How to Improve Your GMAT Score: Expert Tips for Making Gains

Welcome to our four-part series on how to improve your GMAT score! Are you just getting started on your business school and GMAT journey, or have you been hitting the books for a while? Either way, we're going to cover the most important things you can do to improve your GMAT score as much as possible—without letting your studies completely take over your life.

In today's post, we'll focus on the overall skills and mindset you need to get a good GMAT score (not incidentally, this same mindset will help you succeed in business school). In part two, my colleague Reed Arnold will delve deep into how to improve your GMAT Verbal section score and, in part three, my colleague Ryan Jacobs will tell you how to improve your GMAT Quant section score. Finally, in part four, I'll be back to take you through how to improve your GMAT Data Insights section score.

One more thing for those of you looking for an especially high GMAT score. Ryan, Reed, and I have all scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT. Everything we're saying is what we concentrated on ourselves to maximize our own GMAT scores and what we advise our own students to do during their GMAT preparation.

Your First Level of GMAT Studies: The Content

Your first job is to learn the facts, formulas, and rules tested on the GMAT, brush up on your general reading comprehension and critical reasoning skills, and learn how the eight different GMAT problem types work. In particular, there are a number of math concepts to learn, as well as data analysis content.

There are plenty of official and test-prep company materials out there to help you with your First-Level studies. Take advantage of free materials to start (just make sure they're high-quality free materials). Check out both Manhattan Prep's Free GMAT Starter Kit and GMAC's Official Starter Kit. The Official Starter Kit includes free practice tests and official problems that appeared on the actual exam in the past. Manhattan Prep's Starter Kit includes dozens of hours of lessons (both written and video) on foundational math content, the major problem types, time management, and more.

Once you've built your foundation with these free materials, you can take a practice test to figure out what additional materials you'll need to improve your GMAT score even more. (Practice tests are nerve-wracking, yes, but taking a practice test is also your best chance to gain great data about your strengths and weaknesses. Use that data to help you get ready for the real test.)

Your Second Level of GMAT Studies: The Mindset

A lot of people never get to the Second Level of their GMAT preparation at all, mostly because they don't realize that it exists! If you want a high GMAT score vs. just an average GMAT score, then master these three principles:

1. Develop your executive mindset
2. Focus on reading comprehension for the whole GMAT exam
3. Know the code: Train yourself how to think your way through the GMAT

The Second Level is even more important than your baseline content studies—knowing the facts and rules will only take you so far. Give yourself sufficient time to study, solve questions and then analyze them deeply (we'll talk a lot about that in this series), and use your Second Level studies to really drive your GMAT score improvement.

Principle #1: Develop your Executive Mindset for the GMAT

Your very first task is to reset your mindset. The GMAT is not really a math or "academic" test at heart. If you try to approach this exam like a school test, you're going to study a lot longer than you need to and, even then, you're unlikely to get the best score you could.

The GMAT is primarily a test of your executive reasoning skills—your executive mindset. Which of the 12 unread emails in your inbox should you read first? Your supervisor asked for some figures...is an estimate enough or does she need an exact answer?

Business schools do not really care whether you know how to solve a quadratic equation. They do care how well you analyze data, prioritize, handle high-pressure situations, and make well-reasoned decisions about what to do—and what not to do. And they want to feel reasonably assured that you will keep trying hard when your studies become challenging. The GMAT exam is explicitly designed to test all of these skills.

So how do you develop a better executive mindset?

The GMAT is Designed to Allow Mistakes

The GMAT is built to challenge you, yes, but it's also built to allow you to make mistakes.

The GMAT is a CAT, or computer adaptive test—that is, the test adapts to you, getting harder as you get problems right (and getting easier as you miss problems). So, if you're scoring really well, it doesn't mean that you're getting every single question right. Rather, it means that you are earning a harder mix of questions than other test takers. Therefore, you're still allowed to get questions wrong and maintain your high score, because you're literally just getting harder questions wrong.

