The ability to learn, to really understand how to acquire a skill or set of skills, is one of the keys to a successful and happy life. In some sense, the ability to learn is what intelligence really is! Think about artificial intelligence and how the most powerful AI systems out there are the ones that can most quickly and effectively learn and improve. And we humans are unique among animals because of our ability to learn practically anything.
The primacy of learning and the effect that it has on outcomes for people in the real world is something we often see first-hand with our students here at Reason Test Prep: those who can most effectively acquire new skills and master them are usually the ones who have the greatest success on the GMAT and GRE. And while some of this ability is undoubtedly innate (again, it’s part of what we’d probably refer to as intelligence), understanding how to learn effectively is itself something that can be learned!
Enter The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. Waitzkin was a childhood chess prodigy who, burnt out by chess at a young age, turned his attention to Tai Chi and managed to become the World Champion of Tai Chi push hands only a few years after taking up the sport. For anyone looking to understand how to master a new set of skills, the book is incredibly insightful. There is way too much valuable advice in the book to capture in this article, so we’re going to focus on one key aspect that is particularly relevant to the GMAT and GRE. But before we do that, there’s a general theme that pervades the book that is worth mentioning first…
Self-Reflection & Learning How to Learn!
When reading The Art of Learning, one is immediately struck by how much thought and introspection went into all that Waitzkin did in striving to become both a chess grand master and, later, a world champion Tai Chi push hands competitor. Again, it’s impossible to capture the depth of his self-reflection and mindfulness without reading the book, but one of Waitzkin’s strengths and one of the keys to mastering a skill is the ability to really examine and think creatively about the learning process. What are the barriers to my growth? What exactly did I just do that worked so well in that situation? Can I break down the steps to understand more fully what just happened? How can I replicate that process in other situations? Etc.
Of course, posing these questions and providing potential answers to them is part of the job of a good tutor. That’s part of what we’re here for! But, the more you can inspect and learn from what you’re doing in your practice, the faster and more effectively you are going to grow! We have another article that offers some suggestions on how you can maximize the progress you make in your solitary practice. The article is not nearly as exhaustive as The Art of Learning, but it does offer some concrete advice about how to be introspective and deliberate in how you go about your prep.
Training for the Imperfect Conditions of the GMAT and GRE
The part of The Art of Learning that we’re going to focus on in this article relates to being prepared for the imperfect conditions that usually arise when entering a competition (or taking a test, like the GMAT or GRE). In the book, Waitzkin describes multiple instances, from both his chess and Tai Chi careers, in which he had to overcome difficult and unpredictable circumstances: a chess opponent kicking him under the table, a Tai Chi practitioner head-butting him during the World Championships, the organizers of the tournament in Taiwan changing the rules at the last minute to disfavor foreign athletes.
Similar circumstances often play out on the GMAT and GRE. The testing room may be noisy. If you’re taking the test online, the internet may lag. Even if such unpredictable circumstances don’t come to pass, there are predictable factors like anxiety and fatigue that will be qualitatively different on test day from what you experience in most of your prep, and these factors are often THE circumstances that torpedo peoples’ scores. The key is that these circumstances, both predictable and unpredictable, can and should be expected and prepared for! Let’s discuss how!
Expecting Disruptions as Part of the GMAT and GRE Experience
The first thing you can do to address the suboptimal conditions that are likely to be a factor on your GMAT or GRE is to adjust your expectations about what test day will look like. Many test-takers imagine a quiet room, strong focus, and a mind that cooperates. In reality, the test is unlikely to unfold in that way. Even if there are no external obstacles that pop up, test anxiety alone is likely to be a major factor. Once your expectations align with reality, you can begin to prepare for the imperfect conditions that are likely to be present on test day.
The first critical step is to be neither surprised nor alarmed by these complicating factors. After all, the GMAT and GRE are designed to test reasoning under pressure. But many test takers panic when they start feeling anxious during the exam, or they get thrown completely off by distractions and then have difficulty recovering. However, if you expect these difficulties, accept that they are just part of the experience, and learn to go with them instead of panicking and resisting them, you are one step closer to a successful test!
Accepting Rather Than Resisting Difficulties on the GMAT and GRE
In The Art of Learning, Waitzkin describes how he would become unglued when competing against someone in chess who was obviously cheating. But, over time, he learned to accept the emotions that he had in those moments (emotions that he came to better understand through the kind of introspection that we described above) and to use them to his advantage. He learned to become at peace with his discomfort. That is the key!
