Prepare for the GRE and GMAT Focus

Show Summary

Bara Sapir joins Admissions Straight Talk to discuss the benefits and challenges of the GRE and GMAT exams. She delves into the structure and length of the exams and also discusses the challenges unique to each one. Bara shares her expert tips on how to overcome these challenges, including being an active participant in test preparation and developing test-taking strategies. Bara and Linda have a discussion on the value of these exams and the importance of reframing the test-taking experience.

Show Notes

Welcome to the 588th episode of Admissions Straight Talk, thanks for joining me. Are you considering engaging an experienced, supportive admissions consultant to guide you through the challenging application process? Would you appreciate a profile evaluation and a chance to sample your consultant’s expertise and value? Take advantage of Accepted’s free 30-minute initial consultation. Just go to www.accepted.com/freecall, complete the form, and you’ll be on your way to insight, confidence, and application success.

Our guest today, Bara Sapir, is an internationally recognized expert in high-performance coaching and personal empowerment. She’s also a pioneer in mindful test-taking and transformative test preparation. She has a BFA from the University of Michigan, an MA in education from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and an MA from the University of Michigan in art history, gender, and Holocaust studies. Well-resourced and experienced, she has a 20+ year career in the test prep field, with expertise specifically in reducing test anxiety, managing stress, building confidence, and improving each student’s journey through the academic terrain. She founded City Test Prep, a hybrid test preparation company providing academic mastery, test-taking strategy, and techniques in holistic and mindful test-taking. She’s also the co-host of MBA Waves, a leading podcast and must-listen for MBA applicants.

Bara, welcome back to Admissions Straight Talk. [2:35]

It’s great to be here. Thanks so much, Linda.

We’re going to discuss the benefits and challenges of the newish, shorter GRE and GMAT exams. To start, we’ll cover the basic exam structure and then we’ll get into some more interesting test-taking prep tips. What is the current structure of the GRE and how long is it? [2:41]

The GRE has three sections grouped in this order. It’s analytical writing, which is 30 minutes, verbal reasoning, which are two sections, 41 minutes of 27 questions each. And quant reasoning, there’s two sections of that, 41 minutes and 27 questions. And so overall, the test is about one hour and 58 minutes.

What are the challenges inherent in the GRE? [3:24]

The GRE exam is not very different than the one that it used to be. So that exam, you can use the same questions to study, it’s the same actual material, it’s just they made it shorter. And one of the big challenges I find, or you could say it’s easier, especially when we compare it to the GMAT, is that it’s adaptive, but section-adaptive, right? So, that means that you’ll take a whole section, either the verbal or the quant, math or verbal, and you don’t necessarily know how you’re doing on it, but based on how you do in the subsequent section, you’ll know. If it’s harder, you did well, and if it’s easier, you might not have done as well.

So the challenge is that you don’t necessarily have a gauge while you’re going through it, but that actually is really good because if you can get over not knowing that or it means you’re not having to gauge, and so you can actually have some space and just be with the questions, which winds up being a little bit more difficult on the GMAT, which is also adaptive, but question-adaptive.

The challenges have to do with who’s taking the GRE, right? So GRE is not only going to be for business school applicants, it’s going be for French literature and physics and engineering. Everyone who’s going to grad school that’s not taking a specific test for that particular program like the MCATs or the LSATs, is going to take the GRE, and so it’s a catch-all. So one challenge is that you’re not necessarily going to be highlighting what your specific gifts are. If you’re amazing in math, you’re going to do great on the test, but there’s going to be a lot of people who do amazing on the test, it’s a different pool of people. Where when you take the LSAT or you take the MCAT, the pool of people taking that particular test are all people just using, just doing those questions and they have, it’s a much more defined pool of people.

So a challenge could be if, for example, English is not your native language, maybe the vocabulary is going to be difficult for you, but I would also argue if English is not your native language, some of the vocabulary might be easier because you might have the roots based on whatever language you have. So, one person’s challenge is going to be another person’s useful ticket. So it just really, it just depends.

