Virtually everyone who begins studying for the GMAT and GRE (and even many people who are months into the process) tend to misunderstand what the tests are really about. The GMAT and GRE are not typical tests for which you just memorize a body of content knowledge and then demonstrate that you can regurgitate that knowledge on the test. The GMAT and GRE are tests of quantitative and verbal reasoning (with stress on the word reasoning).
Trying to think of it from the perspective of the test writers, if one is trying to measure someone’s reasoning or critical thinking ability one needs to format the questions in a certain language (and I don’t mean English here). One could do it using pictures, puzzles, etc. The writers of the GMAT and GRE have chosen to test this more general logical reasoning in the language of Math and Verbal “content,” for lack of a better word. That is in part because being adept in the language of Math and Verbal “content” is obviously essential to success in graduate school.
So within the Quantitative and Verbal sections of the GMAT and GRE, being familiar with the language of the Math and Verbal “content” is clearly helpful in doing well on the tests. Both tests have a “content foundation” that serves as the basis for the questions that appear: Math concepts and formulas, the language of logic, common vocabulary words (in the case of the GRE). Becoming more proficient in the language of that “foundational content” IS an important part of GMAT and GRE preparation.
But my 2 decades of experience teaching, tutoring, and taking the tests have taught me that by far the most important factor leading to success is the reasoning and critical thinking ability that a test taker applies on the GMAT and GRE. That should make sense if we accept that this is what the test is designed to measure in the first place. Now again, it’s not puzzle-reasoning or picture-reasoning, it’s Quantitative and Verbal reasoning, so familiarity with the content, the language, is an important factor. But that will only get you so far…it will allow you to speak the language of the test, but not necessarily answer the questions correctly. Ultimately the content just serves as a jumping off point to access the reasoning and problem solving skills that the questions are really designed to test.
This truth has been borne out with the many hundreds of students that I have taught and tutored over the years and it serves as the guiding principle for what we do here at Reason Test Prep. Anecdotally, it is also the primary reason that I was able to do so well on the GMAT and GRE the first time I took them. At this point I know the tests so well, including the underlying content, that it’s not that hard for me to get almost every question right. But when I first took the tests, there was an embarrassingly large body of content that I didn’t know, especially with respect to math rules, grammar, and vocabulary, and yet my scores from my first try on the GMAT and GRE are pretty close to where I stand now (my first GMAT was a 760 and my most recent one was a 790, for example). So all of that extra knowledge that I now have about the tests and especially the content that is at the foundation of them really only translates into a very small score difference. When I look back on that 760 on my first GMAT, it’s very clear to me that the main reason I was able to score so high is that I am very good at reasoning and problem solving. I was aware of this when I took the test and I understood even then that this is what the GMAT is all about, so I applied it very consciously to great effect.
So when we at Reason Test Prep prepare students for the GMAT and GRE, we make sure that they understand and align themselves with the true nature of the tests. Over the years, I’ve unfortunately had a few students who didn’t want to see the tests that way and who insisted in trying to conquer the GMAT or GRE by sort of memorizing all of the different question types and the methods for solving them – needless to say the results were not good. On the flip side I have had many more students who didn’t initially understand the nature of the tests but who quickly saw that reasoning and critical thinking trump all else and in many of these cases the students never really achieved the complete mastery of the content that they probably should have achieved. Yet in most of these cases the students ended up doing really well on the GMAT or GRE, often far better than would have been predicted by their pure math or pure verbal ability. Feel free to read some of our “Case Studies” for examples of this.
So as you prepare for the GMAT or GRE and work through individual questions, don’t let a focus on the underlying content trump the larger reasoning and problem solving aspects to the questions, since reasoning and critical thinking skills ARE at the heart of what the GMAT and GRE attempt to measure.