As an example, Waitzkin describes a difficult period in his early chess career in which he would sometimes have a song stuck in his head while competing, and his inability to get the song out of his head would distract and plague him during critical chess matches. What did he do? Well, at first, he resisted, but that just made the problem worse. The distraction and its ill effects just compounded. But then he pivoted his thinking and came to accept the fact that he would sometimes have a song stuck in his head while competing and learned to go with it! He would practice playing chess in his room with the music blasting so that he could get used to thinking through complicated chess moves with a cacophony of songs in his head and eventually felt comfortable, perhaps more comfortable, with the music playing!
On the GMAT and GRE, test anxiety is the clearest case where test-takers need to learn to accept reality and go with as opposed to against the grain. This may seem counterintuitive because nobody wants to be anxious. Shouldn’t the goal be to eliminate test anxiety? Yes, but practically speaking it’s usually impossible to do that and, paradoxically, the more you resist anxiety (perhaps telling yourself to calm down and that you shouldn’t feel anxious), the more that feeds the anxiety: it’s a vicious cycle.
We coach our students to expect test anxiety and to learn to accept it. When the test starts, you will likely feel anxious: your heart might be racing, you might be sweating, you may have difficulty thinking straight. Don’t let these occurrences freak you out and cause further anxiety. Instead of saying, “what’s wrong with me…why am I so anxious,” you should say, “it’s normal and to be expected that I would feel anxious…I don’t like it but I accept it and will focus on my task.” Paradoxically, the more you accept anxiety, the more it tends to dissipate! It’s the focus on the distraction and the resistance to it that tends to give it its power!
Understanding Your Internal Response to Disruption
As mentioned earlier, one of Waitzkin’s talents that shines most clearly throughout the book is his introspection, his ability to examine his internal states and the mechanics of what is happening, especially in the face of obstacles to his performance. This kind of introspection is critical in learning to master any set of skills, and success on the GMAT and GRE is no exception!
You should try to pay attention to how disruptions affect you during practice, and this is especially helpful when you are doing timed practice and practice tests, since this kind of work most mimics the environment of the test. What kind of distractions plague you? How do you notice that you’re distracted and how do you get yourself back on task? How does anxiety manifest? What situations cause it? What is the self-talk that happens when you feel anxiety? How does your mental state change when you feel pressured for time? How do you respond when you fall behind? Better understanding your internal mechanics, especially in the face of adversity, is a critical component to being able to overcome the obstacles to your performance. Not only can you then strategize how to overcome these difficulties, you’ll have a more accurate sense of how your mind works, how it behaves under pressure, and what it takes to return to clear thinking.
Returning to the theme of test anxiety specifically, one example may be helpful, and this relates also to the idea of accepting your challenges, as described above. If you inspect your thoughts and emotions when experiencing test anxiety, you will see that they obviously make sense! Of course you care about the result of your test: you’ve worked long and hard to try to reach a great score and to some extent your graduate school and career future depend on the outcome. So, it’s totally understandable that you would feel anxious when taking the GMAT or GRE. But again, you can go with these feelings and try to use them to your advantage. Reframing is helpful here: to some extent test anxiety is a measure of how bad you want it, and you can reframe the anxiety as excitement and use it to get you charged up to attack the test and the questions you face. Reframing doesn’t work for everyone, and you may need to be more introspective about the mechanics of what’s happening when you get anxious on the test, but this is a simple adjustment that you can make to orient yourself in the direction of accepting and going with your challenges as opposed to resisting them and pushing them away!
Practicing for the GMAT or GRE Under Suboptimal Conditions: Distractions
Once you accept and understand the difficulties you face, the key is to practice dealing with them! In The Art of Learning, Waitzkin describes how, after the head-butting incident at the Tai Chi World Championships, he adjusted his training to prepare for such distractions and difficulties. He sought out dirty competitors so that he could learn how to respond to their unfair tactics. And he began including unpredictability in practice so that disruptive situations no longer felt foreign.
The parallel in test prep is probably obvious: it’s helpful to work under conditions that resemble those of the actual exam and to seek out opportunities in your practice to work on responding to the imperfect conditions that you anticipate facing on test day. But how to do this? Below we offer some suggestions, but the key is to be thoughtful and creative in how to create situations for yourself that will target the difficulties that you are encountering in your prep or that you anticipate encountering on test day!
If distractions are an issue, you obviously need to practice in a distracted environment. So, if external sounds bother you, practice in a noisy environment or with music playing in the background. If the motions and actions of other people bother you (remember that at the test center, there may be people getting up and moving around during the administration of your test), practice in a public place where you’ll learn to get used to seeing people moving around.
