process. Preparing for the GMAT or GRE requires dedication and a lot of time! There is no getting around that. But too often people just go through the motions and fire through hundreds of questions without much self-reflection. You should make sure that the practice you do is very intentional, that you learn from your mistakes and inefficiencies, and that you understand how to better on each additional question you do.