Tuesday’s Tip: Free Study Schedule
OK readers, I have several horses running in January for the official test and the question that keeps popping up is, “How do I study the last few weeks prior to the test?” The answer is simple, the same way you’ve been studying up until now, which hopefully looks something like this:
Day 1: Take online practice test (preferably one that mimics the adaptive nature of the actual test (CAT for GMAT and MST for GRE).
Day 2: Review ALL questions on test that you either missed or guessed on and perhaps got correct. Be sure you understand the explanations and mentally review how the pacing went for you (for a look at pacing guidelines, click here).
Day 3: According to the performance report on the practice exams, you will see which question types gave you the most trouble and where you really struggled to make good decisions. Create 20-question quizzes from the Official Guide focusing on such questions, while timed at 40 minutes per set.
Day 4: Focus EXCLUSIVELY on verbal. That means 3 hours, broken down into one hour sessions of Reading Comprehension, Sentence Correction, and Critical Reasoning for GMAT and RC, SC and TE for GRE. Go to the official guide and do ONLY intermediate questions for one hour apiece. The medium and difficult ones are the ones toward the middle of the respective sections. The questions appear in increasing order of difficulty. Do NOT do these questions blindly for fun like a crossword puzzle. You are doing them with the aim of ultimately raising your score, so focus on how you would treat them on Test Day and what pertinent strategies should ring in your head when you see a similar question type that day.
Day 5: Back to quant. Focus on concepts today for three hours. That is, algebra, number props, word problems (rates, averages, speed, etc.). These are all high difficulty problems so review the section in the Official Guide that talks about them conceptually and then attack some problems in the exercises section with ONLY these types of problems in mind, as they are quite common. With all practice sessions, never exceed 3 hours and give yourself a ten minute break in between so that you are treating it like Test Day and getting “conditioned”.
Day 6: This is important, trust us. Spend 30 minutes or so digging deep within yourself to try and trace back what goes wrong on the exams. Really close your eyes and visualize the things that can be handled better and how you are going to treat certain things differently next time. Journaling helps. Also visualize how comfortable and confident you will feel on Test Day, knowing you made a good decision to study for a total of 100 hours (what is typically required) and the nerves will be relieved. Then do 90 minutes of reviewing your first practice test and seeing if you can do the problems you got wrong and how far you’ve come on this test.
Day 7: Rest.
Then rinse and repeat.
On ALL days, focus on NO SILLY MISTAKES.
Good luck and if you have any questions on this, or previous articles, contact us and we will get back to you promptly.