Today’s GMAT tip comes to us from Veritas Prep. In this article, they provide helpful advice on how to calm your nerves before taking the GMAT. Read on to see what they have to say!
1) Realize that Test-Day Anxiety is exactly what the test wants you to feel
Remember this – the GMAT is not as much a test of “how well you’ll do in business school “as it is a test of “how we’ll you’ll do after business school”. Business schools have essentially two constituents — students/alumni and recruiters. And if the top recruiters come to the school to hire the students, the top students will continue to come — you are going to business school to increase your job prospects and career potential, so it’s only natural that you will want to go to the schools that have the highest job placement rates and starting salaries, the most alumni in leadership positions at top firms, the most elite lists of on-campus recruiters, etc. Business schools know this, and accordingly one of their top goals in the admissions process is to admit the kinds of students who will be successful in landing and excelling at great jobs.
The GMAT is designed to test the kinds of reasoning skills that lead to success in business, and one crucial component of that is your ability to make good decisions while under pressure. By having a timed test that many will struggle to complete on time; by including a stress-inducing check-in-procedure complete with photographs, fingerprints, and a sterile testing environment that reminds you “this is a big deal;” and by using technical language and additional algebraic variables and other devices to contribute to a test that just looks and feels difficult, the GMAT puts nearly everyone under the kind of simulated stress that they may later face while making decisions with millions of dollars or thousands of jobs at stake.
To combat this stress, know that it is an intentional part of the GMAT. You’re not feeling stress because you are personally not worthy of success; you’re feeling stress because the GMAT needs you to in order to make the test more difficult! Tell yourself that you can relax and stay confident because, in many ways, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself.
2) Plan to Punt
As mentioned above, the timed pressure of the GMAT contributes immensely to test-day stress and to the kinds of silly mistakes that result from it. Rushing through problems not only leads directly to score-killing mistakes, but it adds additional stress that can grow unbearable. But remember this about the GMAT’s computer-adaptive scoring system – you can (and will) miss several questions per section and still score very, very high. It’s not uncommon for someone to miss 10 or 11 questions on each section and still score 700+!
If you acknowledge that you can-and-will miss questions, then use that knowledge to your advantage. Plan on giving yourself 3-4 quick guesses, or “punts,” per section — if you start to read a question and realize within 20-30 seconds that you are just not going to get it, guess and move on. The extra time that buys you for the questions that you can-and-should get right will allow you better relax and double-check your work to ensure that you get credit for the correct work that you do. And, frankly, on those 3-4 questions that intimidate you the most at first glance, your likelihood of answering correctly after 2-3 minutes is probably not all that much higher than your odds of guessing correctly, and the time that you save for future questions may be even valuable than one correct answer with accompanying stress.
In business, it’s less exotic but just as important to celebrate the bad decisions that you didn’t make (Madoff may be a bad investment…) as it is to celebrate the good decisions that you did (Apple? Yeah, maybe computers are the wave of the future). On the GMAT, deciding not to waste time on a question can be just as valuable to your overall score as getting a question correct can be.
3) Focus on what you DO know and not on what you don’t
The GMAT is designed to intimidate you, but the flip side is that it is also designed to reward you if you’re able to navigate it effectively. As a multiple-choice test with some pretty stringent time constraints, each question must have a ~2-minute path to a definitively correct answer — that’s just the rule. So while it is natural to be anxious about the fact that the test is intimidating, it’s equally helpful to focus on the fact that each questions is giving you all the clues you should need to solve it. And if you train yourself to begin each question by looking for the latter, you can drastically reduce the downside of the former.
When a question looks convoluted or intimidating, try to identify one thing that you do know right away and consider that an asset that you can use to find the next. Many GMAT questions will have you solve for the fourth or fifth variable, and just the mere presence of that many steps or variables can be stress-inducing. But remember — every long journey begins with a single step, and so does every convoluted GMAT question. Let yourself win that initial psychological battle of identifying “well, I do know ________” so that you can proactively build from that. Celebrate the milestones — each variable you solve for, each answer choice you eliminate, is a step toward a correct answer. Knowing the GMAT, you’re never more than 4-5 steps away from the finish as long as you’re willing to identify, celebrate, and take those steps.
4) Know the GMAT’s role in admissions
While the pressure described above is designed to make you think that the GMAT may be the most important day of your professional career to date, the truth is that it might be…but really only if you do well. Business schools, with precious few exceptions, only care about your highest score on the GMAT. After all, that’s what they report to the rankings services, to employers, and to prospective students. In fact, most applications ask you to self-report your GMAT score by typing it into your application form, and then the admissions office will simply cross-reference your file to confirm that score; it’s quite possible and even likely that no one with admissions authority will even take the time to register your other score(s) when they look at your file to confirm the 720 that you reported. And even if they did, there’s not much chance that they’ll care all that much even if the previous score is a 430. You can’t fake your way to a high GMAT score, and schools don’t have much reason at all to punish you for underestimating the difficulty of the test once or twice before you saw the light.
So what the GMAT is is an opportunity for you to succeed, not a pass/fail final referendum on your candidacy. Your safety net on test day is the knowledge that the worst you can do is need to take the GMAT again — a nuisance, definitely, but not a life-changing catastrophe. There is, in fact, very little to fear on test day other than fear itself.
Test-day anxiety has befallen many a GMAT examinee, but like the GMAT itself it can be overcome! Ultimately the best defense against anxiety is confidence, so prepare thoroughly and earn your right to be confident!
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