How to prep for the GMAT in 14 days if you absolutely Must
“Prepping in 14 days is obviously not the ideal situation. There are limits to how much you can learn in such a short period of time.
Still, sometimes people get stuck. Maybe you haven’t gotten the GMAT score that you need to be competitive at a particular school and 2nd-round deadlines are fast approaching. Maybe you’re on a waitlist and the school has indicated that your chances would be better if you could lift your score. Whatever the circumstance, there are some things that you can do to try to achieve a score boost in a short period of time.
Make no mistake: you’re going to have to work hard! You’re going to live, sleep, and breath the GMAT for the next two weeks. You’ll also need to set realistic expectations for yourself: nobody is going to jump from a 500 to a 720 in two weeks.
Getting Started: Time and Resources
First, if you can take these two weeks off of work (or at least some of the time), then do so. You’re about to undertake a mental marathon; you can’t waste brain energy on many other mental tasks and still get through your GMAT tasks effectively.
If you can’t, then cancel all of your other plans. Outside of work, you’re only going to be working on the GMAT.
Second, it’s important to identify your study resources and set up a solid plan from the start. You don’t have the luxury of trying something for a week (or even a few days!) and then discovering that it isn’t working for you.
At the least, you need the materials in the below list. The starred (*) materials are made by GMAC (the company that makes the real test); GMAC’s materials consist of real, past GMAT questions.
It’s best to practice using real problems, but note that practice problems don’t actually teach you how to get better at the test. You’ll also need material designed to teach you how to get better—this is what test prep companies do.
- *The Official Guide for GMAT® Review, 13th Edition
- *GMATPrep CATs (practice exams)
- Additional practice exams that give you performance data (any test prep company, including ours, sells these)
- Materials that teach you all of the math and verbal facts you need to know as well as strategies for answering different kinds of math and verbal questions
- Test-taking strategies, including time management, educated guessing, and so on
Items 4 and 5 might come in the form of books, online lessons, classes, or even private tutoring. Expect to spend some money, particularly because you’re trying to do this in 14 days!
Day 0: Read Two Articles
Before you do anything, learn what the GMAT really tests.
Next, learn about the second level of GMAT study.
Memorize this rule: whenever you study 2 hours in a row, you then take an hour off to let your brain process and recover before you try to add even more. This rule applies all the time except when you’re taking a full practice test or when you’re in class (if you take a class).
Day 1: Developing a Study Plan
Take a practice test and analyze it to determine your strengths and weaknesses. If you are really pressed for time, you can skip the essay and IR sections on this first practice test (but don’t continue to skip them on later tests!). You are allowed two 8-minute breaks, one after the IR section and one after the Quant section.
Do NOT take a GMATPrep test. While the tests themselves are great, they don’t provide any analysis of your performance. You won’t know how to prioritize your time without that analysis.
Next, take a break! Have lunch or run an errand; give your brain some time to recover from the grueling test experience.
If you take a ManhattanGMAT test, use this article to analyze it. If you take a different test, you’ll have to use whatever analysis tools are provided by that test.
Finally, pull up the individual problems from the test you took earlier today and start analyzing them. That article contains 10 questions to ask yourself when reviewing a problem. You don’t have to answer all 10 questions for every single problem; rather, figure out what you need to figure out based on how that problem went for you. Then write down what you need to study or practice based on that analysis.
You probably won’t finish this per-problem analysis today; that’s okay. Don’t rush the process. You’re figuring out what you need to learn by doing this analysis.
Include timing in your analysis. Familiarize yourself with what you need to do to get better at time management on the GMAT.
At the end of the day, look everything over and rank your weaknesses; you don’t have time to do everything. It would also be a very bad idea to try to concentrate on the worst of the worst weaknesses. Let those go.
Instead, concentrate on topics where you made careless mistakes, or you would have known how to do the work if you had just remembered a certain formula or rule. Also concentrate on weaknesses that you know were strengths for you in school, even though you’ve forgotten or gotten rusty.
You might have performed poorly on some question types because you don’t have much experience with them. Data Sufficiency and Critical Reasoning questions, in particular, can be a bit weird until you get used to what the test-writers are asking you to do.
Days 2-6: Start Shoring Up Your Weaknesses
Continue your per-problem analysis from yesterday’s test. When you’re done, flip open your books or dive into your online resources and start studying based on the rankings you gave your weaknesses.
Didn’t know how to do Critical Reasoning? Start there. Did well on Geometry in school but forgot all of the rules and formulas? Start going through your Geometry book and making flashcards of the information you don’t know. Made a careless mistake? Figure out what bad habits you need to break or what good habits you need to build in order to minimize those careless mistakes in future.
