Plan the Timing of Your Preparation
Unless you’re a natural-born test-taking titan, you will likely need a substantial time period to prepare for the GMAT. I recommend taking your first practice test a year before you apply so you can gauge what will be required to hit the 700-range. Following your initial test, you should follow up with several months of preparation.
Ideally, you should schedule the test about half a year before your application is due. This will allow ample time for a re-test and additional preparation, if needed. Fortunately, most medium and large-size cities offer the GMAT practically any time any day of the week since it is a computerized, standardized test.
GMAT Preparation Materials and Practice Tests
I’ve gone through all of the GMAT prep materials on the market, so I’m happy to provide the skinny on resources you’re considering using. In terms of overall quality, I strongly recommend Manhattan GMAT’s materials. Manhattan GMAT breaks its materials down into a eight separate subject-specific books that each provide very studied approaches to specific nuances you will encounter on the GMAT. Manhattan GMAT’s tests are, in my opinion, slightly more realistic and in tune with what you will really encounter on the test.
Kaplan and Princeton Review also offer less expensive GMAT guides. They can be helpful as additional resources, but I found that Kaplan’s tests were unrealistically difficult (which can be discouraging), and Princeton Review’s tests trend toward being too easy (which gives you a false sense of confidence).
Both Manhattan GMAT’s and the official GMAC tests represent the “Goldilocks” sweet spot, and you should therefore be strategic about when you use their tests for practice, as there are a limited number of them. The GMAC’s two tests are especially indicative of what your true performance will be, so I recommend taking one test a month or so into your studying and taking the other 3-4 weeks out from when you will take the real test.
Tutors and Prep Classes
Whether you need tutors or prep classes is a matter of your level of self-discipline - and the size of your bank account. I believe it is rare that an applicant can’t achieve a 700+ GMAT score without outside help, given that he/she follows a rigorous and methodical preparation plan. However, I have many colleagues that preferred the schedule of a paid program, and this approach worked fine for them. If you do plan to take a class, sign up early. They can last for months and are offered at scheduled times. Again, any prep program can be helpful, but I recommend Manhattan GMAT's program above all others.What Score Should I Target?
The answer to this question is nuanced. By way of benchmarking, the HBS Class of 2012 had a range of 550 - 790 with a median of 730. As a rule of thumb, I would target the 700-710 range, and would definitely retake it if I scored 690 or below.
However, it is important to realize that your GMAT score will be interpreted in conjunction with your background. If you are a poet, you better score extremely well on the verbal portion, and there will be more wiggle room on the math section. The opposite is true for an engineer.
If you are an international applicant with English as your second language, it is probably acceptable to do worse than average on the verbal portion, but you should target being in the top quartile compared to other international applicants. HBS will look for inconsistencies and patterns. Is there a trend of scoring lower on math portions of standardized tests and math-based classes? The important idea to remember is that the GMAT is one of many indicators of your academic and intellectual abilities, and it will be viewed in the context of the rest of your application.
GMAT Strategies, Tips, and the GMAT Christmas Tree
Taking the GMAT is a unique test experience and it merits ample consideration of its unusual qualities to do well.Here are my top strategies and tips:
- Conquer the Christmas Tree: The GMAT’s self-adaptive quality means that it is constantly honing in on your score, question by question. The GMAT has a massive bank of questions, all with a “difficulty level” assigned to them. If you get a question right, you get a harder question next; if you get a question wrong, an easier question comes your way. This characteristic of the GMAT means that you are much more severely penalized for getting questions wrong early in the test than later. In fact, you could miss the same amount of questions on two different tests and achieve a significantly different score depending on which questions you answered incorrectly.
Here again, for your reference, is a diagram illustrating the GMAT's self-adaptive scoring process.
The important strategy to employ, then, is to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the earlier questions, and less time on the later questions. To even this out, it is still always to your advantage to finish the test, so it is always a balancing game to weight the importance to the beginning of the test while still finishing all questions. - Practice Realistically: There are some oddities about the GMAT that you must ensure you’re prepared to encounter. You take the test at an unfamiliar computer with a large headset on your head. It is four hours long, so it is easy to get antsy and lose focus. And perhaps most importantly, you have to do all of your math with a marker and a whiteboard. You perform like you practice, so this means you should go out and buy a whiteboard and a headset, and practice taking the test all the way through, erasing your whiteboard answers and all.
- Get Your Timing Down: Some test-takers have a difficult time finishing sections in time, particularly the quantitative section. If you find yourself in this situation, you will need to pay attention to your timing during several practice attempts, and start to get a feel for how many questions you should have answered at different junctures in the test (or how much of an essay is written in the writing section).
- Eat Chocolate: Call me a chocoholic, but I advocate for eating chocolate before all tests. Chocolate has been shown to improve cognitive performance and help increase focus. You may even consider a yoga routine an hour before the test, and you should definitely get a full night’s sleep. Whatever works for you is fine; just remember that there are situation-specific factors that affect your performance the day of the test.
