GMAT Math is Hard, But No One is “Bad at Math”

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Last Updated on May 12, 2023

gmat math is hard

Too often, students convince themselves that they are “just not math people.” As a result, these students often score significantly lower on the GMAT than they would have if they had revised their way of thinking about how math skills are gained. If such students instead believed in the power of hard work and perseverance in gaining math proficiency, as nearly all experts who study math education do, these students could set themselves up for higher GMAT scores, more impressive degrees, and higher-paying jobs.

The biggest secret about GMAT math is that anyone can master it, if that person is willing to put in the work. In this article, we’ll look at some research that busts the myth of being “bad at math” and give you 3 simple tips for excelling at GMAT math, so you can earn the GMAT score you’re truly capable of.

The biggest secret about GMAT math is that anyone can master it, if that person is willing to put in the work.

The Myth of Being “Bad at Math”

If you’ve convinced yourself that you’re simply “bad at math,” this perspective on your math ability probably formed long before you began studying for the GMAT or even considered sitting for the exam. Maybe you weren’t as interested in math as you were in other subjects in high school. Maybe you didn’t do so well on the SAT or ACT, or you’ve bombed a practice GMAT or two. So what? If past performance could perfectly predict future performance, how would anyone ever grow, change, or learn new skills?

The thought that someone is not a math person is just as ridiculous, harmful, and self-limiting as the thought that someone is not a piano person or a ping pong person. How does someone become skilled at playing piano? By working extremely hard. How does someone become good at ping pong? By practicing for hours and hours. So, how does a person excel at math? You guessed it: hard work, hours of practice.

In 2007, psychologists at Stanford and Columbia University put this damaging myth of being “bad at math” to the test. In a study of nearly 400 seventh-graders over a two-year period, the researchers found that math grades increased for students who believed that intelligence could be developed, while math grades stayed flat for students who believed that intelligence was unchanging. So, while belief alone is surely not enough to increase your knowledge and improve your skills, the science shows that believing that there is a ceiling on your abilities could, in fact, put a ceiling on what you achieve.

We see similar findings in other research into learning and intelligence. For instance, a growing body of evidence shows that a person’s IQ — long thought to be a fixed quantity — can change pretty significantly over a person’s lifetime and is closely linked to factors such as number of years in school, training in new and complex tasks, and consistent practice. And those changes don’t necessarily take years to happen; research has found that they can occur in months or even weeks.

So, if your IQ can increase with studying and practice, why not your GMAT Quant score?

The science shows that believing that there is a ceiling on your abilities could, in fact, put a ceiling on what you achieve.

The Myth of Being a “Math Person”

The flipside of the myth that some people are simply bad at math is the myth that others are “math people.” It’s easy to assume that others are having an easy time with the GMAT, since you don’t see the many steps they’re taking on their paths. In other words, you don’t see their late nights of studying, their Saturdays spent taking practice tests, the dozens of hours they spend with private tutors. You don’t see that they took the GMAT three times before they finally earned a top score. You don’t get to see any of the effort and elbow grease that went into the final product.

Also, sometimes people try to make the process look easy. We’ve all read the stories online of people who took a few practice tests or brushed up on their math skills for a month and scored Q51 on the GMAT. But do you know those people’s histories? Do you know whether their parents emphasized math study throughout their childhoods, or whether they have jobs that require them to perform basic math on a daily basis?

Think about watching Tiger Woods play golf – he makes it look as if he never breaks a sweat. The truth is, Tiger started practicing his swing when he was 2 years old, and he has spent decades practicing in order to make his golf skills look like second nature. Does that mean that Tiger Woods has no innate talent whatsoever for golf? Of course not. Does it mean that everyone who picks up a golf club at age 2 will become as skilled at golf as Tiger? Maybe not. But could they still become skilled enough to win a golf championship? Probably.

The point is, you don’t have to be a prodigy or someone who has “always” been skilled at something to learn to be great at it. And, more importantly for our purposes, by no means do you have to be a math whiz in order to excel at GMAT math. Solving GMAT Quant problems requires advanced analytical reasoning skills, but the actual math concepts on which GMAT questions are based don’t rise to a level beyond high school math. Do you need innate talent to master high school math, or do you simply need to put in the work and have the confidence that you can succeed?

Maybe you had the experience in high school or college of not performing as well in math classes as some of your peers did. You might have assumed that their consistently higher grades in math or their perfect scores on tests were the result of “natural” math abilities. It’s very easy to make these assumptions because they do the double work of explaining the situation and providing you with a convenient excuse.

They’re simply better at math than you are! The problem is, if you believe that you’re not a math person, you’re very likely to not put in as much effort when studying or preparing for tests on that subject, because you feel that your situation is hopeless. If you don’t put in as much effort — even subconsciously — then your performance actually does suffer. As you continue to perform poorly in math, you see confirmation of your beliefs. The pattern repeats, and the story you’ve told yourself becomes reality.

By no means do you have to be a math whiz in order to excel at GMAT math.

How to Excel at GMAT Math: 3 Simple Steps

So, we’ve seen how self-limiting beliefs such as “I’m bad at math” or “I’m not a math person” can affect learning and performance. Does that mean that earning a high GMAT Quant score is all about mindset and psychology? Not quite. Thinking differently about your ability to learn math is the first step on the road to GMAT Quant mastery, not the last.

In fact, there are 3 simple steps that you can take to excel at GMAT math:

  1. Eliminate negative self-talk
  2. Outwork the competition
  3. Recognize discomfort as growth

Let’s explore each of these steps one at a time.

