What the GMAT Really Tests
The GMAT is not a math test. It’s also not a “school skills” test. Sure, you have to know certain facts and rules in order to get a good score. But this test is really testing your executive reasoning skills.
You already have executive reasoning skills—use use them every day! Here are some examples:
- You arrive at work in the morning and think about all of the things that you could do that day. You can’t get it all done, so which things will have to wait until this afternoon, or tomorrow, or next week? Which one thing should you start working on first? (And, let’s be honest, what is just never going to get done?
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- You are faced with a list of 20 (or 40… or 100!) unread emails. Which ones do you read first? The oldest ones? The ones from your boss? The ones marked urgent? Are there some that you won’t even click on right now because you know, from the sender’s name or from the subject line, that those emails aren’t very important?
- You have a choice between working on Product X or Project Y. Project Y will result in about 5% more revenue to the company, but Project Y will also take 50% longer. Which do you do?
None of those decisions are easy ones (and most would likely require more information than I gave in my bullets). This complex decision-making is exactly what a good executive needs to be able to do well—and this is what the test writers and business schools actually care about.
The GMAT does test quantitative concepts, yes, but they are tools to allow the exam writers to test you on your decision-making ability.
How does that help me take the GMAT?
The first step is to internalize the fact that they don’t expect you to get everything right, any more than a CEO expects to clear everything in his or her inbox today. You have to prioritize.
A great decision-maker has both expertise and experience: She’s thought about how to make various kinds of decisions, and she’s actually practiced and refined these decision-making processes. While the clock is ticking, she doesn’t hesitate to make a decision and move forward, knowing that she’s going to be leaving some opportunities behind.
In order to do that successfully in the business world, you need to know the company’s goals and objectives, and you have to have a good idea of the kind of impact that various tasks or activities will have on the company. You also have to have a lot of practice in making these decisions and observing the outcomes. There’s never just one right way to make these decisions, so the more exposure you give yourself to how things work, the better you’ll be able to make good decisions in the future.
The same is true for the GMAT: If you know how it works, and you know what kinds of trade-offs to think about when deciding how to spend your time, then you can learn how to make the best decisions to maximize your score.
Okay, how does the GMAT work?
I talk to GMAT students nearly every day who tell me that, when they “know” they can get something right, they might as well take the time to get it right, even when that means running out of time later on. Other times, they feel like they should be able to do something…and so they hang on to it much longer than is wise. (Sound familiar?)
I put “know” in quotation marks in the prior paragraph because, well, you actually don’t know. First, you could make a careless mistake at any time. Second, if you need a lot of extra time to do a problem, then something is not going well. You might still get it right, but your odds go way down if something’s already not going well.
So you need to train yourself away from your “old-school” mindset of trying to get everything right, no matter how long it takes. And you need to train yourself into the “executive” mindset—the same one that you already use in the working / real world today.
What are the best opportunities sitting in front of you? Which ones should you prioritize over the others right now? Which ones should you save for the end (of the test / of your day) and you’ll do them if you have extra time? And which ones are just never going to be worth the investment? (On those: guess, move on, and never look back.)
Here’s another difference between old-school and real-world: At work, if you think that your team is approaching a problem in the wrong way, then you can discuss that and change the mechanism or the scope of the work or whatever it is that you think is off. Try going to your undergrad professor and saying, “I know you assigned us these problem sets, but I think it’d be more productive if we worked in groups on a project instead.” 
In school, you just did what the professors assigned. At work, though, you’re supposed to think for yourself. The same is true on the GMAT. For example, a problem might ask you to calculate a certain percentage…but when you glance at the answer choices, you might see this:
(A) 10%
(B) 25%
(C) 40%
(D) 60%
(E) 80%
Does that give you any ideas about how to solve this problem (even though you don’t know what the problem is)?
In school, your prof wouldn’t even give you multiple choice answers. They’d expect you to do all the math to show that you knew exactly how to get to the specific numerical answer. On the GMAT, though, not only are you always going to have answer choices, but the answers themselves will give you important clues about what the test is really expecting right now.
When the percentages are spread that far out, you can just estimate. The answers are literally telling you: Hey, don’t bother actually calculating. I don’t care about the difference between 39% and 40%. I just want to know whether you understand the theory or the big picture well enough to be able to estimate your way to the one correct number out of these five numbers.
Unless you’re working in accounting or similar, that’s going to be more than good enough for your job as well. Is this proposed new product going to add about 10% or about 25% to our bottom line? I don’t care about the exact number—it’s impossible to have an exact number now, anyway. I just want a ballpark figure so we can make a decision about whether to pursue this new product idea.
When approaching the GMAT, don’t just accept what’s put in front of you and do it on rote / old-school. Instead, graduate to the real world. Focus on maximizing your executive reasoning / decision-making skills to succeed on the GMAT.
Graduation Day
How can you graduate to the business mindset? Create a free account on our site and sign up for our Free GMAT Starter Kit (it really is 100% free, no gimmicks). As you work through your study tasks in the starter kit, you’ll be training yourself to make that mental switch and start using your exec mindset to get a great GMAT score.
Happy studying!
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Stacey Koprince is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California. Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests. Check out Stacey’s upcoming GMAT courses here.