For most at least somewhat selective graduate school programs, standardizing testing is just part of the process. It helps schools confirm you can do the work and helps filter and sort applicants. It you aren’t great at standardizing testing, it certainly doesn’t mean you can’t be an excellent and highly successful grad student, scientist, business leader, or lawyer.  However, you obviously must play the game, and try to do your best on a standardized test as part of the admissions process, to get into school in the first place.

In this article, we’ll cover some basic, meta tips to ensure you approach the test prep process the right way. Too many students don’t follow these tips, put in hundreds of hours of test prep, and don’t get the score they need. Consider these tips the foundation to a successful standardized test prep experience. 

1. Adopt the Right Mindset about the Exam

It’s important to adopt the right mindset about both the exam and the nature of your own abilities. Regarding the exams in question, no matter what you’ve been told, these are tests of critical thinking, logic, math, and English, which are all skills you can build. They are not IQ tests that are difficult to prepare for. Almost everyone prepares a lot for these exams before achieving a high score. If you think they are IQ tests, you are in a mental hole before you even get going with your prep, because you’ll find it hard to motivate yourself to study. Why study if how well you’ll do depends on something very difficult for you to change?  But the fact is, how well you’ll do depends on how much and how you practice and prepare. 

2. Adopt the Right Mindset about Your Abilities

Regarding your own abilities, Psychologist Carol Dweck, a PhD from Stanford, has done a lot of research about how people tend to have one of two mindsets. The fixed mindset-oriented person believes that intelligence and personality traits are static and granted at birth. The growth mindset person believes your personality, habits, and intelligence will change with effort. In all domains, the truth is a mix of both. Not everyone can win a Nobel prize in physics or math. But you might be surprised to learn that a person with average math skills could probably get a PhD in Math or Physics if they put in the effort. “Math people” aren’t just born with math skills, a huge percentage of their math skills comes from practice and studying. Average math “talent” + interest + effort could easily equal a career as a mathematician.

To succeed on standardize tests, adopt a growth mindset about your abilities. Dr Dweck’s research shows that having a growth mindset is a better predictor of success in school, athletics, and almost any other domain than any other factor. Why? Because it leads to a willingness to practice!

3. Know What’s on the Test

This might seem silly. Of course you need to understand what’s on the test! But many people don’t slow down and go deep enough to truly understand the nature of the exam, topics covered, and question types. If you choose to hire a tutor or take a prep class, what is on the test should be explained to you. But many people self-study, and sort of jump in without having a full understanding of the content that will be tested and the types of questions they’ll see. Simply understanding what’s on the exam, on a deep level, upfront can lead to a better study plan and is a simple step that many students skip.

4. Set a Target Score Goal Linked to Your Target Programs

For MBA and grad school applications, many students overestimate the importance of the GMAT and GRE. We see students wanting to take the GMAT again to get a 750 instead of the 710 they just received. This is generally a mistake, as the GMAT is one of many admissions factors. If you neglect your essays to spend another two months doing GMAT prep, you could hurt your admissions chances. Essays often need to be read and reread and revised many times. 

Early on in your prep process, you should establish where you are looking to apply, and what your minimum test score is to feel comfortable that you gave yourself a strong fighting chance. Typically, we recommend establishing an above average score as your target. If you’ve already hit that score, there is often no need to re-take the exam. For law school, the LSAT score tends to be a little more important, but the general rule still holds.

5. Use Official Prep Materials

The best materials to use to prep for any standardized exam are the official materials for the exam. For the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT, this means exhausting the free and low-cost prep materials and official practice tests made available from:

• Official GMAT Prep
• Official GRE Prep
• Official LSAT Prep

 

It is absolutely OK to take a course or use other materials from reputable providers, as they can often offer many unique benefits (i.e., quality videos, explanations that are better than ones offered by the “official” materials, etc.). However, when it comes to the practice questions and practice exams, you need to use official materials. You just never know if a given “3^rd party” practice exam is giving you questions at the right level of difficulty and covering the right mix of concepts.

6. Take an upfront Practice Exam & Official Exams Over Time to Track Progress

A typical test prep class is built for the average student. But you might be excellent at math, and weak at reading comprehension. Sure, you may intuitively know this going into your exam prep process.  But taking a practice exam early on can confirm it, and this can then be used to help you develop a customized study plan.