As a result, the algorithm is a lot more forgiving than most people realize. In school, you usually couldn't afford to make more than a couple of mistakes to get an A on a test. But on the GMAT, the rules are different. For example, when I took the GMAT, my overall score was 745 (100th percentile) despite missing about 14% of the problems across the entire test. One of my recent students scored 695 (98th percentile) while missing about 17% of the problems on the test. You'd never get such good scores on school tests after missing that many questions.

Don't Try to Get Everything Right

Take strategic advantage of this knowledge about how the test really works. Guess quickly on the hardest problems and reallocate that time instead to other problems that have a better chance of paying off. In fact, know before you go into the test what you hate (I'm looking at you, combinatorics…) and don't even study those topics! Just guess when you see them. (Within reason, of course. You can't guess on all of algebra.)

Likewise, we all experience test anxiety (aka performance anxiety) when taking standardized tests. But on the GMAT, when you hit a problem you don't know how to do, it's fine! Shrug your shoulders and remind yourself that this test is built to allow you to make mistakes and get stuff wrong. Then guess and move on. (If you want, bookmark the problem. You can always take a fresh look at it after you get to the end of that section, when you're allowed to change your answers on up to three problems.)

Approach the GMAT as a series of business decisions. You don't invest in a particular stock just because someone asked you to. You choose whether to invest based on the expected ROI (return on investment)—and some investment opportunities are going to get a "Nope! Not worth my time." Treat GMAT problems the same way.

Principle #2: Focus on Reading Comprehension for the Whole GMAT

My colleague Reed Arnold will introduce this one:

“One of the most important and most under-practiced study tactics is examining the way you glean information from written text. It's very easy to overlook qualifiers (is it many or most?), or to morph the meaning of what is written into something subtly but importantly different (is economic development the same thing as economic growth?).”

To improve your GMAT score, it's critical to get better at reading comprehension on the entire test, not just in the Verbal section. When you find yourself making an "I should have known that!" mistake, it's because either you overlooked some detail, or you interpreted or extrapolated something in the wrong way. Careless mistakes are the most frustrating mistakes you can make.

When you realize that you made any type of mistake on Verbal problems or you realize that you made a comprehension mistake on Quant or Data Insights problems, ask yourself these four questions:

1. Why is the wrong answer wrong?
2. Why was I tempted by the wrong answer? How did the question get me to think it was (or could be) right?
3. Why is the right answer right?
4. Why did I think the right answer was wrong? How did the question get me to overlook or cross off the right answer?

You're probably already asking yourself the first and third questions. But very few people naturally think to ask themselves the second and fourth questions.

On a timed test like the GMAT, it can be easy to misread or misinterpret the meaning of a sentence. If I truly understand how a particular question challenged me, then I'm a lot less likely to fall into that same type of mistake again next time.

Imagine that the problem gives you a table with a list of 5 items that a company needs to buy. One column tells you how much the company budgeted for that item and another column tells you how much the company actually spent for that item. For example, let's say the company budgeted $500 for a computer monitor but actually spent only $438.

So far, that's pretty straightforward. But here's where things can get complicated—let's say the question asks you:

For which of these items did the amount spent differ from the amount budgeted by more than 12% percent of the amount budgeted?

What does that question actually mean? (I have seen real GMAT questions that have quite similar wording to this one—you can find at least one in the latest Official Guide if you look! I strongly recommend using the OG in your studies, by the way.)

Many people think this question is asking whether the amount spent was 12 percent more than the amount budgeted—in other words, whether the company went over budget by more than 12 percent.

If you interpret the question that way, then you'd immediately cross off all of the items for which the company's actual spend was less than the amount budgeted—including the "computer monitor" answer choice.

But that's not actually what the question says! It's asking whether the spend differed from the budget by 12 percent in either direction—either over budget or under budget. You might rephrase the question as: For which item was the company more than 12 percent under OR over budget?

If the company budgeted $500 for the monitor but spent only $438, that's a difference of $62.

Next, 12 percent of a figure can be calculated by finding 10 percent and 1 percent:

10% of $500 = $50, and 1% of $500 = $5
So 12% = 10% + 1% + 1% = $50 + $5 + $5 = $60

The actual difference, $62, is greater than the 12% figure, $60. So the amount the company spent on the monitor did differ from the amount budgeted by more than 12%. The fact that they spent less than they budgeted on the monitor doesn't matter—it's still the case that the amount spent differed by more than 12% from the amount budgeted.