Practicing for the GMAT or GRE Under Suboptimal Conditions: Time Pressure
Practicing with suboptimal timing is another thing that we at RTP often suggest to our students (but that most people who prep on their own never think of). One of the main impediments to success for many test takers is that they succumb to the time pressure of the test. Even if they find that they answer questions within the proper time constraints of the test when they do practice questions on a one-by-one basis, often the wheels tend to come off when they do a timed set of questions or a practice test. If you accept that you are likely to face suboptimal timing conditions, situations on the test where you are running behind and have to tackle questions in less time than is ideal, why not practice that skill?
We often suggest doing this in a variety of ways. First, you can practice this skill on individual questions by creating a “context” for questions as you do them. For example, you can pretend that you’re 5 minutes behind and need to make up time and consider how you’d deal with a particular question in that light. Or you could practice doing all questions in slightly less time than you’ll actually have on the exam. If that feels “unfair,” consider that because of test anxiety, distractions, and other imperfect conditions, you often will have less time per question than you think! This strategy of learning how to operate with less time overall works best on sets of questions. On the GMAT, instead of having 45 minutes to answer 21 Quant questions, try giving yourself 40 minutes. Or 38. And on the GRE, instead of giving yourself 26 minutes to answer 15 Quant questions, try giving yourself 23 minutes. Or 20. Obviously the purpose is not to make practice unnecessarily difficult, and you’ll want to make adjustments if that seems to be the effect, but you want to become familiar with the kinds of sensations (loss of focus, rising tension, a sense of lost time) that often occur on test day and learn how to respond to them!
Practicing for the GMAT or GRE Under Suboptimal Conditions: Test Anxiety
Practicing how to perform in the context of mounting test anxiety is a little harder, in part because the anxiety needs to be authentic for it to really replicate the feeling that you’ll have on test day. That said, there are things you can do! First, learning how to operate under significant time pressure, as described in the above section, is helpful even though it doesn’t directly target test anxiety. That’s because the most detrimental practical effect of test anxiety is that, by inhibiting your ability to think clearly and optimally, it saps you of time. So, the above remedies tend to be very helpful for people who suffer from test anxiety. And of course, having to answer GMAT or GRE questions in less time than they were designed to be answered in does tend to increase people’s anxiety! So, in some sense, practicing with less time than is allotted per question does address test anxiety issues directly as well!
The other helpful tool here is “exposure therapy.” The more you do something that makes you anxious, the less anxious you will be over time. The problem is that GMAC and ETS don’t offer that many official practice tests, so you don’t want to deplete them too early in your prep. So, it’s best to practice with “sets” of questions in a timed setting (in the ways described above) to work out your timing and anxiety kinks before blowing through the official practice tests. “Third-party” (unofficial) practice tests can also be a useful tool here, although people often don’t feel the same sense of anxiety when they are doing an unofficial test (because they know it’s not official!). But for replicating the feeling of time pressure, third-party practice tests are helpful. And if you want to ratchet up the anxiety a little, you could always force yourself to complete the sections in slightly less time than is given!
There’s one additional tactic that we sometimes suggest to our students. For some people it can be useful to sign up for and take the actual GMAT or GRE before they are fully ready. There are disadvantages to this strategy: given that you can only take the GMAT or GRE 5 times in a rolling 12-month period, shooting one of your five bullets out of the chamber before you’re fully ready could be risky. But, there are advantages too, and for some people the pros outweigh the cons. First, for some people, just getting one test under their belt alleviates anxiety and sets them up for success on the next try. Some people just need to “face the beast” and “get it over with” to learn that taking the GMAT or GRE is not as bad as they’ve built it up in their minds.
Additionally, the idea of taking the test “before you are fully ready” has specific merits that are worth mentioning. First, it forces you to get it over with instead of continuing to put it off until you are “really” ready (from some people that can stretch on for months!). Second, if you believe that you are not “fully ready” when you take the test for the first time, that takes some of the pressure off! This is what we at Reason Test Prep call an “early try.” Obviously, you don’t want to go in to take the test when you’re completely unprepared: that’s a waste of an attempt. But if you are “mostly ready,” and if you can frame the attempt in those terms and tell yourself that you’re taking the test as a kind of “trial run,” you’ll put less pressure on yourself to perform. And this often creates a positive first experience with the test that then sets the tone for later attempts!
Closing Thoughts
Like mastering any new skill or set of skills, preparing for the GMAT or GRE is an exercise in understanding how to learn and improve. And part of that is learning to perform under the conditions you will actually face on test day. Distractions, time pressure, test anxiety, and other obstacles are not anomalies…they should be expected. The more you can fully accept them, understand your internal responses to them, and practice operating within them, the more successful you’ll be on test day.