How To Review GMAT® Practice Tests

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the G Math Strategy Podcast. You're here because you believe there's a better way to study for the GMAT, and so do we. We created the GMAT Strategy to maximize your results and minimize your efforts so you can get to the fun parts about business school and life as quickly as possible. My name is Isaac Poolia, and I've been teaching G MAT classes and tutoring privately for the GMAT for over a decade, and I've helped thousands of students get into the business schools of their choice. I'm excited to be a part of your MBA journey since we all at TGS believe that our world can benefit from the best possible business leaders that we can find. If this show is bringing you value, please share it with your friends and family who are studying so that together we can make this process as easy and as painless as it can possibly be. Let's go. Today, let's talk about how to learn as much as possible from your practice exams. Of course, all of us know how to go over practice exams, but that's not the same thing as actually learning from practice exams. And that's a subtle but extremely important distinction. I'm gonna give you a productive structure for this because unfortunately, just going over practice exams and getting a loose idea of what went well and what didn't usually does not move people's scores. And that's very, very heartbreaking when that happens. You'll see people on a lot of forum posts get into this negative cycle of like, I took three practice exams and my score didn't move, or I took three practice exams and my score went down, which is what happened to me back in the day when I was studying with very poor guidance. And so I'm going to just try to fix that situation for all of us right now. I'm going to start with something that might sound a little bit counterintuitive. The practice test itself is the least important part of the practice test cycle that we're going to talk through. And there is a cycle anytime you take a practice test, which is taking a baseline practice test. If you're just starting out, figuring out what your strengths and weaknesses are, working on your areas for opportunity, and then taking another practice exam to measure the results. That's kind of the basic cycle I'm talking about here. But the actual taking of the practice test itself is the least important part of that cycle. Obviously, it's a critical part of the cycle because otherwise, how are you going to measure your results? But being a critical part is not the same thing as being the most important part. And I know that might sound kind of weird, but just hear me out on this, okay? So think about it like going to the gym. When you're lifting weights, the actual workout, the the time that you're under the bar, the reps that you're doing, that's not the time that you're getting stronger. That's the time where you're breaking the muscle down, and you get stronger during the recover period. So when you're sleeping, when you are resting, when you're hanging out with your people, maybe even filming your lifts to see what your form looks like, getting feedback from a coach on whether your program is correct. Those are the times where you get the insights, the actual pieces of the puzzle connecting that improve your capacity the next time you go to the gym. So practice tests are very, very similar. The test itself is just a measurement, it's a diagnostic. It's like stepping on a scale when you're trying to lose weight. If you've tried to lose weight, you know that stepping on the scale is a critical, but the least important part of that process. The most important process, uh, pieces of the process of losing weight are in between the times that you step on the scale. So I I think it's a really important analogy to internalize for all of us because I think our subconscious belief when we come into the process is that taking the practice exam is like the most important part of that cycle. And I think I think if you don't break that belief and change the way you you think about it, I think it can lead to a lot of counterproductive actions. And I think that's that's what all false beliefs do. Uh well, maybe not all of them, like some false beliefs are probably harmless, but like most false beliefs that we have about important things and important situations that we're in in life are going to be extremely problematic. So we want to discover those false beliefs and we we want to remake them to be true beliefs. So just to head this off, if you're someone who's been taking a lot of practice exams, like a practice exam every weekend, which I hear a lot of people recommend and a lot of advice online recommends, and you're wondering why your score is not moving, this belief could be a big part of the problem. So let's start the process of building some more true beliefs to replace that potentially old false belief. So I'm gonna give you three steps to reviewing the practice exam that if you execute it on would make it like almost impossible to not improve. And I think those are the best processes. Those are all the processes always the processes I'm trying to seek out personally in areas of improvement in life. My life are the ones where I would have to like try to mess it up. So that's what I'm gonna try to give you right now. So it's gonna be simple, but a lot of times the best processes are extremely simple. So the first layer, the first key is assessing your timing. So after you take a practice exam, the very first thing you want to ask is, how is my time management? And the the reason for this is twofold. Number one is is sort of the obvious reason, which is I could know all the material that the exam tests, I could have perfect pattern recognition. Every time a question shows up, I recognize exactly what to do. And I could be perfect in terms of not missing questions I know how to do. So every time I realize I know how to do a question, I execute it perfectly and I never make a mistake, like I never do five plus five equals 11, or I never solve for X when the question is asking for Y. So all of that could be literally flawless. And if I run out of time in the section, while being perfect at those things, I'm I'm gonna get a bad result. Like that part I think is fairly obvious. Like let's just take a really extreme example. Let's say I do the first question of the exam absolutely perfectly, and then I have no time to do the other 20 questions of the exam. Well, how how's that gonna go? So I don't want to trivialize it because again, I think it's one of those things that until you examine it, until you like hear it said aloud or you say it out loud to yourself, it might be operating in the background, even though you know it's wrong. Like that's that's the really crazy thing about unexamined beliefs is a lot of times we know they're incorrect, but they're still governing our behavior, which is like, yeah, just a whole, a whole different side quest. Um, but staying focused on on the GMAT, the potentially non-obvious reason that timing is so important on the GMAT is because the GMAT is not scored entirely based on accuracy. And I I've talked about this a lot in the past, so I'm just gonna do a broad overview here. But if you want more detail, there's a video on our website, which is linked in the description of this content, and it's free. You can check it out and I'll I'll go much more in depth with how the scoring algorithm works. But the short version is your score is not based entirely on accuracy, which is very different from tests you've taken in the past. Pretty much every test we've taken in the past has been scored only on accuracy. And so I'm just thinking about how many times was I right, how many times was I wrong. And if you don't believe me on this or you or you want a little bit more data to kind of back up what I'm saying, just do a quick web search on uh any any GMAP forum. And uh let's see, what would be a good keyword? Um yeah, just like score drop or accuracy, either of those keywords, you'll see a lot of posts where people are like, hey, I got more questions right this last time I took the practice exam, but my score was lower. What's the deal with that? My guess is in about five minutes, you could probably find like 20 to 100 posts that say something about that. And that makes sense because it's really confusing. It's like, wait, what do you mean the score is not based entirely on accuracy? Now, obvious, maybe not obviously, but like you do need to get questions right to get a score. So I'm not saying accuracy is irrelevant. Accuracy matters. Uh, but accuracy is not the only component of the score on the GMAT. The other component is the difficulty level of questions. We're not used to thinking about the difficulty level of questions factoring into our score in a significant way the way it does on the GMAT. And that's why we made the video for you on the site, because it's it's a little bit of a longer discussion to talk about the intricacies of that and how you can strategize around it. But again, just to kind of give you the high-level overview, if if I miss an easy question, that actually hurts my score more than if I miss a hard question. Okay, so that's the potentially non-obvious reason that timing matters, because I if I invest all my time in getting hard questions right, I might not have time to get the easy questions right or the questions I know how to do right. And that can actually have an outsized negative effect on the score. So even though the sort of timing thing might be obvious on the surface, there's this other layer underneath it that's worth discussing so that you can master this process of improving from practice exams. And I highly recommend mastering it because number one, it's it's not rocket science, as you're gonna see in a moment. Um, and number two, it's extremely valuable because practice tests uh are very costly in terms of your time and energy. And if you've taken any of them, you don't need me to remind you of that. And