I’ll say one more thing that I think is a challenge is that some of the questions are“Sselect one or more answer choices,” which because you have not one answer per question, but possibly several. I think that that could be a little challenging for test takers.

I think the more you get to know the test, the easier it is and those challenges wind up sort of neutralizing. So, the first thing you want to do with whatever test that you’re taking is to do a diagnostic, and you want to do a diagnostic written by the test writers. And then you want to identify not just what you get wrong, but how you get questions wrong so that you can really identify, is it a content issue? Is it a guessing issue? Is it a careless mistake? Is it some sort of trigger with that particular kind of question that doesn’t feel comfortable? So the more you get to know yourself on the test, the better it is. So those challenges can really be diffused if you go in knowledgeable, understanding test strategy, understanding what your speed is like on a time-bound test, and also what your mindset is. So these are all things that can be overcome, you just need to be an active participant in your own success.

Let’s turn to the GMAT. What is the structure and what’s tested on the GMAT? [7:44]

The GMAT has definitely changed more than the GRE has changed, they’ve both changed in the past 12 months. And the GRE no longer has sentence correction and it no longer has geometry, but it does have a verbal section, which is primarily reading and arguments, and then it has a quant section, which no longer has, like I said, the geometry but no longer has data sufficiency, but that’s been moved over to data insights. So they’ve sort of restructured the test, and they’ve also gotten rid of the writing section, which I didn’t mention. The GRE does have the writing section. So as far as the market share, some people might want to take the GRE because it has that writing section and if a school is requiring that, versus the GMAT, which no longer has that, and their writing additional add-on is not yet ready for public use.

So the test has changed a bit, and the stareholders are the schools and these are the things that the schools had wanted. They wanted to make sure that it was identifying for business school students who are primarily the people who are taking this test, that it was really focusing in on what the schools were looking for.

HBS is taking the GMAT Focus, but is insisting that if somebody is invited to interview and they only have the GMAT Focus, then they have to take an additional writing assessment that I guess GMAC is getting ready. Obviously, if they take the GRE, then they’re done. I think MIT might be doing something similar. [9:16]

Right, I had seen something about that.

In addition to the writing sample not being there and presenting challenges to those people applying to HBS and maybe to MIT, what are some of the other challenges inherent in the new GMAT edition? [10:04]

I think the same thing that was inherent before, which I mentioned earlier, which is if someone has the experience of wanting to gauge how they’re doing with each and every question, they can get wrapped up in sort of pretzel-ing their mind around whether they’re performing better or not as well with each question. And so a student really needs to come to terms with thinking about it as a dance and a challenge to rise up to, instead of grapple with. So that can wind up being an issue, it’s kind of like gaming the system. You don’t want to game the system, you want to be with each thing. It’s also, you don’t necessarily know if something is harder or not because it’s subjective. So it’s really coming to some kind of peace with moving through the test itself.

And the rest of it is the same thing with the GRE or any standardized test, which is who are you with the question, what are you getting wrong and how are you getting it wrong, and then how do you fix it before you go in? That’s why we developed the speed reading platform, MindFlow, because the easiest way to move faster on the test is to read faster, right?

Because you’re not getting points by reading faster, you’re getting points by answering questions correctly. So if you can just bump your reading speed up a little bit, you wind up having more time to answer and to think critically, which is one of the reasons that we developed the program.

Do you find that the new data insight section is more difficult than the integrated reasoning and the data sufficiency that preceded it, or is it pretty much the same? What’s the difficulty? [12:01]

I think that because it counts as a third of the test, certainly it depends on the student and the business schools want to make sure that the applicants can handle the kind of reasoning and critical thinking and working with data. So you could argue that should be a relative… I won’t say easy, that should be an easier section for people because it doesn’t give you real life examples, but you’re not having to harken back to high school math. You’re really looking at graphs and thinking about how the information works together, and it is using material that was on the test before like the data sufficiency. So it’s getting used to the format of that. It’s a prescribed formula. I won’t go into all of the answer choices, but it’s really just understanding the format of it and once you understand the format, you can move through it quickly, you don’t have to get tripped up by it. But because it’s such a big part of the test now, obviously it’s important to business schools and it’s something that students should really plan to study that.

