How to Ensure Consistency in Your Score During Practice and Your Score on the GMAT

These days, online GMAT Prep is gaining currency and people are willingly spending time, effort and money to have stellar scores. Most GMAT Prep online courses include practice tests to help prepare better.

Unfortunately, a substantial percentage of people find that the scores they achieved during online GMAT Prep are not replicated on the actual GMAT. Ideally, you seek a sustained improvement in scores, with your GMAT score turning out boast-worthy. If this does not happen, you are bound to feel disheartened, particularly so if the difference is significant.

How do you ensure that your scores remain consistently good?

First, you must realize that the tests you take for practice while engaged in online GMAT Prep provide only an estimate. And a rough idea is what you can get at best since it is not easy to crack GMAT’s scoring logic. You should be prepared for some variation in the actual score.

But some effective steps can make your performance as consistent as possible.

Enroll for only some reputed online GMAT Prep course so that you get computer-adaptive tests that are consistent with GMAT’s difficulty level plus close enough with scoring patterns. Some freely available tests or the ones by those who are not reputed/experienced enough may be sub-standard and therefore, not reliable.

Even if you have been extremely sincere in your online GMAT Prep, you may face difficulty in answering some questions. Seek the guidance of those trainers who will familiarize you with ways to tackle a wide range of problems.

Take full-length tests to have a better idea of your likely score on the actual exam. If you start with quant during practice tests, you may fare better because you will be mentally fresh. So, whenever you take practice tests, do AWA and IR sections, and then proceed to quant.

Time yourself while doing practice tests during online GMAT Prep. If you are taking your own sweet time to finish your practice tests, you will find it difficult to work within time-constraints on the actual exam. And each unanswered question results in heavy penalty.

Factors such as your health condition at the particular point or your frame of mind may adversely affect performance. What you can control is that you follow healthy eating habits and sleep well. Uninterrupted eight hours of sleep daily also helps in better retaining things in memory.

While preparedness should boost confidence and so prevent high stress levels, the actual exam tends to make you nervous. Even if you follow the recommendation of online GMAT Prep experts and try to make your practice test conditions as GMAT-like as possible, you may hamper your performance by being anxious. Negative thoughts about possible failure may reduce self-confidence and anxiety may prevent capital functioning of the brain. Even concentration levels can be adversely affected and time may be wasted in dwelling on negative thoughts. So you will have to practice stress management. Exercise is a stress-buster and so is deep breathing. Try to cut down on stress-inducing factors in your life and make time for activities that make you feel relaxed. Work on improving concentration.

If you follow these things throughout your GMAT Prep Online, you will surely get the score you desire.