so we want to make sure that there's an actual return on that investment of time and energy when you're taking a practice test. Again, maybe obvious, but worth saying. So, again, might sound a little technical with the algorithm thing. If you want more information on that, I've given you a resource for that. If you're like, okay, cool, this I like I trust your judgment, Isaac, just like tell me what I got to do. That's what I'm gonna move into now. So that's why you want to start by assessing your timing. And the main question that uh that you want to ask is did I put enough time into the questions that I knew how to do? Or not? That's the simplest question you can ask to assess whether your timing was was managed well. Because almost nobody has time to answer every single question well in the section. It's it's it's a kind of like a weird feature of the exam because the exam adapts based on every response you give. So if you get a question wrong, your next question is going to be a little bit easier. By and large, it's not a perfect correlation with that, but by and large, if you get a question right, by and large, the next question is gonna be harder. So if I get three or four right in a row, I'm almost guaranteed to see a question that I don't know how to do unless I drop like 10 minutes on it. Okay, so this is why I'm saying like, did you invest your time well enough? Did you manage your time well enough such that you had plenty of time to get all the questions you knew how to do right? If I got those three questions in a row right in 20 seconds each, maybe I can afford to drop 10 minutes on the fourth question and get it right. So I'm not, I'm not saying you should never spend 10 minutes on a question. It's that's usually a bad thing, but there could be certain situations in which it could be okay. The main question that's underneath all timing problems is did I have time to get the questions I knew how to do right? Because if I have time to get the questions I knew how to do right, then my score will at the very least represent my actual skills and abilities. And I think that's the place where we tend to not be too frustrated by the results of the exam. I think the frustration and the disappointment and the discouragement and the lack of progress comes from when we know that our score does not represent our true capabilities. And that's why the timing layer is so important. Without the timing layer done well enough, doesn't need to be perfect, but done well enough, my score will, by definition, never represent my actual abilities and all the work I put in will not show up in the result. That's really frustrating. And also the opposite of the reason we're talking about this right now, and the opposite of the reason you're prepping for the exam in the first place. You want a score that at least represents your capability or more. Now, if you look at your timing and you're like, okay, I spent a little more time than I wanted to on this one, I spent a little less time on this one than I wanted to, but but basically I had enough time to get all the questions I knew how to do right. That's good timing. It's not two minutes per question on average. It's not never spend more than three minutes, although that is a very good guideline. And I often give that guideline to people who are early on in the process just so they have something to grasp onto. And so it's not too nebulous, like, oh, no big deal, you know, 10 minutes on a question is no problem. It's that's not that helpful for people who are just starting out. Um, at the very beginning, don't worry about time at all, probably for the first like month or so. But then fairly soon, you're gonna want to at least have some count up timers, even if you're spending 15 minutes on questions. And then you'll graduate to count down timers. And when you do, three minutes is a reasonable limit. Usually, if you're spending four minutes on a question, even if you're getting it right, that's one point for the price of two. And that that usually does not pay off. But this is a very broad audience that I'm talking to right now. Um, you and I aren't working one-on-one, and I'm I'm not I'm not saying like, okay, for your specific situation, never spend more than three and a half minutes on a question. That that that kind of guardrail has its place. And maybe you need to set that kind of guardrail for you, and we'll talk about how to use the timing assessment to build a plan in a moment. But right now, I'm just going long on what is the proper assessment of your timing and why am I recommending that assessment? And hopefully that's landing well. Hopefully you're like, oh, I get it. If I had time to get all the questions I knew how to do right, then I'm at least getting credit for the stuff I know. And now all the studying I do between this test and the next test is actually gonna show up in the score because I'll have time to get credit for it. It'll also hopefully naturally lead you to the conclusion that it's completely okay to let go of questions that you don't know how to do. Because if you spend all your time on questions you don't know how to do, your score is gonna suffer for obvious reasons. Okay. So if you need to pause and write that down because it's a little counterintuitive, I'd recommend that. I'll also reiterate it at the end of the lesson. The way to assess whether your timing was good enough on a practice exam is if you had enough time to answer the questions that you knew how to do. If you didn't have enough time to answer the questions you knew how to do, then you didn't manage your time well enough. And the steps toward managing your time better should be fairly clear. Although I'll give you a system for assessing that in a moment. Right now we're just talking about the very first take. What do I assess when I see a practice exam? It's timing. Did the person have enough time to answer the questions they knew how to do or not? If they didn't, that's going to be the biggest turnaround as well for the score is improving that timing approach. Okay, so that's layer one. Layer two or key number two to assessing your practice tests is figuring out whether you missed questions you knew how to do or not. Now, the timing might have been a part of missing questions you knew how to do, like we were just talking about. And so that's why that's the most important layer. But once my timing is good enough, like I actually managed my time well enough so that I had time to do the questions I knew how to do, I might still miss questions I knew how to do, even though I had time to do them. And that's the next biggest opportunity for you. Because it doesn't require you learning anything new to get those questions right. You already knew how to do it right. You just need to change the way that you're executing. Okay, so the first layer is timing. How was my timing? First question I asked when I'm reviewing a practice test. Second question I ask is Did this person miss questions that they knew how to do, even if they did have time to do them? So what you're gonna want to do as you're going through your questions after you assess the timing is separate your incorrect responses into two categories. Category A is gonna be questions I knew how to do, but got wrong. And then category B is gonna be questions I either didn't know how to do or didn't know how to do well enough. Like I hadn't practiced them enough, or I wasn't fast enough on them, or I looked at them and I couldn't even figure out what the right strategy was. So that'd be category B. Category A is what we're talking about and focusing on now is what are the questions that I knew how to do, but still got wrong. So example of this might be like you misread the question. Like you did a bunch of correct math, but you misread it on the first read, and so your setup was off. Um another uh common mistake that I see is like calculation errors, things like that. Uh so five plus five equals 11. I mentioned that earlier. So most of us make those kinds of mistakes even despite our best intentions. And intentions are really important. Intentions for sure are really important, but habits are even more important. And usually we miss questions we know how to do because we uh we have not built a habit that would make it impossible to make that mistake. So uh, for example, there's a good book on this called Atomic Habits. If you're into reading, it's it's a good read. I don't know if I wholeheartedly recommend it because it might be kind of like uh a distraction for some of you. Because the concept in the book is is useful if you struggle to build good habits. But if you're good at building good habits, then it might be a little redundant. So medium recommendation there on the book. Uh, but but it is entertaining and there's some interesting research in it. But uh let's say we go back to the workout analogy, and you just forget to you you forget to weigh yourself after every workout. Like you do the workout, you do the diet, but you have no no data logging, that there's no feedback loop, there's no measure in. And that's not not because you didn't set the intention to weigh yourself at the gym every day. You just plain forgot. Like you had the intention, you had it written down, and uh just didn't do it, just forgot. Um, I think we can all relate to that kind of stuff, just part of being human. So, how do you how do you build a better habit around that? I think the the if we boil it down to the core, it's reminding yourself to do the habit way more than you think you need to be reminded. Like that that usually works. As as boneheaded and simple as that might sound, that's I think if we stripped it back, really what it's all about. So, for example, let's say I'm I'm the uh the person who forgets to weigh myself at the gym. Well, I it's kind of funny middle school memories coming back here, but I'm maybe I would go as far as to write it on my hand, like, hey, weigh yourself. But I think my adult self might try something a little more refined first. Like maybe