As time goes on, you should make sure that you take a full 3-4 hours, every 3-4 weeks, to take an official exam, under timed conditions, to ensure you are making progress. Take these exams very seriously and try to replicate real test day conditions. Too many students suffer from a concept called the “illusion of mastery” because they open a book as they are doing practice problems to get guidance on how to do the problem, and in so doing, tell themselves that they understand the concept. But if you can’t score well on an official timed exam taken in the comfort of your own home, you won’t score well on exam day.

And, if you aren’t making progress each time you take an official exam at home, you need to re-assess and change up your study plan and process. It might sound crazy, but some students haven’t really taken a full-length exam under true timed conditions before they take the real one.

7. Develop a Customized Study Plan

So you’ve taken your diagnostic practice exam. Now what? If you are working with a tutor, they should be helping you build a highly customized plan. If you are taking a class, it will have a curriculum. But should you simply follow the recommend homework assignments? Actually, yes and no. You should follow them, but you should adjust based on your diagnostic practice exam results and target score. Do more GMAT verbal if you are weak there, and less GMAT quant. Or, add on more GMAT verbal prep and do what is suggested on Quant. Are you targeting a 95^th percentile score? Well, then you probably have to do more highly difficult practice questions than you’ll get in the standard curriculum of your course, which is built for the average student.

8. Build Test Specific Skills and Fully Embrace Key Test Taking Strategies

The GMAT and GRE are not mathematics or English tests. They are tests of critical thinking and logic that require a firm conceptual understanding of a variety of math and English concepts. That’s a big difference. Some test prep providers have you doing hours and hours of math homework to build math skills. But on the exam, you can often answer questions correctly with critical thinking, process of elimination, and having select rules of thumb memorized, which can be very different from simply getting to the correct answer by jumping right into the math. Two key test taking strategies, “process of elimination” and “just plug in the numbers” can, by themselves, boost most students’ scores substantially relative to seeing hard problems and trying to power through the math the problem seems to require.

9. Follow Deliberate Practice Techniques

Deliberate practice is a particular form of practice that leads to higher levels of skill acquisition and expertise than other types of practice. You may have heard the term before, as there have been best-selling books written that argue deliberate practice is more important than almost anything else, including any notion of “innate talent.” For your purposes, just keep in mind that when you sit down to practice for the GMAT, GRE, or LSAT, studying “deliberately” means that you:

• Are truly bought in to why a high score is important to you. You are motivated by doing well and getting into school. You approach the test prep process with what Angela Duckworth calls grit.
• Focus intensely for sustained periods of time on the task at hand. You aren’t distracted, watching TV, or checking your phone. You are thinking deeply about how to solve a problem 
• Make sure you understand foundational concepts very well, because most advanced skills are built up from important but more basic ones…
• ….but when those are mastered, you spend time challenging yourself, attempting problems that you struggle with mentally. The mental struggle is what builds skill.
• Realize that you are unlikely to succeed by cramming. You’ll learn better by studying intensely over many shorter sessions for a pro-longed period of time
• Get feedback from an expert on what you are missing or not understanding. This is often done via a tutor or coach, but watching a video is also a form of feedback

A book that does a good job of applying many deliberate practice techniques to academic success is a Mind for Numbers. How to Excel at Math and Science.

10. Get Help When You Need It

While not something to stress about or overinvest in (see tip #4) these exams are important. Getting into a top MBA program can improve your lifetime earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars, or maybe even more. If you need to go from self-study to hiring a tutor for just a few hours, or from spending 10 hours with a tutor to 20 or 30, don’t be afraid to do so. There are many tutors available at fair prices or high quality self-paced courses with excellent videos. Don’t be afraid to invest a little in the process if you need help.

Conclusion

Having the right mindset and approach to test prep and a customized study plan provides the foundation for building skills and learning how to answer problems correctly as you engage in test prep for the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT. Think about these ten points before buying prep materials and jumping into the prep process itself. 

About the Author

Mark Skoskiewicz founded MyGuru way back in 2009 while he was getting his MBA from Northwestern University. MyGuru provides 1-1 GRE tutoring (and tutoring for all major standardized tests). To help him grow MyGuru and help his students, he also completed the Coursera course Learning How to Learn: Powerful Mental Tools to Help you Master Tough Subjects.

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