How to Measure GMAT Ability

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Last Updated on May 15, 2023

Most MBA hopefuls realize that a good GMAT score can go a long way toward bettering their business school admissions. Thus, students often wonder how to measure GMAT ability accurately, so they can prepare appropriately and know when they’re ready for test day. It’s an important question — whether you’re aiming for the top business schools or not. After all, whatever your score goal, no busy MBA applicant wants to waste time on a study plan that won’t build the skills necessary to reach that goal.

So, in this article, we’ll discuss the various methods of measuring GMAT ability, when to employ each method, and why.

Here are the topics we’ll cover:

• What the GMAT Exam Measures
  • The GMAT Is a Test of Logic
• When to Assess Your GMAT Ability
• How to Measure GMAT Ability
  • Before You Start Your GMAT Prep
    • Initial Practice Test
      • Your Score Report
    • Supplementary Diagnostic
  • During Your GMAT Prep
    • Reinforcement Tests
      • TTP Chapter Tests
    • Periodic Review Sets
  • At the End of Your GMAT Prep
    • The Practice Test Phase
      • Spacing Out Your Tests
  • After You Take the GMAT
• Enhanced Score Reports
• Key Takeaways
• What’s Next?

To start, let’s discuss what the GMAT exam measures.

What the GMAT Exam Measures

From a bird’s-eye view, the GMAT tests skills that are important in business school and the professional business world. There are four sections of the GMAT through which these skills are tested. The most important sections are the Quantitative Reasoning and Verbal Reasoning sections. Your performance on those two sections underlies your GMAT total score. The other two sections are the Integrated Reasoning section (IR) and Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA), neither of which affects your total score. (Note, however, that you will receive a score for each of those sections as well.)

Broadly speaking, the Quant and Verbal sections of the exam test your math and verbal skills, respectively. The IR section tests your ability to analyze data in various forms, incorporating both Quant and Verbal concepts. The AWA tests your ability to analyze and write a response to an argument.

On the surface, each of these sections is quite distinct, and of course they diverge in many respects. However, one thing that all sections of the GMAT have in common is that they are designed to test your ability to think critically and reason logically. The fact is, regardless of the particular concept being tested at any point, at its core, the GMAT is a test of logic. Let’s discuss.

The GMAT Is a Test of Logic

GMAT questions are more than they appear to be on the surface. For instance, whether you’re faced with a Problem Solving or Data Sufficiency question, GMAT Quant questions don’t just test the concepts you learned in high school math — though those serve as an important foundation. (If you’re wondering, you can get a breakdown of specific math topics that GMAT Quant tests here.) Rather, GMAT Quant questions ask you to use logic to apply that math knowledge to problems in clever, efficient ways.

Likewise, Sentence Correction questions, while rooted in the English grammar rules you learned throughout your schooling (if you’re a native speaker), also test your ability to recognize whether a sentence conveys an illogical meaning, to give just one example in GMAT Verbal.

Even AWA tests more than your ability to communicate ideas clearly in a cohesive essay using standard written English. It also tests your ability to spot weaknesses and assumptions in an argument and to identify information that would make an argument more convincing.

So, whatever your knowledge of specific math or verbal concepts, you will need to bring your logical reasoning skills to bear to earn a good GMAT score.

Whatever your knowledge of specific math or verbal concepts, you will need to bring your logical reasoning skills to bear to earn a good GMAT score.

Now that we understand what the GMAT exam measures, let’s discuss when you should measure your GMAT ability.

When to Assess Your GMAT Ability

There are four points in the GMAT process at which you either should or may want to measure your GMAT ability:

1. Before you start your GMAT prep
2. During your GMAT prep
3. At the end of your GMAT prep
4. After you take the GMAT (if you plan to retake the GMAT)

Assessing your GMAT ability at the first three points is, generally speaking, essential. Doing so will allow you to properly prepare for the exam and avoid any surprises on test day. The fourth point of assessment is necessary only if you plan to retake the exam to increase your score.

