3 ways to increase your GMAT score to 760
Everyone wants to ace the GMAT and land the score necessary to impress their dream school. As we have discussed before, what score qualifies as a good one varies from person to person and depends highly upon your situation and what your target school’s requirements are. Still, for some a high score on the GMAT is more than a means to an end. Scoring in the highest percentile is a personal goal and a point of pride. Scoring a 760 is a dream for many GMAT testers among us. Here are a few tips to get you there.
Dig Into Literature
Some of us are fortunate enough to be passionate about the written word. We seek out quality literature as a lifelong hobby. For others reading is, at best, a chore. Regardless of how you personally feel about pleasure reading, surrounding yourself with well written books, articles, and news stories is a surefire way to master grammatical rules and learn proper sentence structure. Both of these skills will be invaluable during the verbal section. Even if you are not having trouble on Sentence Correction questions, you should be reading a lot leading up to the GMAT. Fortunately, what you read does not have to be related to the GMAT. As long as it is well written and grammatically correct, feel free to crack open books by your favorite authors and journalists.
Even if you are a diehard book worm already there are certain grammar rules that we let slip from time to time and while nobody likes a grammar snob in the real world, you will have to break out the red ink to prepare for the GMAT.
Learn Multiplication Tables
You remember multiplication tables right? You probably learned them in elementary school, but if you are anything like most of us you probably forgot them by middle school. The simple truth is that calculators have spoiled us and we don’t do as much mental math as we should. However, if you want to ace the quantitative section, your arithmetic skills need to be in top form. Quant is a section which trips a lot of testers up and shaving time off of the section should be a top priority. You will come across a lot of multiplication on the GMAT, and relearning multiplication tables will allow you to solve any parts of a problem involving basic multiplication quickly. While memorizing multiplication tables is a perfectly viable approach, there are also a number of multiplication tricks that you can use to improve your skills quickly. Here is a list of tricks to get you started!
Learn How to Approximate Values
During math class we were taught to solve problems as accurately as possible. The GMAT is not a math class. Instead, the GMAT is a timed test designed to measure your reasoning skills. For example, let’s say that a question asks you to solve the following equation 327x+1.3=842. In math class you would divide both sides by 327 to get x+1.3=2.640625, then by subtracting 1.3 from both sides you would end up with x=1.340625. Not only is solving to this degree of accuracy unnecessary, it is also a colossal waste of precious time. By rounding the figure after dividing to 2.64 and then subtracting 1.3 you would get an answer of 1.34 which not only is accurate enough for the GMAT, but also saves you a lot of time.
What is your dream score and what strategies are you using to help you get there? Let us know in the comments section below.
