The point is that you don't need to go through tons of books in order to study for this test. Instead, you should be learning from questions that are just outside your comfort zone. If you study from questions that are too easy for you, you won't learn much. You won't be prepared for the more difficult questions when you take the test. Similarly, if you try to do questions that are way too difficult for you, once again, you won't learn much. You have to practice from questions that challenge you, not ones that are nearly impossible for you to do.

So, first find out what level you're at. You can do that by taking an official diagnostic test here. Then, hit the appropriate material.

If you scored below the 10th percentile on the diagnostic test, then you first need to thoroughly learn the basics. There are several good books out there for this, and I recommend the "Ultimate Math Refresher for the GMAT, GRE, and SAT". It will probably take you about a month and a half to finish this book. Your math skills should be significantly improved by the time you finish this book, and you should be ready for the next phase. After you finish with this book, take another diagnostic to see at what percentile you now are.

If you're scoring in between the 10th and the 50th percentile, I recommend “Total GMAT Math” by Jeff Sackmann, or the Manhattan GMAT guides, either one of which will help you get a good grasp of the type of math that's tested on the GMAT. Once you go through those books, you should take another diagnostic to see at what percentile you now are.

If you've managed to improve your score to between the 50th percentile and the 75th percentile, you know the basics but need help with the medium and difficult concepts. You probably don't need to do any drilling and instead you can go straight to the official guide. There are two math sections in the official guide, and the questions in each one are arranged in order of difficulty. That is, the first third of each section contains the easy questions, the second third contains the medium questions, and the last third contains the difficult questions. Your goal is to do, and truly understand, the medium and difficult questions. Therefore, concentrate on those and simply skip the easy questions. Depending how disciplined you are, it will probably take you between a month and a half to two months to see the improvement you're looking for. Provided, of course, that you're studying the way you should be studying, and learning from each question you get wrong. There's a big difference between mastering a question and just going through it once as you race through a book.

And if you're scoring at the 75th percentile or above, then you only need to tackle the difficult and advanced questions. This is a little bit trickier. You should jump right into the official guide, and you can disregard roughly the first half of each math section. However, once you finish the official guide, you will need to find questions that are a little bit more challenging. There are several good sources: the Manhattan GMAT advanced quant book, the “EZ Solutions Advanced Workbook - GMAT”, which you can find on amazon, or a set of official 700+ level math questions which I use with my advanced students. The key is to get used to questions that are at a higher level than what you're familiar with.

So, to recap, know where you're at, and then aim a little higher. By overtraining, you'll make sure to hit your target on test day.

 

1. Study in a quiet place, preferably not in your apartment.

Starbucks is out. There's too much distraction there. A library is ideal. There's several reasons why it's good to leave your apartment when studying. There are fewer distractions such as TVs, computers, and family members in a library. Also, having to travel to a library means that you are less likely to cut your studying short. Obviously, when you're studying you shouldn't be doing anything else, such as listening to music, watching TV, browsing the internet, etc...

 

2. Before you sit down to do any questions, in your mind, go over what skills you will be attempting to learn.

Before going through a problem set, using your imagination, briefly go through the checklist of skills you will need for that session. For example, if you're focusing on quantitative comparison questions, remind yourself what the answer choices reprepsent, remind yourself that if you're subbing numbers in you have to test negatives, fractions, zero, etc, remind yourself of the various traps that the test can throw at you on this type of question, and so on...

The reason you do this before embarking on the questions is that once you start doing the questions, you will most likely focus on trying to answer them correctly, and not on your technique. Therefore, you won't get a chance to practice that crucial component of problem solving.

 

3. Approach each and every problem as an opportunity to learn a necessary skill.

Obviously, there is a difference between doing and learning. Just doing something over and over again doesn't ensure that you'll get very good at that thing. For example, most people drive several hours a day, but despite all that practice at driving, we're not all professional race car drivers. Similarly, just doing a ton of GMAT math questions over and over again won't turn you into an expert on GMAT math. In order to learn from the questions that you do, you have to keep track of two things: first, before you do the question, know what skill you will be practicing on that question. And, as you're doing the question, make sure that you're applying the skill that the question tests.

When you study, because you have to remember and then apply a large number of new skills, if you're not wholly concentrated on what you're doing then you will not be practicing those skills. You will probably just be building bad habits instead. You have to approach every GMAT question as an opportunity to learn something new and to improve in some way. Every question is an occasion to practice some necessary skill. Otherwise, why are you doing that question? Remember, the goal of studying is a good score, so each question should in some way help you build skills that will allow you to correctly answer similar questions in the future.

 

4. Remember that you're developing habits.

Good habits are what allow you to use the skills you've learned. When you're doing questions for homework, make sure you always follow proper technique. Don't skip steps. Don't do steps in your head. Double-check your answer. Don't rush. The more often you do this, the less you will have to think about doing it, and eventually it will become reflexive. However, the more often that you do a question and your technique is poor, meaning that you skip some steps or allow yourself to be sloppy, then you are undoing the good habits you've built up and reinforcing the bad ones.