So, let’s look at how to measure GMAT ability at each of these points in your GMAT journey.

How to Measure GMAT Ability

To start, let’s look at how to measure GMAT ability before you start your test preparation — and why doing so is vital.

Before You Start Your GMAT Prep

Some students are surprised to learn that they should measure their GMAT ability before they even begin studying. However, getting a snapshot of your starting level of GMAT skill before you begin your exam prep is absolutely essential. After all, if you don’t know where you’re starting from, how will you know how long you may need to reach the finish line?

So, let’s discuss the best way to measure your GMAT ability before you start your test prep.

Initial Practice Test

Before you start your GMAT studies, take a full-length, official practice test to get a baseline score. With that score, you’ll see how far you are from your score goal. Thus, you’ll see how much time and effort you may need to put in to reach your goal.

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) offers 6 official practice tests on mba.com, 2 of which are free. So, you can take one of the free tests for your initial exam.

Before you take this initial test, spend a few days familiarizing yourself with the format of the GMAT and the types of questions it presents, so you don’t go into the test completely cold. You can try a few of each question type and use GMAC’s exam tutorial tool to get a sense of what to expect on the test. The tutorial will show you what the GMAT test screens look like and how to navigate them, and allow you to review the exam instructions for each section.

To get the most accurate baseline score possible when taking your exam, replicate GMAT testing conditions as closely as possible. If you do anything you wouldn’t be able to do during the actual GMAT — take extra breaks, don’t complete all sections, text your friend, or even drink coffee at your desk — you’ll risk receiving a baseline score that doesn’t accurately reflect your GMAT abilities.

Consequently, you could end up thinking you’re closer to your score goal than you actually are. In that case, you might not complete all the preparation you need to reach your goal, and you may be shocked to see your score on test day.

Now, let’s discuss what to do with the information your initial test provides about your GMAT ability.

Your Score Report

After you take your initial practice test, you’ll receive your scores in all four sections and your total score. Now, as important as it is to get an accurate baseline score in order to properly plan your GMAT prep, it’s also important not to over-infer from the results of your initial test. After all, a GMAT practice test presents only 36 Verbal and 31 Quant questions. So, you’re working with a pretty small sample size. Thus, planning your studies based on your performance on one practice test isn’t wise.

For example, say in the Quant section you incorrectly answer two questions on similar triangles but correctly answer the two probability questions you see. Based on those four questions alone, should you assume that you need to spend a ton of time studying similar triangles but no time on probability? I wouldn’t!

Later on, we’ll discuss when it’s important to analyze practice test results at the level of specific question types. Your first practice test is not that time! This test is simply meant to show you, overall, how far you likely are from your score goal.

Of course, your score report may show a much higher score in one section or the other. For instance, perhaps your overall GMAT Verbal ability is notably stronger than your Quant ability. In that case, you may find that you’re able to move more quickly through your Verbal prep than through your Quant prep.

However, to truly understand your strengths and weaknesses within the various Quant and Verbal topics, you’ll need rigorous study with a comprehensive GMAT prep course.

Supplementary Diagnostic

Since an initial practice test provides limited data about GMAT ability, some students starting their prep may wish to take a supplementary diagnostic in order to gain more information about their strengths and weaknesses.

For instance, Target Test Prep offers a 67-question free GMAT diagnostic test. This test is carefully curated by TTP’s GMAT experts to cover all of the topics and question types GMAT test-takers encounter in the Quant and Verbal sections of the real exam. Once they complete the diagnostic, test-takers receive a detailed analytics report giving them insight into their performance.

Many GMAT students find the data from their TTP diagnostic very helpful for strategically planning their prep. So, we generally recommend that all TTP students take the diagnostic, in addition to an official, full-length practice test, before they start the TTP course. (Note that the TTP diagnostic is available to anyone, whether you’ve signed up for our course or not.)

