7 Steps to Building Confidence for GMAT Test Day
It’s very easy to concentrate on rekindling long-forgotten math skills or memorizing patterns commonly found in Reading Comp passages, but if you spend all of your energy on these content-based skills, you may omit strengthening your performance on the emotional aspects of prepping for the GMAT.
Boosting GMAT Confidence Tips
As a computer-adaptive test (CAT), the GMAT rewards correct answers with harder questions. Harder questions take more time and mental energy to process. They can be intimidating. Likewise, incorrect answers are followed by lower-difficulty questions. These can also be stress-inducing: “These questions are too easy! I must be doing terribly!”
Before I talk about ways to master the emotional side of the test, I must address two reasons the perceived difficulty level should not impact your confidence on Test Day.
Familiar Tasks Can Seem Easier Than They Are
For example, symbolism questions almost always involve low-difficulty math. But because they are intimidating to most students, they usually are rated as high-difficulty questions. If you see “a#b = 2(a + b)” and are asked for the value of 3#4, that will feel easy despite actually being high difficulty.
GMAT Tests Include Questions at Every Difficulty Level
So you may get a string of questions correct, then see a low-difficulty “easy” question because it is being tested. Your performance has no bearing on the difficulty level of an experimental question. DO NOT let your confidence be shaken because a question seems easy!
Try not to evaluate your performance during the test and not beat yourself up over how you think you are doing.
Steps To Start Building Confidence on the GMAT Exam
