Joel Charalambakis- Owen (Vanderbilt)
June 1, 2016
Joanna Lu (Cambridge)
June 9, 2016
The Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) is a must if your academic goals include going to business school.
According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, which owns and administers the GMAT, the exam is accepted at 6,000+ programs offered by 2,100+ universities and programs globally. The exam, moreover, helps post-secondary institutions to find the best possible candidates for their graduate management programs.
So you definitely want to take the exam seriously, and fortunately there are lots of resources available to help you prepare for the GMAT. What follows is a look at some of the best study resources and some tips to help you prepare.
Best GMAT Tests
While there are lots of resources available that can help you prepare for the GMAT, they aren’t all equal in terms of usefulness. This means that you have to be diligent in selecting the right ones. The four listed below will help you since they provide the opportunity to tackle lots of sample problems and to take realistic practice exams.
With The Princeton Review GMAT, you can take advantage of practice exams that are as true to life as you can get. In other words, these sample tests follow the same format as the GMAT you will eventually have to take, and that means that your answers, whether correct or incorrect, will determine how difficult the following questions will be.
If you’re looking for one of the best GMAT tests, then the resources from TestMasters will fit the bill. The company claims that its instructors have all scored in the 98th percentile of actual GMAT exams, and therefore their knowledge of the exam is based on hands-on experience. Leveraging their skills, they can help you to achieve a great score come test day. The company also claims that for more than two decades it has helped tens of thousands of test takers achieve great scores on standardized exams. It offers live courses, online courses, and tutoring.
KapTest offers lots of resources for a variety of exams, including the GMAT. The company provides a very extensive collection of questions that will help you prepare for the exam, and there are multiple full-length practice exams that follow the computer-adaptive format that the real GMAT follows. So you’ll definitely get a good feel for what to expect.
GMAT Study Tips
According to an expert cited in a Bloomberg article, the way you studied in high school won’t necessarily help as much as you might think when preparing for the GMAT.
The expert said that there are two key study tips that will help you do well on the exam.
First, you need to make a point of studying new questions regularly. Working on new problems, rather than sticking with the same ones for too long, will condition you to concentrate on the application of the information rather than solely on the information.
Second, you need to think conceptually rather than simply try to memorize everything. The reason for this is that if you merely memorize, you might get tripped up if presented with concepts that, while perhaps similar, are different enough to make it hard to apply what you merely memorized.
The GMAT is definitely important if you plan to go to business school. If you take advantage of the resources listed above and take the study tips to heart, you’ll be ready when test time arrives.
