My philosophy

For many years now, I have looked at the GMAT as much more than an entrance exam to get into a good business school. 

Due to the amount of effort that is usually required to reach a desirable score, the GMAT offers those who are up for the challenge a unique opportunity. Achieving greatness on the GMAT is about much more than mastering the content. In many ways it is about achieving mastery of self.

Like a professional athlete or musician who learns to master his/her craft from hours of careful study and self-discipline, most successful high GMAT scorers have not only learned the Content inside and out, but they have also perfected the Processes  and Strategies that are needed to succeed. I like to call this putting the “pieces” (PCS) together:

P = Process

C = Content

S = Strategy

Process

Scoring well on the GMAT requires a very high measure of accuracy on questions that are at or below your desired score level (though much less so for questions above that level since an adaptive test expects you to miss those). In addition, you have to be able to keep your cool under the extra pressure of the ticking clock.

The answer to both challenges lies in having a fine-tuned process. Like a pilot who has carefully honed the protocol that he/she must be able to blindly undertake before flying a plane, the successful test-taker must have a well-rehearsed process for each question type on the test.

Achieving this means taking apart every detail of the solving process including: how to read the question, when to start writing — if at all, what to write, how to organize your scratch pad, what internal questions to ask in order to advance your thought process, and how and when to use process of elimination on the answer choices.  Practice is essential, and consistency is paramount. From the outset, I work closely with my students to first observe their innate processes and then to help them instill the best practices to ensure repeatable success.

Content

To do well on the test you also need to have a pretty thorough mastery of all of the content tested. I say pretty thorough because sometimes you can get away with a slightly less-than-perfect understanding of the content, if for example you employ a more practical strategy on a Quant question. In general though, content mastery is particularly relevant for Sentence Correction questions (i.e. grammar rules) and for the entire Quantitative section. 

It might surprise you, however, that the issue that I find that most students have with content is less about understanding the “what” of the content, and more about the “how” and “why”. One of the most common complaints I hear from students about the Quant section, for example, is “I often don’t understand what they are asking. Once I understand what they are asking, I can do the math”.

Welcome to the GMAT! Key to content mastery is understanding how to recognize what they are asking: how to break down the language and recognize key phrasing that indicates a certain topic or set of relationships (e.g. why is this question testing perfect squares, or inverse proportionality, or adverbial modifiers, or parallelism…).

This is an integral part of content mastery. When I teach my students the content of the exam, I always insist on them demonstrating the ability to apply their knowledge in the context of real questions, with an understanding of why it is relevant to do so in each case.  I also rely heavily on a kind of analysis similar to what doctors call “differential diagnosis”; in this process we look at similar presentations and learn to distinguish different content subtleties or areas.

Strategy

Arguably one of the most important secret ingredients to success on the GMAT is the use of strategy. The term strategy here refers to a few different aspects of preparation. Time management is one important aspect. The clock creates a clear and present challenge for most test-takers, especially on the Quant section of the exam. Learning how to manage your time on the Quant section, including benchmarking, strategically guessing when necessary, and proper pacing, is a vital part of your preparation.

A second integral part of strategy, though only relevant for the Quant section, involves different methods for approaching questions. I use the acronym MPC to encompass the variety of options that are often available for solving most Quant questions.