I would send myself a text message, you know, and I check my phone at the end of the workout. Oh, yeah, I gotta weigh myself. You know, that's I guess the 21st century equivalent of my my middle school self. Uh my intentions were good in middle school. I'll give myself credit for that. My habits, maybe they could have used a little bit of work, but you know, how old was I? I gotta cut the young young Isaac a little slack there. Um obviously things worked out, you know. Maybe, maybe he had it all figured out. Maybe I should uh give give him more credit than than I currently am. Um so the point being, you want to find creative ways to remind yourself to do the things that you're not currently doing that you know you should be doing. So I could put a uh a sticky note on my refrigerator, weigh myself at the gym today. Or I could put a scale in the middle of my kitchen so that when I'm cooking, after I get home from the gym, it's like, oh right. I can't, I like literally could not forget to weigh myself. The scale is in the middle of the kitchen, it's right in the middle of what I'm supposed to be doing next. So I'm not saying you should go to those extremes. I'm just saying it's okay to go to those extremes if you have to. And if you think about what's on the line here of the whole rest of your entire career, weight against, okay, I need to remind myself to write what's asked at the beginning of a problem more often. I think you'll find that the return on investment there is pretty good. If you just remind yourself to write down what's being asked, and you're obviously dumping a lot of energy into this. If you're willing to listen to me talk about the GMAT on a podcast, like obviously you have the the intention and desire and willingness and motivation to succeed in this process if you're here right now. And so maybe you need to put the scale in the middle of the kitchen or whatever the version of that is for you. So I'll I'll give you a couple uh kind of G MAT versions of that thing. I just wanted to make the the sort of larger point first of like just find ways to remind yourself to do the habit. So here's how to do this well. Once you have your category A list of mistakes, and I highly recommend having one category A for your entire prep process. So practice sets, uh practice tests themselves, time sets, when you're going through the content knowledge building phase. If you're deep in the practice test phase and you haven't been logging it, go back to your last three practice exams at least. Ideally, all of them make this giant category A list so that you can see when I miss questions I know how to do, what's the most common cause of those misses? And don't put any of the category B mistakes in your category A list. It should be a completely separate list. Don't don't have it in one of these like error log templates that people spam us with. I don't know why people are so obsessed with this, uh, but they just love sending me spreadsheets of their error log template. It's like they're passionate man. It's crazy. I I really don't understand it. Maybe one of you can get me up to that. But um anyway, what I see with those a lot that I I fundamentally disagree with is there's like a sorting function on it, where there's like a drop-down menu in the spreadsheet that says careless mistake or something like that. Um I I just really have not seen that work. I think there's just too much noise in the data set, and we're all just a little too much on information overload. I think the intentions are good behind creating the spreadsheet that way. Like, oh, you know, what's better? One spreadsheet or two spreadsheets. Seems like simplicity is is better, less is more principle. Like, let's just make One spreadsheet with this cool macro or this this cool, you know, um VB code or whatever it's called when you're coding in Excel. Um so I think the intentions are good. And and I think like logically it seems like that would be the better solution. But I have just found that to be the clearly worse solution toward for solving this. I'm really not sure why. So I highly recommend just a totally separate list for the category A, knew how to do it, but got this wrong. And then a completely separate spreadsheet, completely separate notebook, completely separate list for category B, did not know how to do this. Um, obviously, if you're having success with the sorting function thing, then then keep doing what you're doing. I'm never gonna argue with your results. But man, I just I I really haven't seen that work. Sorry. Um, if if I'm if I'm raining on your parade. That's not my intention to rain on anyone's parade here. My intention is to help you and get you results. And I think you're gonna be fine with a little rain on your parade when when you get the result that you want to see and you're like, okay, that was worth it. So um, yeah. So just apologies in advance. I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings. That has no upside. I would never intentionally hurt someone's feelings. Um, yeah, I see no return on that investment. Uh, having said that, sometimes telling the truth hurts some people's feelings and being committed to the truth can be difficult as a result of that. But the truth is really what we need on this path. And so we're gonna do truth over feelings for now. Okay, just in this moment. So um once you have that category A list, it should become fairly obvious because most of you work with data all the time. What is the top cause of me missing questions I know how to do? And then what you want to do is just one reminder in as many places as you can possibly put it, one reminder to build a new habit around that one thing. So the other place that I see people go sideways, even if they have a good category A list of reasons that they're missing questions they know how to do, is they're working on like three, four, five, six of those habits at the same time. I I really haven't seen that work super well. I think you just want to work on one at a time, build the new habit such that you could not forget it, and then move to the next habit that'll help you stop missing the other questions you know how to do. So let's pick an example. Let's say I take a practice test, I see the result, I look at my timing, and I think, okay, not bad. I could have made some better decisions here, I could have made some better decisions here, but by and large, I had time to do the questions I knew how to do. So I'm gonna say, like, here's some small things I could do, but it's not gonna be a major focus area before the next practice test to improve my timing. Time is feeling pretty good. Then I'll look at the questions I knew how to do, and I realize, oh wow, I missed three questions I knew how to do in the quant section. Okay, why did I miss those? Okay, I can see one of them was a computation mistake. I did two plus two equals five. One of them was a reading reading mistake, I was just reading too fast, and I missed um combined rate versus separate rate, something like that. And then the third mistake, let's say, was um just a bubbling error. Like I knew the answer was C, but somehow I bubbled D. I know that sounds crazy, but like it does happen with some regularity. So let's say those are my three mistakes. Hopefully, I have a category A list of all the questions I knew how to do but missed in my entire prep process. And I can go look at that and say, okay, are any of these three mistakes that I've made before? And let's say the computation thing shows up more than anything else. Okay, great. What I'm going to do between now and my next practice test is remind myself thousands of times a day, if I can, to uh do a new habit that would make it impossible for me to make computation mistakes in the future. Okay. So this new habit distinction is important because if I just tell myself to fix the old habit, that actually makes it harder to do. So for example, if I just write a bunch of sticky notes in my bedroom that say, don't make computation mistakes, that usually doesn't work super well. Um you could probably think of a million examples of of this, but um maybe maybe one that a lot of people uh could relate to would be like maybe like eating too much or something like that. Um and it and and it's like or drinking too much, also common. Uh so it's like if if I drink too much, maybe I'm like, okay, self, like don't don't drink too much again. How how confident are you that I'm never going to drink too much ever again, just just as a result of me telling myself to do that? Okay, so here's how you could do that better. So if I if I drink too much, let's say, um, I want to say, okay, like, why did I drink too much? Okay, I was at a work event, I was kind of caught up in the moment. It was an open bar. I was like, okay, it's it's free. Uh I was having a good conversation with my coworker. She's like, you want to get another drink? I'm like, yeah, sure, you know, in the moment. And so then I end up having one too many drinks, and, you know, who knows? Maybe I just feel bad the next day and I'm not able to perform at my best. Okay, I don't want that to happen again. I don't like feeling bad. I don't like not performing at my best. So, what do I need to do to make it impossible that I would ever drink too much at a work event ever again? This is a really different question than what most people ask themselves. Most people ask, how do I fix that problem? I think that that is not the right question. I think the question should be a lot more severe. How do I permanently delete this self-sabotaging thing that I am doing because I do not want to be the kind of person who self-sabotages, especially on a standardized test that's bottlenecking me from getting the other stuff I want in my life? And I am also sacrificing a lot of other stuff I'd like to be doing in the moment to make time for studying for this test. And furthermore, I am now shooting myself in the foot and making it harder for me to get results. Okay. So we don't want to be soft-footed with how we handle