Go through the lessons as provided and, at the end of each day, practice a few problems to see where you are making progress and where you aren’t.
If you find yourself hitting a wall on a certain topic or technique, move on to another.
Day 7: Review and Practice
Set up some random problem set drills for yourself. These drills must be done under official timing conditions!
You can use GMAC’s GMAT Focus product for a random set of quant questions. Set your stopwatch for a 48-minute time limit and dive into the 24-question set. If you don’t want to purchase that product, you can also create a 20-question set (11 PS, 9 DS) from your OG13 book. Give yourself a 40-minute time limit.
For verbal, you’ll need to create a set yourself. You can do this by selecting specific problems from your OG13 book. If you purchase the extra question pack that comes with the free GMATPrep exams, then you can also use those.
Set up a 15 question-set consisting of one longer RC passage with 4 questions, 5 CR questions, and 6 SC questions. Give yourself 27 minutes.
When you’re done, analyze your overall timing performance. Where did you make good decisions about how to spend your time and where did you make poor decisions? Where and how should you have guessed and moved on? What should you do next time and how will you know to make that better decision?
Also do the same review you’ve been doing for the past week: minimize careless mistakes, review specific solution methods, practice certain skills, and so on.
Finally, don’t forget that you can’t do everything! Sometimes, the remedy really is to let something go. Given that you have only two weeks, you will likely have to let entire classes of questions go, as long as those types are not super-common. Hate Combinatorics? Horrible at CR Evaluate questions? That’s okay— guess immediately and move on.
Day 8: Take a Practice Test
This time you have a choice: you can take a GMATPrep exam or another one of ours. What are the pros and cons? GMATPrep is the real thing, so you’ll be practicing on real past test questions. This exam, however, does not offer any data or analysis. Our test is not the real thing, but we do offer you extensive data and analysis to help you figure out what to do next.
Here’s how to make that choice: if you feel pretty comfortable with your level of progress and are confident that you have only minor timing issues, then try GMATPrep. If you are struggling with your progress, or with your ability to determine your own strengths and weaknesses, or if you are having timing issues, then take our test.
Analyze your test in the same way as last time. Look for what we’ll call the “low-hanging fruit…. Concentrate on the easiest opportunities, such as careless mistakes, or problems that you almost got right but for which you just need a bit more practice.
Finally, you will have spent extra time on some problems that you just had no hope of answering correctly anyway. The remedy there is NOT to learn how to do those problems. The remedy is to be able to say to yourself: Oh, look, I have no idea what to do there and I’m not going to learn in 6 days. So forget it; I’m going to pick my favorite letter and move on faster next time.
Days 9-10: Tackle the Low-Hanging Fruit
Using the same activities as during week 1, start tackling the low-hanging fruit you identified yesterday. At the same time, start to do a general review of the major question types (DS, PS, CR, SC, RC) and the overall strategies for tackling each type. For RC and CR, add in the strategies for tackling the different question sub-types—but don’t try to do them all. Ignore any that are weak for you; get them wrong fast on the test.
Days 11-12: Drill
Your focus is no longer on trying to make weaknesses better: you know what you know and you’re not going to change what you don’t know.
Move to timed drill sets today: you’re warming up for the test. You can repeat the drill sets discussed for Day 7, or take sections of a practice test. If you do the latter, don’t do the whole test at once. Very soon, you’re going to be running a mental marathon; you don’t want to tire your brain out with a full practice marathon three days before.
Day 13: Relax…
Easier said than done. During the day, you can do some light review, but really don’t spend more than a couple of hours. The last thing you want to do is tire your brain out today, and you’re not going to learn a ton the day before the test.
Get your identification ready, as well as whatever you plan to bring to eat and drink. Plan to watch a movie, have dinner with a talkative friend, or do something else that will get your brain off of the GMAT, if only for a few hours.
Day 14: Take the Test!
Eat a good breakfast. Get to the test center about 15 minutes early (just in case). Take a deep breath. Now, show what you can do!
If all of that sounds absolutely overwhelming, I do have one more possible resource for you: the Manhattan GMAT Boot Camp. We only offer this a couple of times a year, typically in December, since deadlines are rapidly approaching.
We’ve compressed our regular 9-week program into 2 weeks, adding some additional class time for intensive work and some one-on-one attention from your 2 instructors. You will have class nearly every day, usually in the afternoon, and you will be working on homework in your “free… time. We do some amount of prioritizing for you, concentrating on the most commonly tested material during class. If you want to learn more, follow the link above.”