Test Preparation

The GMAT is a standardized test, and by now in your academic career, you’re probably familiar with what that means: lots of questions to answer in a short period of time, no way to cram for or memorize answers, and very little chance of scoring one hundred percent. The skills tested on the GMAT are those that leading business schools have decided are important for MBA students: verbal, quantitative, and analytical writing.

Getting familiar with what the GMAT tests

Stadardized tests are supposed to test your academic potential, not your knowledge of specific subjects. The GMAT focuses on the areas that admissions committees have found to be relevant to MBA programs. The following sections are an introduction to the three GMAT sections:

Demonstrating your writing ability
You type two original analytical writing samples during the GMAT. The test gives you thirty minutes to compose and type each of the essays. One of the samples asks you to analyze an issue, and the other presents you with an argument to analyze. You’re expected to write these essays in standard written English. Although you won’t know exactly the nature of the issue and argument you’ll get on test day, examining previous topics gives you adequate preparation for the types of topics you’re bound to see.

The readers of your GMAT essay score you based on the overall quality of your ideas and your ability to organize, develop, express, and support those ideas.

Validating your verbal skills
The GMAT verbal sections consists of 41 questions of three general types: the ubiquitous reading comprehension problem, sentence correction questions, and critical reasoning questions. Reading comprehension requires you to answer questions about written passages on a number of different subjects. Sentence correction questions test your ability to spot and correct writing errors. Critical reasoning questions require you to analyze logical arguments and understand how to strengthen or weaken or weaken those arguments.

Quizzing your quantitative skills
The quantitative section is pretty similar to most standardized math sections except that it presents you with a different question format and tests your knowledge of statistics and probability. In the 37-questions section, the GMAT tests your knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, geometry and data interpretation with standard problem-solving questions. You’ll have to solve problems and choose the correct answer from five possible choices.

Additionally, GMAT data sufficiency questions present you with two statements and ask you to decide whether the problem can be solved by using the information provided by just the first statement, just the second statement, both statements, or neither statement.