ourselves in those questions. We don't want to be too hard on ourselves, because by definition, that's going to be counterproductive. But we want to be the right amount of hard on ourselves and say, like, okay, what would it take? Honestly, what would it take to completely delete this self-sabotaging sabotaging behavior? So what I might do in the uh drinking too much example is like really think about that. Okay, what would be the thing I could do that would just like delete that behavior? Okay, well, what if I what if I just made a rule for myself that I will only ever have two alcoholic beverages at any work function ever for the rest of my entire life? Like, could I live with that? Maybe an extreme example, maybe maybe this is not the right analogy, but let's just run with it and say it's going to be good enough for Gina. Okay, so I made that rule. So now what is my what does my problem become? It's not knowing what to do. I have the rule. I know that if I set that limit for myself and I obeyed that limit, that I would be good. I would never drink too much. So now I just have to remind myself of that rule enough times that that rule becomes a habit. A habit is behavior that requires zero willpower. That's what a habit is. It is an automatic behavior. That's why we need to remind ourselves of habits, new habits so much. We don't have those habits as the default behavior yet. Takes a lot of energy to make something totally default behavior, but it's totally doable. You've probably done it many, many, many times in your life. So, what I would do for the drinking example is I would text myself every day. I would have an automated email that emails me every day at four in the morning, two drinks maximum, and every work function for the rest of your life. And then uh, what else would I do? I would write it down on a physical piece of paper. I would have it on my desk at work or in my drawer at desk, you know, so it's a little more discreet, maybe. And I would basically remind myself so much of that thing that it would be, it would, I would have to go out of my way to forget it. I would have to put serious effort into forgetting it. Okay, so once I have that system in place where I'm just being reminded three, four, five, six, ten, a hundred times a day, every time I open my drawer at my desk, I'm like, right, two drinks maximum. I'm sorry, it's kind of an absurd example, but but you'll get the point. Okay, so then I'm going to set up a tracking system. So I'm just gonna have a simple spreadsheet and I'm gonna say, okay, work function a month later, how many drinks did I have? One, when? Okay, work function three months later, how many drinks did I have? Two, when? Work function three months later, how many drinks did I have? Zero. When? Okay, once I have at least three data points of doing the behavior right, then I can remind myself less often. So maybe I would set an email reminder once a month or once a week. But I'm never gonna stop reminding myself to do that because habits are perishable. All of us know habits are perishable as a person. And so I never want to completely stop reminding myself of that behavior, or I'm likely to slip back into the old bad habit. But I will decrease my reminders as I've proved to myself and gather more data that I can do the new behavior well. Okay, so let's let's put this in the GMAT context and use a less absurd example. So for GMAT, um let's say I'm I'm back to the computation mistake thing and I recognize that in my practice test, and then I can back that up with my category A list. What I'm doing is I'm saying, okay, the number one priority between now and this next practice test is a new behavior to prevent computation mistakes. So what could I do that would make it impossible for me to make a computation mistake ever again on a GMAT question? Okay, well, one thing that I've seen work really well that's really simple is every time I write a new line on my scrap paper, I'm gonna check the previous line to make sure I didn't do anything wrong. And I I personally do this, I made this habit for myself back when I was in your shoes because I was I was so bad with missing questions I knew how to do. It was so painful. Longer story for another time. So let's say I make that rule and I'm like, okay, let me test that rule out. So first thing I have to do is remind myself to do that rule 100% of the time. Otherwise, I'm not gonna have uh enough data to assess whether the rule is working. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna text myself, always check the previous step when writing uh a step on a Gmac question. Okay, great. I'm gonna have myself an e an automated email every single day at four in the morning, top of my inbox, every single day when I open up my email, check check the work on the previous step when writing a new step on my scratch work. Um, I'm gonna I'm gonna tell my wife, hey, I need you to annoy the crap out of me by asking me at least once a week, preferably every day, hey, when you were studying for the GMAT, remember how you asked me to ask you if if you're checking your work on all your stuff? I would do that. What else would I do? Physical reminder on the desk. I would have a note card out on my desk where I study for the GMAT, or I would like keep it in in um some place, like if I study in in random places like cafes or libraries, I would have it as like the bookmark in my book with it written in really big letters. Check the previous step of math, and then I would put it on the desk while I'm doing math questions in a very conspicuous place so that I so that I could not forget. I would have to go out of my way to forget to do that. And then I track. I track, okay. So it can be in the same spreadsheet as the category A mistakes. Just to the right, I can make a new table or a new sheet, whatever you're into. And I can just say, like, okay, study session on Tuesday. Did I did I try did I look back at my previous work 100% of the time on every single question? If I have a 90% hit rate, okay, that's pretty good. Maybe on my practice test it was only a 50% hit rate or a 0% hit rate. I didn't even have that habit before. Okay, 90 is a good step in the right direction. That's good progress. Let's see if I can get 91 tomorrow. Okay, Wednesday, did I do at least 91? Okay, I did 95%. Beautiful. Headed in the right direction. Thursday, did I do 100%? 100%. Fantastic. I've got three data points. Now I'm gonna back off and remind myself a little bit less often. Have a nice discussion with my uh beautiful, caring, and supportive wife. Hey, got good news for you. Three days in a row, checked the scratch work. Uh, totally fine if you want to stop reminding me of that. Okay, cool. Um, you get the idea at this point, okay? And I'm sorry if I'm over-explaining this, but um, this is the way I needed it explained to me back when I was in your shoes because I would read the blog posts or I would like read the books, or like, I don't know, the forums didn't forums weren't really a thing. YouTube wasn't wasn't really like as good as it is now uh back when I was in your shoes. Uh so yeah, it was like mostly blogs and and books. Um and like live and and live basically. Like you could take a live class or do live tutoring, but like uh the whole the whole like um really good video web conferencing thing that that kind of popped off during COVID, that that wasn't really a thing when I was studying back in your day. So um and the whole automated course software web app thing hadn't hadn't really like matured. There was a little bit of that, but it but it wasn't great. So all that to say, I would read those things, but reading it was just not enough. It was just so obviously not enough because I read the thing uh obsessively. Like I I've probably read every article on the entire internet about the G Mat when I was in your shoes. And I still would miss questions I knew how to do. And so that's when I realized, like, okay, who cares why that's happening? I just need a solution. Like it doesn't, it doesn't matter if that makes me a bad person or if I have if I'm if I'm dumb, or uh if if I just like had a bad upbringing, or like Sigmund Freud would disapprove of what my parents told me when I was a kid. I mean, like, none of that matters, guys. All that matters is what is the solution? I just need to get where I'm going. Um now, if there's some like underlying, you know, obviously morally corrupt thing, clearly I would have fixed that. Okay. And you would too. Like, we're all good people on this path. Um but like the point that I'm making is passively absorbing information and advice was not enough. I needed to remind myself to an absurd degree. And hopefully that's way more than you need to do. Um, and maybe I am dumb. I mean, like, who cares? I'm I'm getting what I want out of life. What what other KPI do we need here? You know, uh, it took a lot of effort, an obscene amount of effort. I'm showing you 1% of the effort it took me to get what I wanted on the GMAT. Um, but at the end of the day, I encourage you to use the same KPI. Am I getting what I want out of this situation or not? Am I being the kind of person that I want or not? Do I feel the way I want to feel when I wake up in the morning or not? Those are the KPIs that really matter, guys. At the end of the day, we're just doing stuff because we want to feel how we want to feel. So who cares what your parents said to you when you were a kid? I'm not trying to say that that's a that that's something you shouldn't examine. I'm just saying, like, a lot of people get too lost in the why. And it's like, just go for the solution. Just if you have to remind yourself a thousand times a day, just do it, man. It's worth it. There's there's the value's there. Okay. So I'm giving you my system. Text myself, email myself. Important stakeholders in my life, remind me verbally. Friends, hold me accountable to this. Co-workers, buddies at work. Hey man, sorry to ask you this, but like, remember how I did that thing for you that time and that place? Can