Well, I mean it’s more than that, because we’re not the only option in town, and we might not be the option for everybody because of financial issues or because of maybe someone’s got a lot of time on their hands or maybe they’re actually off the grid and they can’t access a way to reach us.

There are lots of options, there’s books, there’s online DIY, there’s, you can go to the boards, but when you go to the boards, just don’t have that be your gospel. Go and figure out what’s going to work best for you and really, the best way to start is to take a real diagnostic test, to take something that was written by the test writers so that you get to know not just the content that’s on there, but dare I say, the vibe or just what the question is like. And the more you use official material, the more you start to get a sense of what’s a wrong answer and what’s a correct answer. So you want to start off with a diagnostic, see where you’re at and where you need to improve.

If you need a soup-to-nuts approach, you might be better off taking a course or doing an online course or doing it yourself and moving through all the material, especially if you have time to do that. If you’ve got less time and you need to fine-tune, then it’s going to be best to work with a tutor or someone who’s going to be able to say, this is what you need to do to improve. And you can always bring a tutor on at the end, even if you do something that’s more of a big box program. But we tell people this is one of your first big business decisions, how you apply to schools, so, and with business school, it’s business school. So it is a decision of, how are you best going to work smarter rather than harder? But there are so many options out there for people to improve their performance.

What are some of the more common mistakes you see, in terms of test prep? Not the day of the test, but getting going and preparation. [15:32]

I think some of the mistakes that we see are going to the boards and thinking that just because someone did well on the test that they know how you need to prepare for a test.

And by boards you mean like forums and Reddit and stuff like that? [15:51]

Exactly. Reddit, Beat the GMAT, GMAT Club. Going online and thinking that just because someone has done well or even the guy in the cubicle next to you. So don’t assume that because someone has done well that they’re going to be able to help you or they know what to do. I always tell people about that thatbook, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, that that was a way that this person made a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean that that’s a way that you’re going to make a lot of money. So you really need to figure out what your needs are and to address it that way and that these are all really good insights into how to improve, but to not spend all your time trying to figure out how to improve, but to get in the trenches and start doing the work. And the work means diagnostic, it means learning and practicing.

It’s also a problem that people will use materials that are subpar, right? Third-party materials are not all created equally, and so you want to make sure that the majority of materials you use are official materials and then using third-party materials that are reputable. And you also want to make sure that you don’t go over the things that you’re comfortable with. A lot of times we want to do practice with what feels comfortable. You want to exercise doing the exercises that are the easiest that you can get through the fastest, but really you want to be able to move through the stuff that’s challenging and confrontational, right? It’s a shortcoming for now until you overcome that. So I do see people going through lots of material of things they already know because it’s, they feel good.

It’s more fun. You can cross it off that you’ve done X amount of time of work, but it’s really fixing what needs to be fixed.

What are the common mistakes that you see applicants making on test day while actually taking the test? [17:53]

If folks have not prepared themselves mentally for the length of the test, sometimes they don’t really understand what the timing feels like. If you do enough practice tests or time yourself, your body starts to know what it feels like with the duration of the sections. And I think it’s important that even though the tests are shorter, that you know what it feels like. So some people might go too fast or they might go too slow, so that’s on test day that happens. Also, if they haven’t turned some of the practice into habits, they just fall back into ways of doing the test before they even started studying. So diagnostic tests, you should use what you’ve learned, not go back to the way that you had done things before, and trying to game the system, like what I was saying before. Is this one harder? Is this one easier? It’s really about getting yourself into the mindset that you’re here now, this is the question you’re working with. Until you get to the next question, and then that’s the question that you’re working with.

If you’re second-guessing yourself, you’re just going to drive yourself crazy and lose focus and concentration, and then you can’t think critically. [19:08]

Yeah, exactly.

How much time should an applicant allocate to test prep? How do they know how much time they should allocate? [19:18]

We usually assume that the minimum ideal time to prepare is six weeks to two months, maybe four weeks, but let’s say it’s six weeks to two months.