Step 1: Eliminate Negative Self-Talk

In my more than a decade of experience coaching GMAT students, I’ve found that students who score well on the GMAT tend not to engage in negative self-talk, self-talk such as “I’m bad at math and I can’t improve,” or “GMAT math is too hard — I’ll never be able to answer the questions quickly enough,” or “my GMAT math skill is atrocious.” Instead, students who earn high scores on the GMAT are rational, realistic, and optimistic when it comes to their current skill sets and the time and energy required to reach their score goals. Their self-talk is more like the following:

At the moment, I need to improve my math skills, but with hard work and time, I can improve them to a very high level.

I may not be fast at solving GMAT Quant problems right now, but I can and will get better and faster each day.

GMAT math is hard, but I’m up for the challenge and I’ve learned to do difficult things before.

MANY students who earn top GMAT scores started out struggling with Quant, and no one is denying that GMAT math is hard. However, as the research I discussed earlier suggests, when you are optimistic about learning something, you are more open to the information and more likely to absorb it.

Attitude also plays a large role in your well-being during your months of study. If you’re inwardly (or outwardly) grumbling every time you sit down to study, you’re going to be unhappy and stressed. That feeling of stress is likely to make you less focused, and thus your study time will be less productive. In fact, there are studies showing that positive self-talk improves students’ performances on timed math problems and standardized tests.

So, when it comes to developing your confidence in your ability to master GMAT math, the saying “fake it ‘til you make it” definitely applies. Engage in some positive, confidence-building self-talk before you sit down to study, and if you catch yourself engaging in negative self-talk as you’re working through practice problems, learning concepts, or quizzing yourself with flash cards, for example, stop yourself and put a more positive spin on your thoughts. Tell yourself that what you’re doing in that very moment is helping you to improve your skills. Try, even, to view learning GMAT Quant as a fun challenge. You may be surprised at how much more readily GMAT concepts begin to stick.

TTP PRO TIP:

Engage in some positive, confidence-building self-talk before you sit down for a study session, and try to catch yourself if you engage in negative self-talk while you’re working through GMAT problems or learning concepts.

Step 2: Outwork the Competition

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that anyone who is willing to put in the work can master GMAT math. The thing is, the work of mastering GMAT math is maybe two to three times the amount of work that many students expect to put into their GMAT Quant study.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that, when it comes to GMAT math, you can outwork your competition to outscore them. If your competition is studying GMAT math for 100 hours, study GMAT math for 200 hours, and you’ll be roughly twice as skilled as they are. If your competition is studying GMAT math for 200 hours, study GMAT math for 300 hours. You’ll be about 50 percent more skilled than they’ll be. Trust me, when you sit for the GMAT, your work will show.

Not convinced that you could see such a one-to-one correspondence? Scientific research has shown that training has a “dosage-dependent” effect on people’s ability to reason, learn, and solve new problems, meaning that the more you train, the more you improve in these measures of intelligence. The fact is, people who score high on GMAT Quant are not innately or genetically talented at math; they just learned more about math than the competition learned.

TTP PRO TIP:

If, for example, your competition is studying GMAT math for 100 hours, study GMAT math for 200 hours. You’ll be roughly twice as skilled as they are.

Step 3: Recognize Discomfort as Growth

One of the essential aspects of outworking your competition is perseverance, and persevering often means not being deterred by setbacks, not getting thrown when things are harder than you expected they would be or when progress is slower, and dealing with discomfort. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the students who went on to earn the highest GMAT Quant scores were the ones who were willing to not give up on problems during practice.

Conversely, the students who gave into their discomfort and gave up on questions after 60 seconds, or 1:30, or some other brief time frame, were the ones who, all else equal, saw the smallest increases in their Quant scores.

You must learn to push through GMAT Quant questions even when your brain begins to hurt and you feel frustrated and tired, and you’d rather be doing anything other than studying for the GMAT. Generally, if you keep at it and go through the fire – the questioning yourself, the feelings of fear, anger, boredom, or whatever else – you will arrive at the answer, or you’ll learn what to do for next time. On the other hand, if you never allow yourself to get to the point where you feel truly uncomfortable, and work past that point, you won’t experience the learning and growth and muscle memory that goes along with it.

In fact, you should strive to make discomfort a part of your GMAT preparation until you get to a point where nothing about the GMAT can shake your resolve. Let’s face it, the process of sitting for the GMAT in itself is uncomfortable — the test center environment, the hours staring at a computer screen, the time pressure. There is pretty much nothing comfortable about it. If you use your GMAT Quant prep as training for being uncomfortable, won’t that give you yet another advantage on test day, and make you that much more prepared for the exam?

This type of learning and training is a good reason to work on practice questions untimed until your skills improve. At first, you may look at a question and not know how to answer it. You may wonder whether you have what it takes to get the answer. Well, getting the answer may take more than two or three minutes.

So guess what? If you give yourself only two or three minutes, you let yourself off the hook. You don’t learn to go through the fire and come out the other side with the answer. Instead, you go to the explanation to get the answer, but you have not learned one of the most important GMAT skills: how to persist and hack and do whatever you have to do to get the answers to questions that you find challenging. It’s an uncomfortable process, but if you want to score high on GMAT Quant, it’s a necessary one.

Research suggests that when you think you’ve done all that you can, you’ve actually done about 40 percent of what you’re capable of. So, when you’re practicing GMAT Quant questions, don’t give up unless you are really, truly stuck. Even if you don’t get a question right after sticking with it, you’ll be teaching yourself how to be resilient and persevere in the face of adversity.

TTP PRO TIP:

Work on practice questions untimed until your skills improve, and don’t give up on questions unless you’re truly stuck; the discomfort of sticking with challenging questions is a key to mastering GMAT Quant.

The consensus is strikingly clear: You CAN work your way to strong math skills and an impressive GMAT Quant score. Incorporate these 3 steps into your GMAT Quant study, and check out my article on how to increase your GMAT Quant score for more practical tips.

Happy studying!

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