you do me a solid on this? Um, that kind of stuff works really, really well. But you need to figure out what works for you. So the physical reminder thing, really, really useful. I've found that works for a lot of people. Like physical note card on the desk, can't not see it. That works really, really well. Okay, so that's what you're gonna do if you're successful in building the habit. Let's talk about if you fail to build the habit. So I check my category A mistake list, computation's my problem. I make the rule of rechecking the thing, uh the previous step that I wrote on every new step that I write. I go to the library the next day, I go from 0% to 90% on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I have all the reminders, and on Wednesday, I only do it on 50% of the problems. Okay, now I'm going backwards. That's not good. So, what that tells me is my reminder system is not good enough. I'm not reminding myself enough. I've already proven to myself, I've already sold myself on the value of doing this thing. So therefore, not doing it would be totally irrational. Most of us are very rational people. So the the most rational deduction is I'm not, I didn't remind myself enough to do it. Like I clearly want to do it. I clearly know what I should be doing. I clearly am capable of doing it. I just forgot. So that's when you know your reminder system is not good enough. So that's when you that's when you're like, okay, well, email's not working. What else could I do to remind myself? Maybe I need to write it on my hand and pen. Okay. Maybe I write it on my forearm or I wear long sorts of long sleeve shirts to work every day so nobody else sees it. But when I'm at the library, I roll it up and it's like, all right, there it is. Um, so again, just kind of comical examples there, but I'm more trying to give you the philosophy behind it. Let's give you a couple tactics. So writing the thing on a note card on your desk is pretty good, but I haven't seen that be like a hundred percent thing. So I think it's a good piece of the solution. I think the emailing yourself a hundred times a day thing works pretty well because a lot of us check our email a lot more than we realize. The texting ourselves thing helps. Um what else have I seen that's that's really good? Physical reminders, uh, like a bracelet or a necklace or a ring or something like that can be really good, like something where you you feel it. Something inconvenient works really, really well. So I talked about the scale in the middle of my kitchen. If I'm forgetting to weigh myself at the gym, it's like, okay, I just I can't miss it. Okay, so one thing you could do that I've seen work well is put your pen pencil down or pen down uh while you're while you're reading a question. And when when you're ready to write something down, you pick up the pen, you write that down, and then you force yourself to put the pen down again. And you can't pick the pen up again until you have checked the previous step on your work. Okay, write the next step, put the pen down. Now, obviously you're you're probably not gonna do that on test day, but it's it's a stepping stone. Like you need the extreme reminder system so that you can get to the reasonable reminder system so that you can get to the place where it's an automatic behavior where you don't need a reminder system anymore. And I think people are just not extreme enough with themselves with this stuff. Some of you are, some of you are too extreme and you need to back it off a little bit, and that that's fine. You already know that. Uh, but I I have found that most people, most people are like, oh, I'll just make this flashcard, or uh, oh, I'll just put this note in my error log and and you know, that'll be great. But I I gotta make time to do a lot of new problems, otherwise, I'm not gonna get better, or some some version of that. And yeah, I think I think you need to ask yourself a deeper question. I think you need to ask yourself seriously, what would it take to completely, permanently, irrevocably delete this self-sabotaging behavior for the rest of my entire existence? And if you really, really sit down and think hard about that question, I think you'll come up with good answers. And I think it'll mostly come back to reminding yourself a lot. That's been the most positive thing. There's the whole reward and punish thing. That works for some people. Um, I'm not gonna go there because I think the hit rate on that is maybe like 70% at best. Uh, so I think the thing that I that I think is gonna work in a in a general context like this, without me knowing more about you personally, would be the reminder piece. So think about creative ways to remind yourself and hold yourself accountable. Um, even if you need a public leaderboard on your refrigerator at home with your roommates where they can see whether you execute it on your habits 100% of the days or not, if you got to go public with it, go public with it, everybody. But the most important key I'm trying to give you today is that extreme question of, okay, what would it take to permanently delete this? That's the real key takeaway here. And the second key takeaway is one new habit at a time. Keep your category A list, focus on one thing, and only move on to the next thing when you have proven to yourself that you can do the new behavior at least three times in a row. Three times would be the bare minimum in a row that I would uh accept before allowing someone to move on to allowing myself, I should say, to move on to the next habit on the list. Uh when I'm working with clients specifically, there's there's exceptions to every rule. Um, and and that's the whole point of personalization, and that's why personalization produces such fast results because it's all about that one individual. It doesn't need to be generalized at all. What works for that one person works for that one person, and that's what we do. But in a generalized format, we need something that's a little more scalable. And so hopefully I've given you that. Okay, we'll come back to the category B misses and how to deal with those a little bit later. But for now, step one is did I have enough time to do the questions I knew how to do? Step two is did I miss questions I knew how to do? And if I did, do I have a list of all of those that I've ever done in my entire prep? And step three is do I have a reminder for the top number one thing that I could fix that would keep me from doing that? And am I executing well with my reminder system? Okay. So the next layer is a question by question review, and this is gonna be kind of obvious. Excuse me. We just got a new cat. Some of the cat hair has made it to the off the office. And uh yeah, it got it got stuck in the throat. Sorry about that. It sucks. Um I think I'm good now. Okay, so the question by question review. This one I think is is gonna be like the most obvious out of all three layers, and so I'm gonna go over this kind of quickly. Now, once you've assessed your timing and whether you're missing questions you know how to do, you can you can just go over all the questions in the exam and start to separate them into category A versus category B. Web search them if you need a good solution or if your platform that you're using has pre based solutions in the software or in the practice. Practice exam. That's awesome too. Start to do your regular analysis. Okay, why did I miss this? Should it go in category A? Should it go in category B? And maybe the one tip I can give that seems a little counterintuitive for people is you also want to do a solid review on the questions you get right. Even if there's no takeaway other than I'm good at this, you want to at least do a quick web search and just check out some other solutions that other people are doing just to make sure that you have the best approach that you can have for those. And if you don't have the best approach and you realize there's a better way to do that problem, even if you got it right, then put that in your category B list and just treat it as a question you didn't have uh a good enough process for. Okay. But that's not category A, obviously, if you got it right. Um clearly that's not a question you knew how to do and got wrong. Okay, so we'll keep that really, really simple. Just the going over questions thing is just separating um questions into category A versus category B. Okay. The uh the number one thing you can do with the category B questions is take 20% of all your future study sessions and take that 20% and use it to solve those category B questions again and just keep solving them over and over and over and over again until until you know them so well that you could if you the moment you see the question, you immediately can visualize the path to the right answer. That's that's what you're going for, is like that instant pattern recognition. Because when you have that instant pattern recognition on a familiar question, you'll have much more instant pattern recognition on a unfamiliar question that has that one familiar element in it. And the questions you'll see on test A, for the most part, are gonna be recombinations of stuff you've seen in your practice. It might not be the exact same question with different numbers, certainly not gonna be a question with the same numbers. They're very good about not repeating literal questions. But the questions you do see on test A, like if you see a rates question, it'll probably have at least one or two things in it that you've seen on previous rate questions. And if you immediately identify those pieces, then you can solve those first two pieces of the problem. And usually that's the hardest part about GMAT quant questions and GMAT verbal questions and GMAT DI questions, is just getting that initial one to two steps going. And then once you get that, you usually have momentum through the problem. Or it's very obvious that you don't know what the third or fourth step is and you can just let it go, like I was talking about before, and invest that time in a question