How to prepare for GMAT. The GMAT is the
daunting task that stands between you and a top business school
and when you're thinking about how to prepare for the GMAT, there are a number
of things that you should be focusing on. I'm Jenny Rae Le Roux, the managing
director at Management Consulted, and our focus today,
aside from helping people get into consulting, is how to get into top
business schools that may give you a great platform for consulting.
Some of you may be thinking about taking the GMAT
now. Maybe you're in undergrad and wondering if business school is in your
future. Some of you may be wondering if you
should plan to do consulting now or at a later stage in your career
and ultimately a lot of those are great questions that we answer over at
managementconsulted.com, but today our focus is how do you prepare
for the GMAT, and when you're thinking about the GMAT, what are the key things
you should focus on? On our website we have a guide to
preparing for the GMAT, there's a lot of really great stuff on there so i'm gonna
summarize some of the key things that are really important in this video.
Number one, it's critical that you take at least
three months to prepare. The biggest issue that we've seen is
that people say, "Oh I took the GMAT on a whim and I got a..."
fill in the blank. 500, 600 something, it wasn't that bad,
and the issue is that basically taking it all without actually preparing
is a pretty dangerous enterprise because then you set as an
anchor where you should be performing without preparing to
a level and then thinking that you can do better. So what that does is it sets
yourself to be like my 650, that's like
no practice and so i'm definitely going to get better
over time. But you're not able to actually calibrate yourself
against some additional benchmarks like personal practice or coaching in order
to get the extra help that you often need to get yourself where you need to
be, usually into the 700s. So take at least
three months. When you schedule the test, begin to
practice super faithfully and super diligently.
Secondly, it's really important that you understand
which GMAT you're prepping for and you don't use outdated materials.
If you think about one of the key materials, the official guide to the GMAT,
that's going to be very helpful in your preparation, but if
you're using outdated materials of course you're going to be preparing for
a GMAT that's never going to happen to you,
and many GMAT practice materials are actually easier
the way that they break things down is more digestible than the GMAT itself, so
that isn't helpful. Number three, complete some sort of upfront diagnostic and then
develop a targeted plan. One of the biggest
issues that we've seen is people who get a book and then they read
through the entire book from a to z and they're like, "I don't know this, I do know
this, I don't know this, I do know this." If you take a test, a practice test, not a
timed paid test but a practice test first, and you understand what some of
your key issues or areas are when you're working
through the practice test, it gives you a really good sense of
where you should focus your practice. That's the same approach that we take to
the case interview when preparing for consulting. Don't
focus on your strengths, focus on your weaknesses.
Use your strengths when you're in the interview but when you're prepping you
focus on the weaknesses. Make sure that they're not a hindrance to you.
Number four, get help. Work with a group, work with a coach, work with a prep plan,
work in a class, but it is highly highly recommended that
you get help. In fact, when I was at Bain, Bain had a
budget for every single person that was there to
both take the GMAT, and travel to the organizations. But then
I found out the ringer. On top of the two of those things,
you could go to Stanford Business School and check it out and they were paying to take
the GMAT, they also paid extra if you were willing
to take a prep course. Why? Prep courses are in general really
effective for increasing your GMAT score. Number five,
follow very focused deliberate GMAT practice principles when you're doing
homework and working on practice problems.
Set a calendar and hold things back like your favorite dessert
until you actually do your homework, set an accountability partner.
Really make sure that you're not trying to cram, don't give yourself
three months and then work the week beforehand. So you really need to set up
what you're doing. A lot of GMAT is muscle memory
and so the more repetitive you are and the more frequently you're practicing
over a long period of time, the better you get.
Honestly, same truth for case interviews. Can you pull it together
in a week? For sure. Do we find the most success for people who work for two to
three months very diligently and faithfully?
Absolutely, because they're transformed by the time that they're actually
tackling the case interview. And then finally, take regular and timed
practice tests to track your progress. The practice tests are a commitment, they
take two to four hours depending on whether you're doing a full one or a
section of one and using those practice tests is really
the only way to tell how you might do when you're inside the interview. Now, a
lot of them still, depending on the packages that you're
using, aren't responsive, so you'll do one question and it's not
giving you a harder question or an easier question based on that one,
so the kind of mind jedi tricks that you need to utilize
when preparing for the GMAT are not in play but
still they'll be good diagnostics and good to test how you're doing in terms
of your advancement of the key concepts. Ultimately when we
say, how do you prepare for the GMAT, whether
you're thinking about a top MBA or just consulting in general for
your future, our ultimate recommendation is
give yourself plenty of time and don't cram it in at the end.
If you want to get into Harvard Business School or Stanford Graduate School of
Business or Columbia Business School or Wharton, you will want to take the
GMAT, and spend plenty of time on it. Don't
become a statistic just because of your inability to plan or practice. There's a
lot harder things coming your way in your MBA and ultimately later if you
go into consulting or other fields that are related to it, so
good luck on the GMAT, but make sure that you prepare well.
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