B-Schooled Podcast Episode #292: Biggest Test Prep Mistakes

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Timestamps refer to the audio.

Stacy: Welcome to B-Schooled, a podcast by Stacy Blackman Consulting, bringing you insight into all aspects of the MBA. I’m Stacy Blackman, the founder of SBC, and today I’ll be your host. Today I am excited to sit down with Stacy Blackman Consulting’s Director of Test Prep, Anthony Ritz. We are going to talk all things test prep, GMAT, and GRE. Welcome, Anthony.

Anthony: Thank you for having me, Stacy. I love coming on the podcast and talking to you about test prep and talking to all the students out there. As Director of Test Prep, I work with students who come to me a lot of times after their own attempts at studying have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

One thing I’ve seen a lot is every manner of study fail. Whenever these students come in, I always wish I could go back in time and meet them earlier and save them from a lot of wasted effort and struggle. So I thought today I could share some of those mistakes in the hopes that those of you who still have the studying ahead of you can actually do your studying right.

Stacy: Yes, this is your chance to catch them before the fails. We’re giving warnings and flagging all the pitfalls that you see. So let’s start with the biggest mistake you see in your students. What would you say that is?

Anthony: Maybe the biggest and most important fundamental mistake that students make is they just start studying way too late. I get these calls from students, and it’s two weeks before their test date or application deadline, and they’re just getting started. They’re like, I guess I need to take the test; should I study for it? It’s crazy to me, but we do sometimes get students who come in with these sort of timelines. There’s just so little I can do for somebody at that point. Given a couple of weeks, you can maybe review a practice test and grab some low-hanging fruit, but that’s about it.

Stacy: So what is the recommended timeline?

Anthony: A typical prep timeline for these tests is something like two to three months of studying, an average of two to three hours per day. A few students may be able to prepare a bit faster, and some will take longer, as is the nature of averages. No matter how long you think you need, you probably want to add some extra time as a cushion because it usually takes longer than you expect.

That goes for your self-study, but also, if you’re thinking about working with a tutor at some point, even if you’ve self-studied for a long time, try to reach out to the tutor at least a month, ideally two or three months in advance, so that we have time to do that prep correctly.

Stacy: Why do you think people delay studying for something that’s so critical to the application process?

Anthony: I think there are a lot of different reasons someone might delay studying for these tests, and plenty of them are totally legitimate. There are other things that are important in life, and no one is saying these tests are the most important thing in the world. But there are also a couple of reasons that really do qualify as study fails. One is that some students simply get too confused and don’t know where to start. Other students may have been told where to start, but they’re too intimidated to actually do it.

Stacy: So here we are, beginning a process. Someone wants to get a jump start early. How do you recommend they kick this off and get started?

Anthony: For a lot of students, the first decision is whether to take the GMAT or the GRE, and that’s a whole topic of its own. But in brief, it really comes down to which test plays better to your strengths. It’s not about what feels easier, because both tests are scored on a curve. If you’re not sure, you could discuss it with a tutor or just look over some sample material from each test to see which question types suit you best.

But let’s say you’ve chosen your test. Then you may want to spend a little time looking over the format and materials and just familiarizing yourself with what you’re up against. For either test, the official guide is really useful in this regard and well worth purchasing. But the other big thing you need to do to get started is take an official practice test.

You need a baseline and an honest assessment of where you need work, and there’s no substitute for an official practice test taken under testing conditions to get that. Once you have that, you can go over your mistakes either on your own or with a tutor and plot out the path of your studying over the weeks and months ahead.

This brings me to the other reason some students just don’t start. They get intimidated by the idea of all that studying, or more often by the idea of even taking the first practice test. They’re willing to work hard, but they’re afraid of failure and how they imagine they might be judged, even just by themselves, if that first test doesn’t go well. A lot of these students decide, okay, I’ll just keep looking at the material until I feel ready for a practice test.

But they don’t have any structure or direction in the looking without a practice test result. So they look over the material aimlessly, often not enough and without a lot of direction, and they don’t really make much progress with it. So they’re not feeling more ready for a practice test, and so they don’t get any more structure, and the loop just continues and they’re stuck. I understand feeling a bit intimidated to go into a practice test cold.

It’s fine to set aside a week, maybe two, to review beforehand, but set a firm deadline. Then, whether you feel totally ready or not, just take the practice test. It’s not your destiny; it’s just a starting point. But you need that information.

Stacy: I think this is the class we struggle with: procrastination till we die, basically. What I’ve learned is procrastination is not laziness; it’s fear. It’s fear of taking that step, and getting started is the hardest part. So listen to Anthony, not to your ego telling you to delay things. All right, so a student is locked in; they’ve started. What other mistakes do you see in the process?

Anthony: Congratulations on getting over the initial hump and actually studying for the test. But there are still more study fails along the road ahead, and one of the biggest is that a lot of students just flatly study for these tests wrong. One of the things that can happen here is I see the student who just does piles and piles of assorted test questions one after another, with no specific focus at all: a set of 20 random questions, another set of 20 random questions, and so forth.