you do know how to do. And that's fine. By by and large, just to give you a metric, most of us are gonna not know how to do maybe 20 to 30% of questions we see on test day. And so that that seems that I think can be kind of disconcerting if you're used to getting 90% right on all your exams. All of a sudden, every third question, you're like, wait, I don't know how to do this. It can feel really, really weird, but that's totally normal, just so you know. And again, that algorithm video is there for you on the website if you want more of the technical understanding behind that. Okay, so those are your three layers of review. You've got timing. Hopefully, I've explained to you why that's the most important and most foundational. Then you've got missing questions you know how to do. Maybe I didn't explain well enough why that's so important, but the simple way to understand that is knowing more stuff will not help your score if you're missing questions you know how to do. So, like all the content study that you do and all the platforms you're buying and all the money you're investing with your coach, like whatever you're doing, um, that that's not gonna improve the score because you're you're not even getting questions right that you already know how to do. So, how is knowing more stuff a solution to that question? It's not uh the problem, it's not. So we have to solve these things in the right sequence. That's why we got three layers to the cake. Then once I have a good system for improving timing and improving my uh missing questions I know how to do, then knowing more stuff actually will show up in the score. So that's why we have it in that order. And by the way, if you if you need a system for getting faster, like your time management was bad, and you're like, how do I get better at it? We've got a whole episode called How to Get Faster at GMAT Focus Questions. Uh the GMAT was rebranded GMAT Focus a couple years ago, and then now it's just called the GMAP, but it's the same thing. So that's why it says in 2024 and beyond on some of those episodes. Um, because that's what that's that's what we're living with, is the exact same exam that came out in 2024. Okay, so those are our three layers of review. So now once you've finished that review, what do you actually do? What's the operational system to get better? So the highest level of the operational system is pick only three things to focus heavily on before the next practice test. I think the biggest mistake I see is people spreading themselves too thin between practice tests and trying to have like eight focus areas. Maybe you're way more capable than I am, uh, and and eight focus areas works for you. I have never seen that work with the GMAT. Uh so maybe that's maybe that's just because of the nature of the work I do. Like people, people who don't need help don't get in touch with me. So there's probably people out there who can do the eight focus area thing. So trying to be sensitive to that. And hopefully that's you. That'd be awesome. Would definitely love to learn your system if if it's systematizable, but maybe it's genetic. I don't know. But what I've seen is people get the fastest results with one, two, or three focus areas. And then what you do is you take 20% of your time, you're doing the category B resolving. Then of that 80%, you have maybe half of that, half of that or a third of that goes to maintaining everything you've already built. And then um the other, let's say, like 80% of the 80%, that goes to these three focus areas. So lots, so like 40% of your time there could could be review, give or take. So um usually it works out to be about 30%. So 20% of the overall study time goes to resolving questions from category B. Then 20% of 80% is like 16%. So maybe, you know, another out of an hour, it's gonna be like five, 10 minutes. You're gonna work on uh all the things that are not those three focus areas. So let's pick three focus areas to give you a more specific example. So let's say I'm gonna focus on data sufficiency. That's a big pain point for me. Let's say uh my timing's good, but my uh computation mistakes are a big problem. So I'm gonna make checking my previous step a big focus area. And then let's say in verbal, I need to work on critical reasoning strengthen questions. So, what I'm gonna do in an hour-long study session is my first 10 minutes or so are gonna be resolving category B questions so that I'm um using all the review I've done in the past to actually grow my skills and I'm not just covering stuff and never revisiting it and not learning it. And then the next segment of my study session, I'd set a timer for 15 minutes and I'd maybe do like one reading comp question. I would do um, let's see, I've got uh I've got plenty of quant in my study plan because I'm working on computation. So reading comp, I don't have as a focus area. Other non-focus areas would be DI questions that are not data sufficiency. So I'd probably do an MSR on Tuesday and then a couple graphs on Wednesday, and then a couple tables on Thursday. I'd probably set up a plan or schedule a calendar for myself like that. And then what else would I need to work on? That pretty much covers everything that I would see on the test. So then my my main three focus areas cover everything else. Um, well, if I'm doing critical reasoning strengthen, then I might on Friday. Maybe I would do like an assumption question and a weekend question and an evaluate question or something like that. And then I would go into my focus areas. Now, for your focus areas, you could do like Monday is critical reasoning strengthen day, Tuesday is computation, check the previous step day, and Wednesday is data sufficiency day. You can totally do it like that. Or you you can do like in an hour-long session, okay, 20 minutes of CR strengthen, 20 minutes of computation work, 20 minutes of data sufficiency. That um can really work either way. So however you want to split that up, as long as on a weekly basis you're putting about this, about that 80-20 split into those new focus areas, I think you're good. Okay, so I've gone super long in the past on what to do with those focus areas. Um, so if you're looking for more instruction on uh how to improve your focus areas, like how do I get better at data sufficiency, we've literally got a data sufficiency episode. If you're looking at how do I get better at CR strengthen, we've literally got a critical reasoning episode. So I would start with those if you're doing the free prep process. If you have a paid provider, just go to the section that they have on that stuff and look at it again and make sure you've learned all the key components of it and that your process is good. And then what I would do is just find official guide questions wherever you can, either by buying the official guide or whatever you're into. I highly recommend buying the official guide. And find all the official guide questions on those topics and do them all. Keep it that simple. So just do them one at a time. So I would I would literally do every single data sufficiency question in the OG, whether I've done it before or not, I would go to it and I would just every every day I would do however many I can get through on that day until I have done all of them and I have truly mastered data sufficiency. Again, the idea is not how do I get a little better at this, it's how do I delete this problem permanently. That works well. Same thing with critical reasoning strengthen. I'm gonna find every critical reasoning strengthen question in the official guide. I'm gonna do them all. I'm gonna do them one at a time. I'm not gonna do them as a time set. I'm gonna, that's totally unrealistic. I'm never gonna see 10 CR strengthen questions in a row on a real GMAT. So don't practice that way. It's counterproductive. And uh then I am going to, if needed, find other sources of critical reasoning questions. So there's supplemental official guides you can get from MBA.com, there's third-party uh source questions, some of which are very good online. And uh you can reach out to us at the GMAT Strategy on current social channels or email us contact at the gmaststrategy.com. Our contact page on our website should be linked in the description below if you want to get in touch. We're happy to get you some other stuff if you need it and not necessarily charge you for it, by the way. Um we we usually don't default to selling, we default to helping. And then if you want to buy from us, just let us know and and we'll tell you what we have. Um but yeah, just I needed that back in the day, and everybody was trying to sell me something, and that turned out to be kind of a crappy experience. And I don't want to give anyone else that experience. So that's why we run our company that way. Maybe that's not the right way to run a company. Um, maybe you're way more successful at running businesses than I am, but so far, so good for us here. Um so that's how you do that. It just just to keep it simple. Now, if you're working with a coach or you have a program that has like a much more detailed explanation, uh then follow that advice. But in a podcast where maybe you're gonna listen to this once and I want to make sure that what I tell you like sticks and that it's usable and simple, that's what I would do. And that is a little brute force ish, so maybe it's not gonna be the most slick tactical thing, but it's it's almost certainly gonna work. Okay, so if you do a good job identifying the focus areas, the things that are causing you the most pain on the on the the um the test, and that's a simple analysis. What thing, if I fixed it, would turn the most red to green? What what thing am I missing the most? You all can do that analysis. What are the top three? You can all do that analysis as well. You don't need uh MBA level spreadsheet skills to do that. Um then then you're gonna know what to focus on. And then it's just a matter of, okay, well, how do I get better at that? That's where the brute force approach approach really shines. If