GMAT Preparation Tips

Are you aiming admissions at top B-schools abroad? If yes, GMAT is one of the exams that should be in your list of priorities as the GMAT score is accepted by most of the B-schools, including Harvard, Wharton, Booth, Columbia and so on.  

How do you prepare for GMAT? How to get a score good enough to be selected by your dream institute? How can you maximize your GMAT performance?

Especially designed for management aspirants, GMAT has a strong mix of topics, which evaluate students from a managerial perspective.

We bring here GMAT Preparation Tips to help you enhance your analytical, verbal as well as your mathematical abilities.

Accepted by over 1600 institutes across 82 institutes, the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) consists of four sections, namely, Analytical Writing Assessment, Integrated Reasoning, Quantitative and Verbal.

Let us have a look at the GMAT pattern below:

In this GMAT preparation tips, we have taken each component - Verbal, Quantitative and Analytical Writing and Integrated Reasoning separately and provided tips to help your performance in the exam.

Verbal section:

The Verbal section measures your ability to read and understand written material, to evaluate arguments, and to correct written material to conform to standard written English. This section includes around 41 questions from Reading Comprehension, Critical Reasoning and Sentence Correction.

Tips to crack:

1. Practice reading comprehension: Practice as many as reading comprehensions as possible. The best way to solve a comprehension is by breaking it into parts. Take one question at a time. At practice level, you can jot down each relevant point and consider whether it is the best possible answer to your question. This will make your thought clear at the time of GMAT.

2. Eat, sleep and pray Grammar: Clarity in grammatical concepts is essential in GMAT. Make sure you know your modifiers and prepositions right.Sentence correction forms the tricky part in GMAT preparation. It usually requires higher level of analysis and logical application.

3. Don’t stop reading: Yes, do not stop reading. Reading is the most easiest and effective way of preparing for GMAT Verbal section. Improve your language skills by reading the editorial sections of newspapers. The topics coming in GMAT usually are from science and humanities.

Analytical Writing Assessment

The Analytical Writing Assessment measures your ability to think critically and to communicate your ideas. In this section, you will be asked to analyze and express your opinion on a given argument.

Tips to crack:

1. Create a template for your essay: This is one of the fast tricks to writing your essays fast and without mistakes.  Make drafts of the essays and choose the draft, which is the most feasible for you.

2. Write sample essays: Practice writing as many as many sample essays as possible.  Here are the tips to consider:

   a.    Give a direction to your essay.

   b.    Analyze your arguments. Are they valid?

   c.     Support your arguments with examples.

   d.    Note down your points and then give the essay a final shape.

Integrated Reasoning

The Integrated Reasoning section measures your ability to evaluate information presented in multiple formats from multiple sources. Basically, it assesses your ability to make judgments, organize and combine information to solve challenges.

This section has 12 questions and includes Multi-Source Reasoning, Graphics Interpretation, Two-Two Part Analysis and Table Analysis.

Tips to crack:

1. Get familiar with the test format:  It is important to get familiar with the test format of GMAT and most importantly integrated reasoning.  This helps you to be ready with the different format of the exam and also help you manage your time during the exam.
2. Practice graph: Do not forget about graphs if you are appearing for GMAT. Venn diagrams, charts, tables are all part of the integrated reasoning section of GMAT. Learn how to analyze the graphs. That is the first step in solving the all the questions related to the graph. If you understand the graph properly, that saves half of your time.
3. Practice sample papers: Solving sample papers and taking mock tests go a long way in perfecting your preparation for GMAT. Especially in the case of Integrated reasoning, mock papers help reduce the surprise elements in the test. There are many practice sets available for GMAT.

Quantitative section:

In this section, you are required to use reasoning skills to evaluate data and draw conclusions. Interestingly, the quantitative ability requires just basic mathematical knowledge on your part. So, the important point is to make sure that your concepts of elementary mathematics are clear.

Tips to crack:

1. Focus on your weakness: Are you afraid of Geometry? Is Alzebra your Achilles heel? Then focus strongly in these areas. Understand the nitty gritty of these topics. Find where your concepts are unclear and focus on them for maximum benefit.

2. Clear your concepts: If you had pursued mathematics after high school, chances are your concepts in some topics might have faded. So, bring out your high school maths text books and start re-doing your maths. Most of the questions that come in GMAT involve the application of elementary level mathematics. Once your concepts are clear, you can be confident of getting a good score in GMAT.

3. Refer to study resources: It always helps to refer to study resources. There are many GMAT practice sets available. Even mba.com helps you in taking online mock tests and provides test practice sets.

Also read:

Score-reporting change gives aspirants greater control over GMAT: GMAC

Save