What the GMAT Actually Examines

Math is not tested on the GMAT. It's not a grammar test either. Yes, in order to achieve a good grade, you must be knowledgeable about at least a little bit—if not a lot—of these subjects. However, this exam actually measures your executive reasoning abilities.  

Though the word may be foreign to you, you already possess and utilize these talents on a daily basis. Here are a few instances:

• You arrive at work in the morning and think about all of the things that you could do that day. You can’t get it all done, so which things will have to wait until this afternoon, or tomorrow, or next week? Which one thing should you start working on first?
• You are faced with a list of 20 unread emails (or, if your inbox is more like mine, about 80). Which ones do you read first? The oldest ones? The ones from your boss? The ones marked urgent? Are there some that you won’t even click on right now because you know, from the sender’s name or from the subject line, that those emails aren’t very important? (And how did that one spam message get through the filter?)
• You have a choice between working on Product X or Project Y. Project Y will result in about 5% more revenue to the company, but Project Y will also take 50% longer. Which do you do?

None of those decisions are easy ones (and many would likely require more information than I gave in the little scenario). This complex decision-making is exactly what a good executive needs to be able to do well—and this is what the test writers and business schools actually care about.

The GMAT is not a math or grammar test. The math and grammar are just there as tools to allow the exam writers to test you on your decision-making ability.

How does that help me take the GMAT?

The first step is really to internalize the fact that they don’t expect you to get everything right, any more than a CEO expects to clear everything in his or her inbox today. You have to prioritize.

A great decision-maker has both expertise and experience: she’s thought about how to make various kinds of decisions, and she’s actually practiced and refined these decision-making processes. While the clock is ticking, she doesn’t hesitate to make a decision and move forward, knowing that she’s going to be leaving some opportunities behind.

In order to do that successfully in the business world, you need to know the company’s goals and objectives, and you have to have a good idea of the kind of impact that various tasks or activities will have on the company. You also have to have a lot of practice in making these decisions and observing the outcomes. There’s never just one right way to make these decisions, so the more exposure you give yourself to how things work, the better you’ll be able to make good decisions in the future.

The same is true for the GMAT: if you know how it works, and you know what kinds of trade-offs to think about when deciding how to spend your time, then you can learn how to make the best decisions to maximize your score.

Okay, how does the GMAT work?

Glad you asked. The information I’m discussing is available everywhere, but I still talk to GMAT students nearly every day who tell me that they just can’t give up on a question, or they figure that, if they “know” they can get something right, they might as well take the time to get it right, even when that means running out of time later on.

So here’s what you need to do: You need to graduate from school. The way that we were trained to do things in school is often not the way things work in the real world. You already know this—you learned it when you got out into the working world.

At university, it’s not that uncommon to ask for extra time on a paper or assignment; some professors won’t allow this, but many do, as long as the work is still done in a reasonable timeframe.

It’s not so easy to ask for an extension in the real world. You’d better have a very good reason as to why it would be better to extend the deadline than to stay up all night and finish the project on time. Also, you would be expected to bring this to your boss’s attention several weeks before the deadline, at the least. Expect a very unhappy boss if you don’t say anything until the day before!

Further, if you think that a work assignment is approaching a problem in the wrong way, then you can discuss that with your boss or your team and change the mechanism or the scope of the work or whatever it is that you think is off. Try going to your professor and saying, “I know you assigned us these problem sets, but I think it’d actually be more productive if we worked in groups on a project.”

In school, you’re supposed to do what the professors assign. At work, you’re supposed to think for yourself.

So get yourself out of school. Graduate to the real world. Approach the GMAT as a test of your business ability and decision-making skills. The test just happens to include some school subjects in the details of the questions.

Graduation Day

If you can graduate to the business mindset, you’ll have a much better shot at hitting your goal score. If you stick with the school mindset, then you’re almost certainly not going to get the score you want.

So, first, keep reminding yourself that the GMAT is a decision-making test, not an academic test. React accordingly.

Educate yourself on the subject of Time Management. Great business people know how to manage their time and make trade-off decisions; great GMAT test-takers have this same skill.

Finally, remember that your ability to get better hinges on your ability to analyze your own thought processes and the test questions themselves. Your goal is not academic. Your goal is to learn how to think.

Happy studying!

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