you've already known what you need to improve at and then you brute force it, that's probably gonna work really, really well. Okay, so just all the official guide questions in that area. And same thing with computation. I would do all the quant questions in the official guide until I just could not make a computation mistake on them. It's fine if I don't know how to do some of them. I can live with that. But I I won't accept missing a question that I knew how to do. I have to just become the kind of person who will not tolerate that anymore. We tend to get what we tolerate in life. If you tolerate it, you're probably gonna get more of it. It's a very difficult truth to confront as a person, but yeah, our standards are just increasing impactful on our results. Crazy, crazy powerful stuff. Again, another long side convo there. But that's that's it. That's the system. Okay, so I'm gonna just hit it one more time and then we'll move on to some kind of quick hitter tips for you and wrap up. So, how do I how do I learn from practice tests? How do I actually review practice tests in a way that improve my skills and improve my scores? Number one, I have to assess timing first and I have to make sure that I have a good enough timing system that I have time to get the questions I know how to do right. And I have to accept that it's okay to let go of questions that I don't know how to do. And if you need more help with letting go of questions you don't know how to do, I talked about that a lot in our How to Break Through Score Plateau episodes, which we'll link below for you and should be searchable in the feed. I think we might also have a written blog post on that if that's easier for you to digest or reference or put into your uh claude skill or whatever you whatever you guys are cooking up these days out there, crazy kids. Uh I gotta say, I love me some claud skills, guys, you know. So maybe, maybe I'm maybe I'm the problem here. Uh anyway, so second, second thing you do is make sure you have that category A list. Do I have a list of every single question I knew how to do for my entire prep? If not, build that. It'll be crazy helpful for you. And you will you will come face to face with the chilling realization of what is causing you to miss questions you know how to do the most, and then you're just gonna remind yourself a boatload to do that. Uh start with the send yourself an email every day. If that doesn't work, physical reminder in a place that you cannot miss it, like put put a put a scale in your bed where you sleep at night so that when you're laying down to go to bed, you couldn't forget to weigh yourself. You would not even be able to fall asleep without moving the scale and weighing yourself. Okay. So whatever the equivalent is for that, for your new habit for GMAT, do that. Physical reminder if you need it. Third layer is just go over the questions. You're probably doing that already, and then just make sure you separate them into category A versus category B. And then with your category B, just first 20% of every study session, resolve those questions. Okay. I know it might feel a little bit weird the first time you resolve some questions, and like logically it might not make sense why that's valuable. But if you do it a few times in a row, I think I think you'll really like it. And I think you'll really see, like, oh shoot, I should have been doing this the whole time. Okay. So that's that. Then once you've reviewed your questions in the exam, you're gonna find the top three problem areas that would turn the most reds to greens, the most wrongs to right. You're gonna limit yourself to three of those. 20% of the 80% of your study session that's devoted to new material is devoted to stuff that's not those three focus areas. So you're just keeping that warm on the back burner. And then you have the rest of the session to focus either like one day a week on focus area one or all three focus areas every study session. And the way to do those is just every question in the official guide. Simple, simple, simple, but it works. Okay. So let me know if that's too complicated. We're super open to feedback. There's a feedback form in the piece of pretty much every content I think we've ever put out, or at least a link in the bio. And we're very, very open to feedback and we love hearing from you guys, and we very much value your time. So it's not like a 20 question feedback thing unless you unless you want to answer all 20 questions on there. There's just a thing at the top, like, hey, what feedback do you have? And then you can submit. And we really appreciate that, by the way. And you can't hurt our feelings. Okay. So that's the technical side of everything. So let's talk about the emotional side a little bit. Um a lot of us are going to put our self-worth into the number on the screen. And I don't know if that's good or bad. I've thought about it a lot. I really still don't know if that's good or bad. I think we could make the argument that it's good. I think we could make the argument that it's bad. The reason I wanted to have this segment in here is just so that you know you're not alone with that. And that pretty much everybody is either like too high because they got a good result, or too low because they got a bad result. And what I've realized about this emotional roller coaster that I think is just part of the day-to-day of like, oh, I had a good practice set on Tuesday and a bad practice set on Wednesday, or I had three good practice sets on in a row on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday was a bad practice set, and now I'm thinking about giving up. I think that's totally normal. I think, I think just achiever type people tend to put our self-worth into those external measures. And the reason that I'm bringing it up is I think if you realize that it's it's normal and that it happens to pretty much everybody, then you can separate yourself from it a little bit. And I think it doesn't govern your behavior as much. You're kind of like, oh yeah, I'm feeling down because I just had a bad set. That makes sense. I want to do well on this thing, and I care about doing a good job in general, and I've been working really hard on this thing. So obviously I want it to go well when I sit down to practice it. Like that's all super reasonable. My bad feelings about my bad performance are very reasonable feelings. And I think if you can, if you can think about it that way, then I think you can get to the place that I think most of us want to get, which is like, okay, what can I learn from that? All right, let me show up tomorrow and keep going. Which I think is the best place to get to because that's what drives the results. Driving the thing that drives the results is just uh more intelligent effort, like well-designed effort definitely works. You want something data backed as far as human history goes, like going back thousands of years, intentional, intelligent effort applied at the right place and the right time, which is the system I just gave you, that works. That that we can go back to uh we can go back to all the greats of history, whoever you admire. They probably did that, and that's probably why they were great. They they did intelligent application of effort. And I guess if we were to boil the MBA down to what are the skills you learn in an MBA program, it's it's that. It's how do I imply my effort more intelligently, and that's that's why you get more for your effort. Makes sense. So that's that's just a quick aside. It's it's we don't need to go long on it. Um but it's it's worth it's worth talking about at least a little bit, okay? So there's that kind of like small point at the end. A couple more small points for you that that might end up being big points, actually, now that I think about the emotional point, might be the biggest point for some of us. Um another kind of like frequently asked questions, how often should I take practice tests? And I think I think um the only time that like a calendar-based cadence makes sense is close to the official exam. So close to the official exam, I think it's okay to take my take maybe like two practice tests relatively close together just to like fact check your your approach and and build stamina and make sure that you can actually sit there for three hours and um two and a half, whatever it is, uh, and um actually get through the whole end-to-end experience. So that's that's a time where like taking a practice test a week could make sense. But I think the whole like take a practice test every two weeks to measure my approach, it like feels very logical, like you're gonna have a really good feedback loop there. But usually that kind of thing forces people into bad habits of taking too many practice tests without enough skill growth in between them because it's very difficult to predict how long it's gonna take you to get great at data sufficiency. You've never done this before. So, so how could you have a large data set on how long it's gonna take? But we often don't, again, it's one of those subconscious beliefs that I think we're just thinking about like, oh, well, when I study for my tests in high school, I would study for a few days and get an A. So, you know, maybe I'll study data sufficiency for a few days and get an A. Maybe that, maybe that's an analogy that works for you. I really haven't seen that work very often. So I think what you want to do is say, like, I will take the next practice test when I have mastered these three focus areas. That's when you should take the next practice test. It should be skill-based pacing, not calendar-based pacing. To the maximum extent you can do that. I know some of you are under tight deadlines, so you got to just get it done. I respect that. But if if there's any way you cannot be in that situation, guys, I highly recommend reorienting the plan so you can have enough calendar time to build your skills and get good results. You'll probably get way better results that way. Um, if you are in the tight timeline