You’re assuming they’re working also, right? [19:33]

I’m assuming they’re working. You want to think about taking the test at least twice. If you don’t, great, but most people take it at least twice. So you want to take a diagnostic and then look at your schedule and really identify what your responsibilities and obligations are and when you’re going to be able to study and how much time you can give yourself to study. And create a roadmap and look at your own timing and assume, like I said, that the minimum is six weeks to two months. If you don’t have that much time, then you work accordingly. But having even with six weeks to two months, that’s still a really tight schedule of a lot of time that you’re going to be putting into homework. So just look at your schedule and you can always look, talk to a tutor or talk to an expert on the test that you’re taking to see how much time they think that you need based on your diagnostic and what you need to improve.

Good advice. We touched on the lack of a writing section in the GMAT and that the GMAC is coming out with a writing assessment. What do you think that’s going to be? Is it just going to be the AWA? [20:34]

I think it is. I think they’re bringing it back. I mean, they’re basically saying that you’re tasked with analyzing an argument, which is exactly what one of the questions was. And so it’s interesting that I don’t know what they’re waiting for because they already have this and I’m not sure what the holdup is.

Is there going to be a fee for it? [21:14]

There’s a $30 fee. I’m not sure what the holdup is, honestly.

Do you think they’re going to just add it back to the GMAT? [21:25]

I don’t know. I think it depends on what the business schools tell them they want to do.

If you only have two schools… I mean, I’m sure you’ve kept your eye on what’s happening with the SATs and the ACTs and whether standardized tests are required for schools, because for a while there it was optional and test blind, and so I don’t know if all after Harvard and MIT say that they have to have this, if all the other schools are going to jump on the bandwagon and say that they need it also. And it’s interesting because the GRE still has the writing components, so, and I know that when we interviewed folks from ETS, they boasted about how they had the leg up on the GMAT because they kept it, and maybe they did and it’s interesting to have that kind of competitive quality between these two test makers. But it is interesting whether they’re going to add it or not, or maybe it will be optional, but it will be part of the test. I don’t know, I don’t have any insider information about it, but I do think that it’s interesting that there’s a holdup.

I suspect that the appearance of ChatGPT in November 2022, roughly eight months before the new GMAT came out, kind of caught them by surprise. That’s speculation on my part. [22:42]

Yeah, that’s possible.

One of your many specialties is reducing test anxiety. Can you give us a few tips? All test makers are nervous, but let’s say for those whose nerves are a little worse. [22:59]

There are a lot of symptoms of test anxiety. It can range from physical like stomach ache and headache to mind racing. You can feel tired, and there’s so many ways that you can feel anxiety. And so once you know what the symptoms are or what the triggers are, you can identify them directly. And it doesn’t take a long time, in fact, dealing with test takes the least amount of time to overcome in your study process, which is one of the reasons why you really should deal with it, because whatever nervousness you feel now, it will probably come up in another life situation, whether that’s giving a presentation, going for an interview, having subsequent exams, like if you’re in medical school, taking the boards. So you really want to be conscientious about what’s happening and then address it directly. So it could be as simple as breathing before you answer questions, like before you start a question, taking a really conscientious breath and practicing this. I can tell your listeners right now to do this, but unless you actually do it and turn it into a habit, it might not be the first thing that you think of. So one thing you can do is something called heart breathing. I’m not sure if I’ve shared this with you before, but you can put your hand over your heart, look at a point across the room, and then breathe as if you’re breathing from your heart to that point. And this is from HeartMath, and you’ll start to feel your shoulders just sort of drop down. And you could do this before you start studying, and you could just take a couple minutes and do this just to regulate, it’s all about emotional regulation.

Other things that you can do, like taking out the big guns, you can do neuro-linguistic programming techniques. You can do hypnosis and self-hypnosis. You can figure out if there’s music that really allows you to drop in or feel more alive and alert. So you can create soundtracks for yourself, used Binaural Beats. So we’ve got lots of resources on the City Test Prep site, and there’s lots of material out there. Everyone is stressed. So if you can identify what is happening and then come up with solutions that work for you, that’s the best thing.

