5 Hacks for the GMAT test

I’ve been teaching the GMAT for many years and have taken the test myself. Students often ask me what my favourite tips for the GMAT are. Here are my 5 hacks for cracking the exam:

1. Don’t put yourself under unnecessary time pressure. There are approximately two minutes for each question. The test is computer-adaptive, so if you get a question right, the next question gets harder. The goal of the test makers is to slow you down with a hard question. Don’t fall into this trap. No question is worth spending 5 minutes on. Your goal is not to get everything right. Hard questions are an opportunity to spend less time, not more time. Guess the hardest questions and give yourself more time on the questions that are within your reach.

2. Use the official material to prepare yourself. The Official Guide to the GMAT is published by the test makers themselves. They are the only organisation that is allowed to use old GMAT questions in their prep material. It’s their test. There are other good books on the market, but they have to copy the style of the real GMAT questions and sometimes they move further away from the style of the real questions.

3. Use the official practice tests. Two are available free of charge on the official GMAT site – mba.com. You can use these twice each. They replicate the testing situation, as they are full-length GMAT exams. There are also four other tests available to buy on that site. You can use each of them twice. Depending on how long you have to prepare, these may also be useful.

4. Use the answer choices to help you in quant. Don’t be stuck on solving quant questions in the algebraic way that we learnt at school, where we often didn’t have multiple-choice questions. The joy of multiple-choice is that the correct answer is on the screen in front of you. Often, testing these answer choices to solve a question can be faster than trying to work out the answer without using the answer choices.

5. Don’t try to understand everything on your first read of reading comprehension passages. There is much more information contained within these passages than you need to answer the questions. If you try to understand everything the first time you read a passage, you’re doing work you don’t need to do to answer the questions. Just remember (or note down) where they talk about what in the passage. Then, when you get a new question, you can refer quickly back to the text to get the right answer. This will save you time.

There’s so much more that can simplify the test for you. Why not book a trial lesson with me at nativespeakers.ch GmbH? Or just contact me below via Whatapp with any questions you may have.

---

The following topics could also be of interest to you: