Gmat prep how many hours

What was your Integrated Reasoning Score? For now, keep your analysis simple. Two hundred points? GMAC did some research on the number of hours students who scored or higher studied. In one study, they found that students who scored or higher studied on average for hours. Now, even though hours may seem like a lot, many students will actually find they must study for hours or more to reach a In general, hard work and devoted study are the norm for competitive applicants.

For example, many students learn most efficiently when they spread out their studying. For example, they do an hour in the morning, an hour at lunch, and two hours in the evening. At that rate, you could rack up about hours of studying in about ten weeks. If, on average, you could only study two hours each day, you would need about twenty weeks to build up hours of study.

Do a little bit each day, but make your studying count. Instead, strive to build deep mastery. Here are some practical strategies you can use to study for the GMAT while working a demanding job. You know your GMAT goal and you know where your score currently stands. It will be much less painful to study over an intense week period than on and off over a year. People waste so much time trying to prepare on their own without a defined curriculum and without the guidance of an expert.

Self-studying for this complex exam is generally a bad idea and usually ends up being more expensive and more time-consuming than if you had started with professional help.

With a full-time job, you should plan on spending hours on GMAT preparation during three of your workdays, with a big 4-hour study session on one of your weekend days, and a shorter 2-hour session on the other. Ideally, you put in at least 12 hours a week over the week period. Avoid short study sessions in which you are not able to dig deeply into topics and train both focus and pattern recognition. If you are not working full-time you can condense this GMAT study plan into weeks.

Completing large batches of problems within one content area is essential for learning all the different wrinkles and strategies associated with that type. For all the question batches in the first five weeks, primarily use the official guide but add in questions from the supplement guides as needed. Learn important strategies for critical reasoning questions and apply them to a collection of official problems.

Having specific, regimented strategies for critical reasoning is key to success, and most students who self-study do not develop a systematic approach. The standard for algebra on the GMAT is high, so make sure you have complete mastery of this content.

Learn important strategies for reading comprehension and apply them to a collection of official passages and questions. Success in reading comprehension depends on both your reading approach and your ability to recognize patterns and tricks related to specific types of questions.

Learn strategies and best practices for attacking the common word problems used on the GMAT. Your natural abilities which we are not always good at accessing accurately may play some role in your score. Regardless of your natural abilities however, you will not achieve your best score without proper preparation.

Building GMAT knowledge is a bit like building muscles at the gym. You need to keep it up and do a bit every day. Try not to lose momentum and stop and start your studies. In the second phase you will introduce the timing element. Make sure you practice taking the test under the same conditions you will be taking it on test day. Building up stamina against mental fatigue and being able to put strategies in place for yourself around this is vitally important.

If you are taking the online GMAT, be sure to practice with both the online and physical whiteboard before test day. The accuracy of your current estimate will play an important role in determining how long will you take to prepare for the GMAT.

Thus, make sure you choose an efficient and reliable method depending on the resources available to you. A good target GMAT score helps you stand out from the candidate pool. We show a 5-step process to help you determine the same. To learn more about what GMAT score will give you an edge over other applicants during admissions and scholarships considerations, read our other article. Depending on whether you are using books, video lessons, or instructor-led classroom coaching, the time required for GMAT preparation may be different.

However, if you are using books for GMAT preparation, you would require approximately 12 hours per point improvement on a scale of Besides the time required for learning the concepts tested in the GMAT, you also must account for the time required for taking mock tests for conditioning and fine-tuning preparation strategy.

Now that you have understood the factors which determine the amount of time it takes to prepare for the GMAT and hit your target score, use the following formula to calculate your GMAT preparation time:. Thus, if you are extremely weak in either determined based on your mock test score the value of CBT would be 0.

However, if you are scoring or above in your mock test attempt, you need to analyze your sectional and subsectional abilities to determine the CBT. Now we will consider a couple of scenarios to understand the application of the above formula to calculate your GMAT preparation time.

A working professional has found the answers to the questions that determine his preparation period. His required target score is , he gave a GMAT Prep mock test after some basic concept review and scored Thus to reach his target score, he requires a point improvement. Taking this a step further, since a working professional would not be able to allocate more than 2 hours of time on weekdays and around 3 hours of time on weekends, his preparation period will be spread throughout 8 — 10 weeks.

Thus, even though the preparation time required is around hours, due to scheduling constraints, the time required to reach the GMAT score would be 2 — 2. The above estimate assumes that you will be putting in 4 hours of study time towards GMAT preparation daily for 7 days a week.