Week 5: How to Best Use Practice Exams | GMAT Summer Study Series with Hailey Cusimano, Menlo Coaching

We've been talking about the different section of the exam, and now I really want to focus on, like, getting in the mindset or the grind set as the, as the youth like to say, um, with a particular focus on practice exam strategy.

Uh, we both know that practice exams are one of the most crucial parts of, of any GMAT prep journey, but I also feel like there's a lot of places where things can go wrong.

Um, so I just sort of wanted to open up with this idea of what happens if you don't approach it with a plan? Um, how do you, you know, adjust or change your prep strategy as you approach test day?

Yeah.

It's a really, it's a really cool question, particularly because up until this point, we've talked a lot about making sure that in early stages of your prep, you're giving yourself a lot of grace, you're doing a lot of due diligence, and building good test-taking technique before we start to incorporate considerations like pacing, before we start to kind of shift the topic area question by question and have to think on our feet really briskly and, and be really, really thoughtful about how we invest our time.

And I think that that shift can feel really abrupt for a lot of people, and that in terms of how they approach thinking about practice testing, they'll create a very abrupt shift in some spaces.

So, you know, a lot of people look at practice tests as basically this, you know, this predictor, marker, indicator of whether or not they're test ready and then more or less leave it at that, right? It's either a positive indicator of I've made progress, or it's a not so positive indicator of, oh no, I'm not where I expected to be, where I want to be, where I need to be with the exam.

And it's so important to contextualize that first and foremost, practice tests are, are data.

Really, really valuable insight into not just what to expect from the exam, but also what to expect from yourself under pressure.

Uh, you know, how do you interact maybe a little differently in a higher pressure environment than some of the tendencies that you run into in a lower pressure environment? And there are, of course, a lot of things we can do to mitigate how sudden that feels.

Uh, I mentioned very, very briefly in our very first session, but we'll elaborate a little bit today and even next week about the idea that, you know, getting into the practice test phase of your prep should feel like a progression.

Having this really sharp shift from, all right, I'm gonna take as long as it takes to just move really slowly and methodically through questions to, well, suddenly I have this two-ish minute benchmark that I feel like I absolutely have to hit no matter what, can feel really abrupt, it can feel really off-putting, and oftentimes students will panic, and they'll just drop all of the strategy that they know and revert back to what they would've done day one.

But if instead we build out a progression that moves from that kind of lower pressure environment to perhaps a more process conscious one where maybe we're not restricting the time or certainly not restricting it question to question, but we're starting to be a little more thoughtful about ensuring we're not taking steps that would've been obviously unrealistic in a higher pressure environment, uh, that we are, you know, thinking about the path of least resistance on questions and looking for opportunities to optimize our pacing, not just on questions that you're wording wrong, but on questions where maybe there was a better path forward or you felt a little kind of stuck in your shoes on a given question.

And in many cases, moving through that progression in a couple of steps can be a really helpful way to make sure you're carrying over all of those things that were going well and feeling comfortable in a lower pressure environment into ultimately what you're bringing to the table on game day.

Yeah.

That all makes a lot of sense, but I do feel like there's, like, this inherent tension in that you have...

Of course, I'm thinking about the official GMAT practice exams, and of course there's a, a limited number of them, and you can only take them a couple of times.

And there's a part of me that's like, do I want to go slowly through one of these? Do I want to waste it on a, on an attempt that is not, uh, uh, you know, uh, an emulation or a simulation of test day? Can you talk about the approach there?

Yeah.

This is a really good question because I do think that there is a space for test-like practice that, you know, maybe has a bit of a progression or a bit of a distinction from a full-fledged, what we might call kind of a dress rehearsal practice test.

And typically when I have students leverage such a middle ground, I'm having them do so by building out timed test-length sets of practice that mimic the process of moving through a practice test question but aren't eating away at those very, very valuable actual official practice tests.

And so usually the progression that I'll recommend is one in which we're moving from what, what I'll refer to as kind of process conscious practice, meaning You're conscious of whether or not a process would have been realistic or in scope on game day, but you're not watching a clock tick down as you move through your practice.

Sometimes for certain candidates for whom we know pacing is gonna be a really big consideration, maybe we'll kind of blindly keep time and just take a look at how long a set of questions took them after the fact.

A lot of people are very pleasantly surprised to find that when they don't see a clock ticking down in front of them, the things that they thought were just, you know, taking them way too much time or causing them to drag their feet on a question were actually totally reasonable and in scope, and some of the things that they thought were saving them time were actually costing them in the long run.

And so usually my, you know, my shorter than I've been so far answer to that question would be to start to leverage those official resources on mba.com to address some of the specific kind of pacing considerations before we step fully into that practice test environment so that we feel like we're able to make adjustments, reflect, error log, gain feedback, understand what needs to optimize when we hit that practice test environment.