I thought that for this week’s post, we’d take a closer look at one of the aforementioned “productive” uses of my class time: preparing for the GMAT.

For those uninitiated, the GMAT is the standardized test that you need to get into a graduate business program, similar to the SAT you’d need to get into any college that doesn’t have the word “community” in its name.

I don’t actually know what G.M.A.T. stands for. What I do know is that unlike the SAT, the GMAT is a CAT, which stands for Computer Adaptive Test (personally, I was hoping for Cereal Advocating Tiger). This means two things:

1. You get to do the whole thing in front of a computer (positive!), and
2. The computer is smarter than your typical test booklet, and makes the test harder as you answer more questions correctly (negative!)

Also like the SAT, the GMAT consists of a Writing, Verbal, and Quantitative section. The third is really just a math section. I think the test makers just wanted to be pompous, so they gave it a bigger name. Supposedly nobody really counts the writing section for anything.

You end up getting an overall score out of 800, which is derived from your scores on the math and verbal sections. Those are each scored out of 60, even though the sections are 37 and 41 questions long, respectively. And if that wasn’t enough, the test weighs your right and wrong answers differently depending on the difficulty of the questions it fed you. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I have no idea how this thing is graded. Intuition suggests that answering more questions correctly leads to a higher score. This was as far as I got.

Oh, no, wait. The test also gives you a percentile score, showing where you rank compared to all the other people who’ve taken the test. I’ve got no idea why they’re still messing around with 800’s and 60’s and things, but I guess some people just like to make work for themselves.

The ultimate positive of having the test done electronically is that my score gets calculated instantly. I took the test and walked out of the building with my grade in hand.

You could argue that standardized tests don’t really do a great job of measuring aptitude. The test really measures your ability to take tests more than anything else. I’d agree with that. My mom points out that it’s a shame I can’t take tests for a living. Love you, Mom.

If you were thinking of taking the GMAT (or any test, for that matter), here’s a 3 step system that’ll probably raise your score by 40 points:

1. Read Everything. The GMAT loves to ask questions like this:
   All of the following equal 4 EXCEPT:
   a) 2+2
   b) 4
   c) Firetruck
   d) 3+1If you’re rushing and don’t read everything closely, you end up circling A and looking like an idiot. This has always been my biggest crux in taking tests, and probably always will be.
2. Write Everything. Most of the math functions on the test are easy enough for you to do in your head. But the more you do in your head, the more likely you are to forget that the answer should be a negative number. Or something equally insipid. And the devilish test makers seem to always pair the one correct answer with the three incorrect answers you’re most likely to arrive at when you screw up mental math. Writing it all down really doesn’t take any extra time.Writing everything is helpful in the verbal section, too. You might not have time to re-read everything you’ve written, but writing notes as you read a passage on a freshwater lake’s summertime ecology and water temperatures (yuck) is bound to help you better absorb the passage info. Unless freshwater lake summertime ecology is kind of your thing.
3. Practice the Test. At roughly 4 hours in length, the GMAT is a freaking marathon. Practice doing the whole thing without breaks. It’s a lot harder to answer simple math questions when you’ve been staring at the light bulb that is your computer screen for the past three hours. But get used to it.

One final note: I wish death upon the Princeton Review. Be very wary of the scores you get on practice tests provided by guys like Princeton and Kaplan. I was sweating bullets the day before my actual test after taking a practice exam from Princeton and scoring a good 100 points lower than either of my other practice tests from mba.com. Then it occurred to me that those jerks didn’t really care about how much the practice test low score frightened me, they’re just trying to do business (“Hey, that score’s kind of low. Looks like you’d better sign up for a review course, y’know?” or “We guarantee that your score will go up by 100 points or your money back!”). One of these days I’ll throw a brick through someone’s window.