I actually see these students a lot, because after months of that, they come to us for tutoring, going, oh man, I studied and studied and didn’t improve at all, so now I need help. I suppose I should thank them for keeping me in business, but I just feel really bad for them. They wasted so much effort. The reality is that assorted practice is a terrible way to learn, especially if you’re knocking the questions out in timed sets and not doing a lot of review of each question as you go.

Stacy: So what’s a better approach?

Anthony: I think a lot of students don’t even realize there’s an alternative. But the key here is targeted practice. What you want to do is identify a single narrow area in which you need improvement, say exponent equations involving addition, or roll a boldface portion critical reasoning question. Then review the rules and strategies for that area and practice just that topic, seeing how the strategies you learned apply.

After a while, if you’re doing this right, the questions should start to feel almost repetitive. Oh, this is the same thing I did a little while ago, I’ve seen this twist before, oh yeah, this is where I use that approach. That’s how you actually make progress. You get mastery through sustained, purposeful practice in one narrow area, and then you move on and repeat the process somewhere else.

Stacy: Good advice for life in general; I’m seeing parallels between test prep and life. Let’s continue on with other pitfalls. What else are you seeing?

Anthony: A related study fail I’ll see a lot is that students will just start out doing questions timed, two minutes per question, back to back to back. They’ll knock out ten or so, whether on the same topic or different, and then check all the answers and quickly review what they got wrong. They’ll see the right answer, maybe glance quickly at a solution, nod sagely, and go, oh yeah, of course, I see what I did there, and then move on.

Even if you’re doing targeted practice, if you do it like that, you won’t get much out of it. What you really need to do, at least at the beginning of studying a topic, is slow down, do the questions one at a time, and review after each one. That review isn’t just, what was the answer, oh I see, it was supposed to be that one, then move on. It’s, how was my process? Did my approach to the solution utilize any of the strategies I’ve studied? Did it line up with any of the other solutions other people have gotten to this?

By the way, if you’re looking for those, a couple of sites, GMAT Club and its sister site GRE Prep Club, are a great way of looking at other people’s solutions. You can go into the forums and find basically all of these questions there and see what other people are doing to solve them. If it’s not lining up with that, or if you struggled or got it wrong, then you have to ask, why did I struggle? Why wasn’t I able to use those strategies and get to that solution?

Don’t just ask one time; dig deeper. Okay, fine, why didn’t you get that solution? You just didn’t see it. Okay, fine, why not? I was careless. Okay, but why was it careless? Why did you make that silly mistake? What could you do differently next time to make sure you won’t make that mistake again? What can you take away from this question that will help you on a similar but different question on the same topic?

So take your time with this, go deeper, ask the why question one more time than you might otherwise. And if that sounds like a lot, yeah, it is. When you’re doing this right, you’re not spending two minutes on a question; you’re spending maybe ten to fifteen minutes digging into it, either on your own or with a tutor, and really exploring what you can improve. Then you’re taking everything you just learned and applying it to the next question. That is how real progress happens.

Stacy: Great advice, love that structure.

Anthony: Before we move on too much, I’d love to talk about practice tests, but I do want to say another word or two about what real progress looks like here. Another fail I see from a lot of students is that, because progress isn’t always linear and isn’t always immediately visible at the level of right and wrong answers, a lot of students will get frustrated and abandon all the good things they’re doing if they don’t immediately see the results they want.

I want to let people know that these tests are really hard, and you may have to do half a dozen or more different things right on a single question to get the right answer. As you’re progressing and studying, you may go from doing one of those half a dozen things right to doing two or three or four, but you’re still getting the answer wrong, because you have to get all of them and you’re not. It doesn’t feel like progress.

But the thing is, one day you’re going to get the final piece into place, and suddenly you’re getting it right. It feels like you woke up that morning and it’s magic. It doesn’t feel linear; it feels abrupt, but it’s really the result of all that gradual, invisible progress.

If you’re struggling here, this is a place a tutor can be really helpful. If you’re feeling frustrated or stuck and not sure whether you’re doing the right things and making real progress, someone like me can get underneath your process a little and see what’s really going on, and identify whether you need to make changes or whether, if you just stay the course and keep dropping things into place step by step, it’s going to one day all click together.

Stacy: Love that. As with anything in life, it’s not linear, and that’s so hard. You have to keep plugging along even when you’re not sure if it’s making a difference, and then have faith that one day it clicks. Thank you for that.

Anthony: You asked about test materials, and I think that’s also a great question, so let me take that one now. I think practice tests are really important; I’ve said that. But there are also fails students have in even how they choose the tests they do.

Sometimes students come to me, and I ask them to take a practice test, and they say, I’ve already done them all. Like, excuse me? You did all six official GMAT practice tests? And you can reset the four paid ones one time without repeating any questions, so you really have ten, right? Oh, you did that too. Okay, I guess we can use a company test; it’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing. Wait, what, you’ve done those too? Which companies, all of them? I get these students whose entire study plan was just to take a practice test every other day for months, until they, I guess, got a score they liked.