Most GMAT studiers don't spend enough time analyzing their own comprehension mistakes. Spend at least twice as much time reviewing a problem as you spent doing that problem in the first place. There's a lot to learn!

Know the Code: Train Yourself How to Think Your Way Through the GMAT

As my colleague Ryan Jacobs says, “Improving your GMAT score is about wiring your brain to solve problems that it's never encountered before (even though certain parts may look familiar).”

Yes, there are facts and rules and formulas to learn. You need to know basic math concepts—and some that are not so basic. But that's not enough to earn a good GMAT score. You have to train yourself how to think your way through new GMAT problems, because what you see on test day is never going to look just like what you studied.

This is really different than what you were used to when taking math or data-based classes in school. In school, the problems we practiced before the test were almost identical to the problems we then saw on the test—the numbers were changed, some other details were changed, but mostly we just had to memorize the solution process and then just apply to the new numbers/ details on the test. But that's now how the GMAT works. The problems you see on official test day are going to feel largely new and different.

But don't panic—you already think your way through these kinds of new problems every day of your life. The issue your boss asks you to resolve today is similar in certain ways to three other things you've resolved over the past six months—but not exactly the same. So you pull the relevant pieces from those three prior issues and come up with a semi-customized solution for the new problem in front of you right now.

How do you learn to do that on the GMAT exam?

First, please stop trying to plow through hundreds and hundreds (or thousands) of problems. This is the single biggest mistake people make! Your goal is never to try to memorize all of the Official Guide problems and then just hope you'll see really similar problems on test day. School tests were like that, especially for subjects like math, but on the GMAT, you're never going to see essentially the same problems with different numbers or words.

Deeply Analyze Problems to Improve Your GMAT Score

Instead, you're going to dive deep into analyzing problems after you've finished trying them. Most of your GMAT score improvement is going to happen while you review problems, not while you're trying a problem for the first time.

The comprehension questions I listed earlier were just a start. Here are more questions to ask yourself when you're reviewing a problem:

In this scenario…	Ask…
I got it right in a reasonable amount of time	Did I legitimately get it right or did I get lucky? (If lucky…I need to study this.)
I got it right but took way too long	What is a more efficient or easier way to solve? (If nothing…guess fast and move on, even at the expense of getting it wrong. Exec mindset!)
I made a careless mistake or fell for a trap	What was the specific mistake / trap? Why did I make it / fall for it? What new habit can help minimize that kind of mistake? (e.g., what solution method I use; how I organize my scratch work) What clues in the problem itself could help me spot and avoid similar traps in future?
I didn’t know how to do it before but I get it now	Prioritize these! What do I need to study to get better at this? How can I practice to get comfortable with it? When am I going to revisit to help me remember it?
I didn’t know how to do it before and I still don’t get it now	Deprioritize these! Until my next practice test: Let it go. What characteristics can help me recognize quickly to guess and move on? On my next practice test: Guess immediately and move on. After my next practice test, is it worth my time now to learn how to get better at this?

Use all of that analysis to articulate your takeaways in this Know the Code form:

When I see __________, I’ll do ___________.

For example:

When I see…	I will…
…one value differs from another by more than X%... e.g., M differs from N by more than 10% of N	Ask: Is one number always greater than the other? Or could it go either way? M could be more than N or less than N. Can’t tell which way.
Qualifier or "scope" words in CR e.g., a few, some, often, many, a majority, most	Ask: Does the conclusion match the argument’s scope? e.g. If most companies do X, can conclude some do x. But if some companies do X, can’t conclude that most do X.
Extreme words in the answer choices of any word-based problem (Verbal, DI) e.g., all, always, none, never	Ask: Can I find definitive proof in the prompt that this extreme word is justified? If not, cross off this answer choice.
Four variables combined with two or more complicated algebraic operations   e.g., |x + z| > |y – w|	Guess (B) / second option and move on immediately.   (This applies to anything that I know I hate or that I’ve spent 60 seconds trying to understand and yet I still don’t.)

