GMAT Tips: Don’t Wait Too Long to Ask For Help

Right now, we’re at the time of year when the application ‘season’ for most business schools has closed and many GMATers look to the upcoming fall and winter of 2016 as future MBA application deadlines. While that is a significant period of time away, the burden is still on you to stay organized and proceed through your studies in a consistent fashion. To take it a step further, planning ahead is essential to properly achieve your goals this year. As you study for the GMAT, if you find that your practice GMAT scores become stuck, then you have to be willing to seek out expert advice. As a word of warning, while you might think that you can fix your problems on your own, you really cannot afford to wait until the last minute to seek out GMAT tips and help.

One of the BIG hurdles to improvement

It’s quite common for GMATers to spend months studying before they face the official exam. Unfortunately, many of those same people don’t stop to properly measure their progress and evaluate their overall study plans. At a certain point, almost all test takers get stuck at a particular scoring level – whether in the quant or in the verbal, some part of the test just doesn’t get better. With the proper GMAT tips, enough study time and the willingness to make the necessary adjustments to how they handle the exam, just about anyone can improve their GMAT score. However, the capacity to improve is not the same as KNOWING how to improve. At this exceptionally important point in the process, the unbelievable almost always happens – instead of seeking help and looking at valuable GMAT tips, those same test takers continue to study in the exact same ways that they studied before. One of the most common comments in online GMAT chat rooms is, “I don’t know why my GMAT score isn’t improving….” The immediate reason is that those test takers keep making the same fundamental mistakes in how they handle the full GMAT.

Change takes time

One of the best GMAT tips: to improve in any aspect of life, some type of change has to occur. When it comes to the GMAT score, a change could be big or small. As a simple example, the process of adding a bit more detail to your notes (e.g. labeling your work, summarizing paragraphs in RC, etc.) can make a big difference. In bigger terms, learning, practicing and mastering a new tactic can often help to correctly answer many more questions. Regardless of the scope of the change, it almost always takes time to properly incorporate that change into your work. People tend to be creatures of habit (and GMATers often develop bad habits when they study without any guidance). Those bad habits often take time to eliminate; there’s a big difference between using a new approach on a few practice questions and using it consistently and correctly during a timed, full-length practice test.

Waiting until the last month (or even closer to test day) before your official GMAT to ask for help puts an incredible burden on you to learn what you need to learn and properly make those changes in a short time frame. The GMAT is a consistent, predictable test, so you can absolutely train to score a higher level. However, that training takes time.

Big improvements almost always involve getting help

The greater the head start that you can give yourself to seek out and incorporate the needed expert GMAT advice, the more likely you’ll be able to improve your scores. This is all meant to say that you have to seek out help sooner rather than later. Whenever you think that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing, you should seek out help immediately. A higher score is never that far away, but you have to be forward-thinking enough to not put yourself in the position of needing to make big changes as you close in on test day. The experts are out there and willing to help.