WWSD* (What Would Stacey Do)?
I sat down to think about a topic and suddenly realized that I’m writing my 201st GMAT article! How do I have anything left to write about?!?
The GMAT is actually a pretty fascinating topic (in my opinion, at least!). I have to give a big shout-out to all of my students (class, tutoring, and forums!) because you guys have inspired most of my articles. I just think about what my students have been struggling with lately and, boom, I’ve got a topic.
A fellow teacher, though, is the inspiration for this particular article. We were teaching a 9-session course together recently and he asked me how I always had an article to recommend when a student had a question on any particular topic. I keep a list of every article I’ve written, so I sent it to my colleague not really thinking about how very long that list is, or how unhelpful it is to be handed something that contains a couple of hundred titles. : )
Sure enough, he replied, Um, yeah this is great. So, which ones do you think are the most important?
Point taken. There are too many”nobody’s going to read all 200”so which ones should you read? Where should you start?
What would I do if I were about to start my studies?
We’ll start today with the highest-level stuff: what we’re really trying to do here and how to approach studying in general. Next time, we’ll take a look at more nitty-gritty details. Also, I’m going to limit the list to just my own articles”but you shouldn’t limit yourself in this way! Obviously there are a lot of great study resources out there.
The one article Everyone Should Read
My Deadline is Approaching and I Don’t Have the Score I Want!
I’ve been speaking with a lot of students in this position recently “ welcome to December. Most second round deadlines are rapidly approaching and some students, unfortunately, don’t yet have the score they want in order to apply. What to do?
What you CAN’T do
There are some things you can do “ but we can’t expect miracles either. If you tell me that your test is in less than 2 weeks and you need to improve your score by 100 or more points, I’m going to (gently) tell you that such a goal is unrealistic. I’m not going to discourage you from going for it (it doesn’t hurt to try), but you should also start examining your other options are. These could include accepting your lower score, changing the schools to which you apply, or postponing your candidacy to a later round or a later year. Some people, thinking through this, actually end up deciding that they’d rather wait a year anyway and take their time with the whole application process.
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The 2 Biggest Mistakes GMAT Studiers Make
Recently, a new student asked me what he could do to get the most out of our class and his study time over the next several months. He’s not the first person to ask me this, but when I was responding to him, I realized that I really needed to write this down and share it with all of you. Many of you have heard me say these things in various forms in articles, blog posts, or forum responses over the years—but here they are in one place.
So, without further ado, the 2 biggest mistakes that people make when studying for the GMAT:
#1 Doing instead of Analyzing
Most people try to study for the GMAT in the same way they studied for school—and, for most people, that isn’t going to lead to a 700+. The GMAT is not a math test or a grammar test—really, it isn’t! It’s a reasoning test—and I’m not just referring to critical reasoning. The GMAT is really a test of how we think. If that’s not your primary focus when studying, you won’t get the best score you could get.
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