That last one is from my own bail list! I'm fine with two or three variables, but it's pretty annoying to deal with four. And I'm not a fan of combining both absolute value and inequalities. Put all of that in a single problem...and I'm out. By the way, B is my "favorite" answer letter. If I have to guess immediately, I always guess B or the second option—not for any real reason but just so that I don't waste any more time thinking, "But which letter should I guess?" My goal at this point is to get out of the question as fast as humanly possible.

When I took the official GMAT, I guessed randomly on about three problems each in the Quant and DI sections—and I scored 745 (100th percentile). Remember: The algorithm is purposely designed to be forgiving. You don't need to get everything right. (Also: Sometimes, your random guess will be right! In the Quant section, my score report showed that I only missed 2 questions on that section, so I got lucky on at least one of my random guesses.)

If you really want to improve your GMAT score, incorporate all three Second-Level principles into your studies:

1. Develop your exec mindset
2. Master reading comprehension (for the whole test)
3. Know the code: Train yourself how to think your way through the GMAT

 

These skills will get you prepared not only to do well on the GMAT but also to excel in business school and beyond.

Next steps

This is the first post in a four-part series. In part two, join Reed Arnold for a deep dive into how to improve your Verbal score.

Ready to put all of this into practice? You can use these strategies with any study materials you already have. Please also check out Manhattan Prep's GMAT Free Starter Kit. It contains free eBooks, lessons, practice problems, time management strategies, and tons of strategies for analyzing your practice problems and practice test data to improve your GMAT score. And don't forget GMAC's great (and also completely free!) Official Starter Kit with practice problems and two full-length official practice tests.

Good luck and happy studying!

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my GMAT score not improving?

There are three main areas to examine if you find that your GMAT score is not improving.

1. The underlying content: Do you have any weaknesses in the facts, rules, or skills you need to know for the GMAT? If you have holes in your foundational knowledge, those holes may be preventing you from raising your overall score.
2. Your process: Are you writing down all of your work and keeping it well-organized? Do you have a systematic process for each question type—one that you follow consistently, every single time?
3. Your time management and decision-making: How are you tracking yourself as you work through a test section—do you know when you are too far ahead or behind on time? And do you have a plan for what to do if you discover that your timing is off? Do you have a "guess fast list"—a short list of content areas or question types on which you know you'll guess fast and move on as soon as you see them? Any one of these three areas can derail your progress and make it difficult to improve your GMAT score.
   

How can I improve my GMAT score to 655+?

Assuming you know the underlying content and how the different question types work, here are the three ways to kick-start your GMAT score:

1. Develop your exec mindset. Make decisions based on the expected ROI (return on investment); don't try to do everything! Guess quickly on the hardest problems and reallocate that time instead to other problems that have a better chance of paying off.
2. Focus on reading comprehension for the whole test. A lot of errors are fixable just by slowing down and making sure you understand what the test is really saying. When you realize that you made any type of mistake on Verbal problems or you realize that you made a comprehension mistake on Quant or Data Insights problems, ask yourself (1) Why is the wrong answer wrong and why was I tempted by that wrong answer? (2) Why is the right answer right and why was I tempted to cross it off?
3. Know the code. Distill your study takeaways in this form: When I see X, I'll do Y. On the test, when you see X characteristic again, you'll have already trained your brain what to try next.

For more free study resources, use Manhattan Prep's GMAT Free Starter Kit, as well as mba.com's official GMAT starter kit and start putting this advice into action.

Is 655 GMAT score good?

A 655 GMAT score is great! Average GMAT scores are in the 545 to 555 range. Less than 10% of all test takers score 655 or higher, so if you're able to earn that kind of GMAT score, you'll be in a strong position when applying to business school. (Of course, top MBA programs care about a lot more than just your test score, but it always helps to have a competitive GMAT score.)

If you're familiar with the classic GMAT scoring scale, a 655 GMAT score is equivalent to about a 700 or 710 on the old scale. 

Find out how understanding GMAT Exam timing strategy is key to getting your best score possible.