There are lots of test prep companies out there. How is City Test Prep different or better? [25:51]

We’ve been around for a long time. I opened up City Test Prep as Test Prep New York in 2005. And prior to that, I was in the industry since, I can’t even believe I can say this, since 1992 and I was working for Princeton Review. So we’ve been around a long time and have adapted to all of the test changes and have a really very talented staff, many of whom have been with us for 20 plus years.

So it’s important that when you’re looking for any organization to work with to improve your test score, to make sure that it’s a good fit for you. And what we do is we look at the whole student. We’ve got four pillars of test-taking success, content management, and test-taking strategy, which almost all the other test prep companies also have. But something that we also address but we don’t have to address it with every student, is time management and mindset. So when a student comes to us, we’re really crafting a individualized program for that particular student and setting them up with a tutor that’s going to help them to succeed, not only because that tutor does amazing on the test and is an expert, but because they’re able to inspire greatness in the students that they serve. So there’s lots of great companies out there, but we definitely feel like we’re up there and have been around a long time.

Are all your students served via tutors? Are there any courses? [27:19]

The only course we have is the MindFlow speed reading.

And then if students come to us or schools come to us, we do teach in a bunch of schools in New York and after-school programs, but those are for SAT and ACT and SHSAT, and those are because the schools and programs came to us and then we developed programs. We have taught an MCAT course for university and some educator continuing education courses. So if people come to us, we’re happy to create courses for them. We’re talking to one program now potentially doing a GRE course, but it just depends on who comes to us because we can absolutely create something.

In terms of individual applicants, you work with them individually? [28:07]

Totally, yeah.

What would you have liked me to ask you that I haven’t asked? [28:13]

I think one thing, maybe not necessarily asked, I could have just as easily said is, “What’s the value of these tests?”

I think it all comes down to, it’s the only part of the application that allows the admission committees to see students on one plane that they can be compared to each other. And it’s just a data point, so you don’t have to get bent out of shape about it, but it is a way that it’s standardized and there’s no other part of the application that’s really standardized. The resumes are different, the essays are different, grades from different schools are different, volunteer experience. This is the only thing that’s closely approximates something standardized that they can compare like with like. So I think that that’s important.

And really, the second thing I think important to remember is that this is your first hand at graduate school, at business school. And so how can you make the whole experience more enjoyable? How do you make it so that it becomes an opportunity for enjoying the process of learning about yourself, of achieving a goal? Doing well on a test is small goal, it’s not the big goal of finishing a program. So, how can you reframe the experience to see it that way, instead of torture? Right? How do you look at it in a different context?

One thing I’ve said many times, any listener would know, is that graduate school is a means to an end. I think your point is that so is the test. The test is a means to get into the school that will get you to the career you want for the rest of your life, or at least launch you on that career. [29:55]

It’s no different than starting an exercise program or doing something that’s a challenge. Once you know that you’ve been able to do it, what’s your next challenge going to be? It might be in the school program that you’re looking at.

Hopefully. Most of the tests are supposed to have predictive value of how you’re going to do in school. The skills that you’re learning in the test prep course should also help you once get to school, at least theoretically that’s what it’s supposed to do. You don’t seem very convinced, you seem skeptical. [30:34]

I think they simulate the skill sets. The GMAT is more likely to be a predictor than the GRE. As we said before, the GRE is sort of like an overall test, and someone who’s studying French literature doesn’t need math. I think it depends on the test, whether it’s predictive or not, and they certainly have the data behind it to show that it does to some extent. So what happens when someone can actually do really well on the test because they’ve really spent a lot of time doing well on the test, but maybe they don’t apply themselves as much in school? There’s nothing on the test that really shows that. I don’t know if there’s data for that, but they certainly use it as a predictive and retention, right? Schools want to retain the students that they admit, and so this is a way that they say it can help with that.

Where can listeners and test takers learn more about City Test Prep? [32:11]

Well, they can go to our website, citytestprep.com. For MindFlow, they can go to mindflowspeedreading.com and they can call our office (646) 290-7440.

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