Learn from your mistakes during your Gmat practice

Perhaps that is the best piece of advice you can follow during your Gmat practice. Quality is more important than quantity. To improve, you must review your mistakes during your preparation. If you are stuck in Gmat limbo and not improving, then you are probably not learning from your mistakes. You need to be organized and structured in your approach to all problems. Follow these steps while you prepare:

Getting the most out of your Gmat practice problems

• Keep an accurate log of all questions you attempt. Use a proper filing system or a notebook to keep a record of all problems you solve.
• Review all incorrect answers. Understand why your answers were incorrect. Was it because you didn’t understand the theory, made a careless error, or wasted too much time? This is key. You have to know why you failed on this question.
• Review all correct answers. Yes. Even correct answers. Especially in situations where you got lucky, or almost answered incorrectly. You should do this for two reasons:
  1. To reinforce your understanding of the required theory
  2. To discover better techniques to answering the question. Read this article on painting a clear picture to see what I mean.
• For every gmat practice session you complete, do a “conclusion”, in which you note down what you learned. Do not limit your conclusions to what you learned about Quant or Verbal theory. Include your conclusions about effective problem solving strategy or any useful piece of information or realization you achieved during your practice session. For example, you can write down something like this:
  “In today’s critical reasoning session, I realized that I do not pay attention to the basics. Often, when I am under pressure, I forget that it is essential I identify the premise, assumption and conclusion of the argument. From now on, I will not make this flaw in mindset”. 
  This will be extremely helpful and will help you improve because it will help you identify and highlight, to yourself, your weaknesses in theory and strategy.

Your gmat practice will be hard work and it will take time. You need to be patient and diligent and put in the conscious effort to implement the strategy above to eliminate your weaknesses, improve, and achieve the score you need to go to business school.