On the test, because of the stress, many people revert to whatever habits they've built up over the course of their preparation. If you've been dilligent about your technique over the course of your training, then you will still perform well on the test. But, if you haven't been rigorous in building up good habits, then you will notice a big drop between what you've been getting on low-stakes diagnostics taken in the comfort of your own home and on the actual test.

Keep in mind that this means you should practice good techniques even when a question is laughably easy. Doing so will make it easier to recall those techniques even on the hard questions, when your focus is on understanding and doing the challenging problems.

 

5. DON'T do as many questions as possible, as quickly as possible

You should instead do fewer questions, but review them thoroughly. In other words, plowing through 100 questions is not even half as effective as is doing 20 questions thoroughly. By "thoroughly" I mean that there is a particular way you should do homework problems, which I will explain below.

 

6. DON'T cram.

Studying an hour a day from Monday to Friday is better than studying 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday. There are several reasons for this. One is that in order to do well on the GMAT, you need to build good habits, and good habits are internalized through repetition over a period of time. You just don't get that benefit if you try to compress a week's studying into one day.

Also, if you try to do too much work in one day, at a certain point, your concentration will give out, and you either won't be able to do any more, or you will be doing the work with really poor form and therefore not improving. After a certain point, you will not be able to focus on what you're doing as well as you should, and you will therefore not be absorbing information efficiently. Two hours, with sufficient breaks throughout, is probably a good period of time for a study session. Usually, anything more than that is not efficient enough to be worth it.

Finally, the more time you spend between sessions, the less you will retain. 5 hours on one weekend followed by 5 hours the next is not as effective as an hour each day, partly because you will forget much of what you learned from one weekend to the next if you don't return to it over the week.

To do a set of questions properly, you will need the following:

- the questions you're going to be working from
- scratch paper
- a spreadsheet or table with at least 4 or 5 columns
- a stopwatch
- a calendar

Step one: Doing the questions

First, you have to accept that over the entire course of your GMAT studying, you will be doing far fewer questions than you previously thought. Several hundred questions is probably enough. Second, never write in the book that you're using. Always use scratch paper, because this is the way it'll be on the test. Third, use a stopwatch. You need to know how long it's taking you to do these questions.

As you go through a problem set (about 20 questions, let's say), always keep track of the following on a spreadsheet or some other sort of table:
- the answer you put down
- how long it took you to get that answer
- whether you guessed or not

Then, take a break, go to your favorite website for a couple of minutes, get up and stretch, etc. After about 5 minutes (and no more than 10 minutes!), review the problems you just did. You need to take a close look at the explanations of the problems that you got wrong, that you guessed on, and that took you too long to do. For the math, too long generally means more than 1.5 minutes, since on the test you'll have roughly 1.5 minutes per question.

Step two: Reviewing the questions

See where you made your mistake. Was it a careless error or did you not understand a fundamental concept? Go to the explanation and see how the question can be solved most efficiently. If you got a question right, did you do in the most efficient way? Once you've reviewed a question, note any takeaways that you think will help you avoid making a similar mistake in the future. For example, you might note that you should review the rules of right triangles, or that you need to write down what the question is asking before you start doing any work, or anything that you think might help you get a similar question right in the future.

Step three: Redoing the questions

Once you finish reviewing the questions, take another short break. Check your email, catch up with your favorite webcomic, and then, once you've rested for about 5 to 10 minutes, redo the questions that took you too long, that you guessed on, or that you got wrong. Your goal here is to see if you remembered and understood the explanations.

While you're redoing the questions, once again, keep track of which questions you get wrong a second time, which ones you have to guess on again, and which ones still take you too long. Keep reviewing and repeating those until you get them right. You'll find that you'll have to redo some questions maybe three or even four times. If there's questions that you just simply don't understand no matter how many times you look at the explanations, you might want to either contact a tutor or just put them off to the side for a couple of weeks. Once you get some more studying under your belt they will probably make more sense.

Step four: Pencil in questions for future lessons.

This is the last step. Before you call it a day, you should make a note of all the questions that you got wrong, that you guessed on, or that took you too long the first time through. Then, write down in a calendar a reminder for yourself to do ALL those questions one more time in exactly a week. This way, you will be making sure that you can remember how to do them when they're not so fresh in your mind, and therefore you'll be confident that you know the underlying concept and you're not just working from rote memory.

So, a typical session would look like this:

1. redo mistakes from previous sessions (this is to solidify anything you may have learned earlier)
2. do any assigned reading (if you're scoring below the 50th percentile and need to learn general concepts)
3. do about 20 questions (keep track of the time it took you to do the questions and whether you guessed or not)
4. review the questions you got wrong (ie, look at the explanations, note whether you made a careless mistake or whether you truly did not get the question)
5. redo questions you got wrong, that took you too long, or that you guessed on
6. review and redo until you completely understand all 20 of those questions

As you can see, a lot of emphasis is placed here on reviewing and redoing, and questions you get wrong you ultimately wind up doing three or more times. In fact, you wind up using at least half to two thirds of your time reviewing and redoing, as opposed to just doing question after question. Although with this method you do fewer questions, you extract much much more from each question that you do, so that ultimately your studying is much more effective.