Cracking the GMAT - GMAT planning and preparation Tips

GMAT – the first step towards any foreign B-School Admission is intimidating for quite a few. The amount of material available to cover is enormous and the time limited because most of the aspirants have professional commitments to attend to. It becomes critical to be selective, prepare using the optimum study material and build the right strategy.

I’ll narrate the strategy, which I believe will help you mellow down your initial intimidation and subsequently succeed. Before start preparing, it’s essential that you take a complete mock test, which includes writing the essays. Analyse your score - where all did you get stuck, was it because you forgot some concept or because you don’t know about it. Do you really have the stamina physically and mentally to stay focussed for the long duration of this test? Many people solve few questions from here and there and try to judge there preparedness for GMAT based on that. A verbal critical reasoning question might appear very simple if taken stand alone. But the same verbal question may be daunting when you have already spent over two hours in the actual test writing your essays and solving quant questions. So the first mock test will give you some idea about your strength and weaknesses. Following this you have to make a realistic estimate about how much time you can devote and at what speed you can cover the material.

It always helps to solve questions in batches and try to prefix the amount of time you want to spend on each batch. GMAT is a race against time. Besides, I believe that the material mentioned below is the basic minimum which you should cover:

• Manhattan Sentence Correction (considered as the bible for SC).
• Official guide (12^th, 11^th and 10^th edition if possible) - All these have different set of actual questions which appeared in exams. Here it is not only important to get the questions right but also to understand why they are right. Religiously read through the explanation given at the back in OG’s.
• Kaplan Quant Diagnostic tests, Princeton review notes and Free GMAT flash cards.

Also it’s important to track your mistakes and visit them again later to see whether you have grasped the concept or not. Besides these you should at least take 6 tests in the two-three weeks before exam and save the GMAT Prep, available as free software at www.MBA.com site (Test 2) for the last mock as it feels exactly same as the actual exam.

All the Best!!