The first thing you notice when you start studying for the GMAT is that it feels… weird. The questions look familiar but strange. They seem designed to trick you.
They are.
The GMAT isn’t testing your math skills. It’s a test of how you handle a complex, arbitrary system under time pressure. It’s a proxy for how you think.
I scored a 760 in old GMAT. I didn’t do it by being a math genius or a grammar expert. I did it by realizing the GMAT is a game. And like any game, it has rules, patterns, and exploits. Your job is not to “know” the material, but to master the game.
Here’s the new mental model.
The GMAT is a test of logic, not knowledge
Good news: GMAT never requires you to do more than 90 seconds of high school math.
Bad news: Unlike high school maths, It’s difficult to often understand what to calculate.
You have to think outside the box
For example, Stop trying to solve for x. The fastest path is almost always logic or testing numbers.
- Problem Solving: Look at the answers first. Can you just plug them in? Can you estimate?
- Data Sufficiency: This is the GMAT in its purest form. It’s a logic puzzle. Your brain wants to find the answer. You must train it to stop. The only question is: Could I find a single answer? Your only job is to check “Sufficient” or “Insufficient.” The best way to do this? Be an adversary. Try to prove it’s insufficient by testing weird numbers: 0, 1, -1, 0.5. If you can get two different outcomes, it’s out.
Verbal is more technical than you think
People get Verbal wrong because they treat it as subjective. They pick the answer that “sounds best.” This is fatal. Verbal is as rigid and rule-based as Quant.
- Sentence Correction (no longer part of GMAT focus but still including it here): This is not English class. It’s code debugging. Read the sentence and find the bug. There are 4-5 core “fatal flaws”:
- Subject-Verb Agreement: The box of apples is… (Box is the subject).
- Modifiers: The describing phrase must be right next to the thing it describes.
- Parallelism: If you are listing things, they must be in the same format.
- Pronouns: Does “they” have a clear, plural noun it refers to? Your job is to scan the options and eliminate the four that are provably wrong. What’s left is the answer, even if it sounds clunky.
- Critical Reasoning: This is just mapping an argument. Every prompt has a Conclusion (the main point) and a Premise (the “why”). Between them is a gap: the Assumption. Every question is just asking you to interact with that gap. To weaken an argument, you attack the assumption. To strengthen it, you support the assumption. That’s it. Don’t get lost in the story.
You Are What You Measure
You will not improve by just doing thousands of problems. You will improve by doing 500 problems and obsessively tracking your mistakes.
This is the Error Log. It’s the single most important tool.
Get a spreadsheet. Every time you get a question wrong, you log:
- Question: (Copy/paste or OG #)
- Topic: (e.g., “Quant – Rates,” “SC – Modifiers”)
- The Mistake: Why did you get it wrong? Be specific. “I didn’t read ‘integer’.” “I fell for the trap answer C.” “I solved for x when I didn’t need to.”
- The Fix: What is the rule or process you will use next time to avoid this exact error?
Review this spreadsheet every week. This is how you stop making the same mistakes. You are training your brain to see the patterns.
When I prepared for the exam, I had notebook with horizontal lines to track error. When I was solving verbal problems, I always employed two strategies in verbal:
- Go through all the options from A to E
- Eliminating 4 wrong options by finding the errors is as important as identifying the right answer
I learned just as much from the wrong options as from the right answers. It also helped me develop my pattern recognition skills in verbal section.
The process
Don’t buy 10 books. Buy two things:
- The Official Guide (OG): These are the only real questions. You must train on the real thing. You can use third party materials for quants. But verbal should be OG only.
- Basic verbal and math books: Manhattan Prep used to be good. They are worth a try for GMAT focus
To be continued…