situation, we've got an episode called How to Cram. You can check that out. But um, yeah, not recommended. But if you are gonna do it, I'm happy to teach you how to do it well. But but I just want to go on the record as saying, like, it's generally not good to do that. Uh having said that, it can work sometimes. And if cramming didn't work, no one would ever do it. So yeah, let's just call a spade a spade there. Okay, so that's how often you should take practice tests. When your skills are ready, not when the calendar time rolls around whether you've improved your skills or not. That's that's a good way to get stagnant results and waste a bunch of time taking practice tests, which are a scarce resource, and and see the score not improve or um go down and and get really discouraged. That's usually what happens there, and that's that's really counterproductive. So let's just not do that. Let's just not shoot ourselves in the foot. Okay. Couple final tips for you here. I've already gone over a lot of these. Sorry, sorry, um, my notes here got a little jumbled. There we go. Okay. So last uh last couple tips. What I've seen work really well is have a third spreadsheet that has um your review process written out. So I just gave you kind of the core process, the basics. I'd recommend making a spreadsheet with some checkboxes that has that written out. And then uh test it out, iterate on it, figure out what works for you, customize it if you need to, and then uh duplicate it for every practice exam. And that way you can see you can you can see, okay, this is the reviews process I was using when things were going well. This is the review process I used on the most recent practice exam. That didn't work out. Let's just say something bad happens. What did I change or what did I do differently that I wasn't doing on my previous review processes that that didn't work? It's kind of like if you've ever written software before, you want to do versioning of it so that you can roll back quickly if some if you break something. Um so, so the way I was taught to write software is heavy versioning. And maybe some other people have some crazy stuff that I'm not aware of. And if you do, I I want to know it. Hook me up. Um, but the the the way that that we would do it is we would just have some kind of repository uh back back in the day. It was like a very simple file system. And it would be like, okay, what are the last 30 versions of this software? Like, okay, we have to roll back to May, May uh 1999 because we just we just screwed up the last six years. All right, boot it up. You know, so you want to have that for your your practice exam review process itself. So uh I would I would make your own spreadsheet of what I just talked you through. Okay, to go listen back to the episode or have an AI transcribe it for you or go to our blog. We probably have a transcription and a and a bullet point for you ready already by the time this goes live. Um and we're probably not gonna make you a spreadsheet that you can that you can just download and copy because um there's there's a lot of value in making it yourself. There's a lot there, yeah. I mean, I guess this gets into like a larger point in society right now, but we're all trying to negotiate right now like what should I have a machine do for me automatically and what should I do myself? And this is kind of an unanswered question at the moment, which is interesting. But um, this is something you're gonna want to do yourself because you don't it doesn't need to be fancy. But if you want it to be fancy and that makes you excited to use it, then do that. If you want it to be simple, that's also okay. But the idea is to make something you're actually gonna use. And so just have whatever structure you used on your last practice exam and then just be able to roll back or roll or roll forward or see what you changed between practice exams with your system. And that can work well for your process for critical reasoning, that can work well for your process for reading comp, that can work well for your process for data sufficiency, just having it all in one snapshot, really, really useful. Uh, but you don't have to do that. But I would strongly recommend it for the practice test review process because if it's just difficult, if I'm if my last practice test was two months ago, it's just really difficult for me to remember exactly what I was doing leading up to that practice test. And if I have a record of it where I can just click a button and see, like, oh, I was doing all this, and that works really well. Maybe I need to roll back a couple of these things. I think you'll find a lot of value in that because there's a lot of advice out there. Some of it's good, some of it's bad. It's hard to know what's good and what's bad until you test it out. And that's my next point, which might be obvious, but it's worth saying anyway. Like, make sure everything I'm telling you actually works for you by just using it, just test it. I I really don't want to be that person that just tells you to believe me. It's like, why don't you just try it out and see if it works? Like, I'm I'm comfortable building trust with you over a long period. I'm totally comfortable with that because I know I've seen the data behind all these recommendations I'm giving you. Um, this isn't just something I I came up with yesterday. This is this is decades, okay? Um, but again, there's exceptions to every rule. Even if this might be the right advice for 99% of you, I want to help 100% of you. And so you might have to change some of this stuff. And I don't know necessarily what you need to change because I don't have the opportunity to talk with every single one of you personally every single year. I'd like to get there. Um, but just based on the numbers, it would be physically impossible for me to do that right now. So maybe the AI is going to get there to the point where we can do Isaac AI and you know, we can have all those discussions. And that's cool. We're working very hard to make that a reality, but it's just the technology is not not on the level that would meet our standards just yet. Um, getting closer by the day, but just not quite there at the moment. And we'll let you know if we launch something like that. But arguably, maybe maybe we shouldn't do that. You know, maybe you shouldn't have 24-7 access to advice. Maybe you should figure some stuff out for your own. You know, that goes back to this issue we're all dealing with in society right now, but larger discussion, obviously. Okay. So recapping those quick tips, have a spreadsheet where you have your review process listed out with a checklist so you can see which boxes you checked and which you didn't two months ago, six months ago, three months ago, however long you're studying for this. And then have a versioning system so that you can tell what you changed between practice tests with your review process itself so that you can figure out what works and whether you need to roll back to previous processes if things start to drift a little bit because you took some bad advice. Next tip is just test out every piece of advice you have. Um, if someone's making some big claims, they should be able to back up those claims by making by getting you results. And if they can't, you should probably stop listening to them. And that includes me, guys. If I'm not helping you, don't waste your time. Okay. But I I think you'll find that the vast majority of advice I give is is very good advice. Um and if if it's not, like I said, give me some feedback. Let me know. I want to improve too. Okay, and then I just want to reiterate this, even though I reiterated it probably too much. Limit your focus areas to three maximum. Please, please, please don't go for four, five, six focus areas again, unless you're that 0.000001% of people where you've proven to yourself that that's how you get your best results, in which case that's amazing. Okay. And then the last step in the cycle, like we started with, to bring this full circle, is you take your next practice exam and you assess. But again, that's the least important part of the process. Obviously, it's the most important part in terms of results. And that's that's the same thing with the scale, weighing yourself if you're trying to lose weight. Did I lose weight or not? But the thing that actually matters, the thing that actually moves the needle, that's all the stuff that happens between stepping on the scale. And it's the same thing with practice tests. So I hope that analogy helps as a good reframe there.

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As always, my greatest hope is that this material is going to make your studies as easy and as painless as they can possibly be. If you want more tips on how to improve your results with the exam, please just head to our website, gmatstrategy.com, which will be linked in the description of this content. And like I said, check out our free video on how you can reach your dream GMAT score in half the normal time. And that will give you a deeper instruction on how the scoring algorithm works. And there's no obligation, there's no fee. I'm not going to pitch you on anything during that video. It's just trying to help you. And again, if you want to work with us, just reach out and let us know. Uh, but we know we're not a fit for everybody, and we're totally at peace with that. And we're not trying to pretend that we're something we're not, because yeah, I don't I don't believe in being dishonest. I think that's I think the returns on being dishonest are extremely negative. Okay. In the meantime, everybody, this is a regular show. So if you like it, please subscribe. And if not, it's all good. And please, if you don't do anything else, just stay positive and stay consistent with your studies. We need your leadership in the world, and I'm excited to experience the positive ripple effects that you're gonna have as a result of becoming a more awesome and more successful person through this process. Talk to you all soon.