Stacy: That’s dedication. Why is that not your recommended approach?

Anthony: There are two massive problems with this plan. Number one, it doesn’t work. Practice tests are great for identifying your weaknesses, tracking your progress, and working on pacing or test-day mindset. But they’re a terrible way to actually improve your mastery of any particular content, because they’re not the sort of targeted, purposeful practice we were talking about earlier. So for whatever test you’re taking, it’s not actually going to help you improve that much just to take a bunch of practice tests.

The other huge problem is that the official ones, which I recommend, especially for the GRE, are an extremely limited and valuable resource. There are five for the GRE, and even with resets, there are ten for the GMAT, and when you run out, they’re gone. If you burn through them all prematurely, then when you need them later for tracking, identifying weaknesses, or practicing test-day mindset, you won’t have them. Don’t put yourself in that spot.

Stacy: So how should someone proceed with practice tests?

Anthony: Another thing we see with practice tests is that some students like to use company-written lessons to prep, in addition to the practice tests, and that’s fine. But it’s not a substitute for seeing official questions and practice tests. The best companies understand this and use their materials to supplement the official stuff. But especially if you end up with a test prep company that isn’t as good, or if you use a company’s materials exclusively, you may be in for a bit of a shock when you finally see the official test and realize there are subtle but important differences in difficulty, wording, or just how airtight the logic of the answers actually is.

Stacy: So even using those practice tests, there’s a strategy to that, a structure and methodology, rather than just throwing it all at the wall.

Anthony: You want to have a cycle of taking a practice test, evaluating where you need work, and then going into that targeted practice I talked about, mastering all the areas you’re struggling with, and then, some weeks or maybe a month later, taking another practice test, seeing how you’ve progressed, identifying new areas, and repeating the process.

Stacy: Okay, so let’s assume you’ve dodged all the traps we’ve mentioned. You’ve studied and mastered some of the topics. So now you’re in the clear, correct?

Anthony: Not so fast. Unfortunately, there are still other study fails, and one that pops up way too often is that a student will learn a topic, maybe even get pretty good mastery of it, and then move on, but ignore it for weeks or even months as they study other parts of the test, since this is a long, probably multi-month process.

When they finally get back to it, maybe even at the testing center or on a practice test, they come to the painful realization that they’ve forgotten pretty much everything they learned. If you ignore something for a long time, your skills will slip, and it’s really easy to make this mistake and end up playing whack-a-mole, never really getting anywhere.

You should spend about 80 percent of your study time on whatever new topic you’re focusing on at the moment, but the other 20 percent needs to go to general cumulative review. Even after you’ve mastered a topic, mix in a question or two on that subject every week, just to make sure you don’t lose it. It’s a simple tweak, but it does a lot to get you to the end of the process with all that progress intact.

Incidentally, this is when assorted, timed question sets actually do make sense, because if you have true mastery, you should be able to perform while you’re on the clock, and mixed sets force you to work on correctly identifying each question type, which is also an important skill to master. So once you’ve nailed down a topic, it can go into the mixed question set and be a part of that.

Stacy: Excellent, so lots of pitfalls to avoid in this process. Are there any final ones you want to warn students about?

Anthony: Before we go, I do have one final fail I’d like to mention today. It’s not technically a study fail, but it’s important nevertheless, and that’s don’t ignore the mental side of taking these tests. Mental state is really important, and if you walk into a testing center unprepared for that side of things, it can really bite you. This includes sleeping and eating well before your test.

Some degree of nervousness or jitters is totally natural. But if you find you’re struggling with severe anxiety, if you can do the questions just fine in practice sessions but your mind goes totally blank every time you sit for a practice test, or if your GMAT score drops 100 points or more every time you try to go from a practice test to the real thing, you should address that.

We actually have a performance coach we sometimes refer students to for exactly this reason. It’s not for every student, or even most, but for the ones who need it, it can make a huge difference. Don’t ignore it, and don’t think you can necessarily power through it or make it go away just by mastering and memorizing every single question, because these tests are adaptive, and they will always find something that’s hard for you.

If they haven’t found it yet, they’ll just get harder; that’s the nature of adaptive tests. So the question isn’t whether you can make everything easy and memorize how to do all the questions you could possibly get asked. The question is whether you’re mentally prepared and equipped to handle it when things get hard.

Stacy: Love that. From testing through to submitting your application, it’s an intense process; it’s stressful, and we have to take care of ourselves. I love that you mentioned that. I also want to say that Anthony is the test prep guru. He’s the one we on the SBC team trust to help even our own children, and he has worked miracles for them. It’s crazy.

So if you’re in the market for a tutor, this is the one. Thank you for your time, Anthony. I know these tips will be so helpful for all listening, and I really hope future test takers heed your advice. It’s hard-earned through many years of test prep and dealing with test takers.

Anthony: I hope so too. I really want students to succeed on these tests, and if something I said here makes a difference, I’d be very happy. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Stacy: Thank you, Anthony.