However, the diagnostic can also be a useful tool for students at other stages of their GMAT prep. For example, students who are just getting back into GMAT prep after an extended break can use the diagnostic to help get an idea of how their GMAT knowledge has held up in the interim.

Now, let’s discuss how to measure GMAT ability during your prep and when during your prep it’s important to do so.

During Your GMAT Prep

There are two main ways to measure GMAT ability during GMAT prep: with reinforcement tests and with periodic review sets. Let’s discuss each of these important assessment tools — when to use them and why.

Reinforcement Tests

As you study new GMAT topics, it’s essential to gauge how well you’re understanding the concepts you learn. In other words, you don’t want to move from one topic to the next without assessing whether you’ve actually learned and can apply what you just studied.

You want to have a concrete measure of how well you’ve absorbed and understood a topic before you pronounce that you’re “done” with that topic and move onto the next thing in your study plan. Reinforcement tests are one such measure.

A reinforcement test is just what it sounds like. It “reinforces” what you’ve learned by presenting questions covering the concepts you just studied — and only those concepts. By practicing questions that focus solely on the topic you just studied, you give yourself the opportunity to apply what you learned. Thus, you can determine how well you actually learned it and avoid moving on to the next topic before your GMAT ability in a given area is up to snuff.

Let’s look at an example from the TTP GMAT Course.

TTP Chapter Tests

In the TTP GMAT Course, when students finish all of the lessons in a chapter, they’re presented with a series of chapter tests featuring a mixture of realistic practice questions covering all of the lessons from that chapter. These tests both reinforce what they just learned and assess whether they’re actually ready to move onto the next chapter.

Let’s take the example of the Essential Skills chapter on the Quant side of the TTP course. After students finish all of the lessons in the Essential Skills chapter, they’re presented first with a chapter test featuring easy-level questions, then a test with medium-level questions, and finally a hard-level test. Each of those tests has a specific accuracy target associated with it. So, students don’t move on to the next Quant chapter — in this case, Linear and Quadratic Equations — until they’ve reached their desired accuracy levels in all tests.

Along the way, TTP’s built-in error tracker logs their incorrect answers to the test questions. So, students can easily return to the relevant lessons in the chapter to refresh their understanding of the concepts they missed on one test before they progress to more difficult tests.

If you don’t take the time to measure your GMAT ability in each topic after you’ve studied that topic, you may not have an accurate sense of how effective your GMAT prep is. As a result, you may be surprised to find that, on subsequent full-length practice tests you take in advance of your GMAT, you don’t get the results you were hoping for.

Periodic Review Sets

Another important way to measure GMAT ability during your prep is by periodically completing sets of practice questions on previously learned topics. After all, you may perform great on a quiz about a topic you just studied, when the concepts are fresh in your mind. But what about 3 weeks later? Or 6 weeks? Will your GMAT ability in that topic be just as solid after you spend a month on other topics?

There is so much material to learn for the GMAT, and you don’t want to move so far beyond a topic that you begin to forget it. So, it’s essential to regularly and systematically revisit GMAT topics that you’ve already studied. Moreover, you want to measure how well you’ve retained those previously covered concepts. Periodically quizzing yourself with questions on past topics is a great way to do just that.

For example, in the TTP course, before a student moves on to the next Quant chapter, they’re presented with a review quiz featuring 10 questions covering concepts from previous chapters. These quizzes allow students to not only refresh past concepts on a regular basis, so they’re less likely to forget them, but also assess how well they’ve retained their previous learning and identify specific concepts they’ve forgotten.

Remember, your GMAT ability is not fixed; it can change with time. Hopefully, as you progress through your GMAT prep, your skills will continually improve. However, it’s not unusual for things to slip through the cracks or weaknesses to develop on the long and winding road to test day. So, measuring your GMAT ability with periodic review sets is a smart practice.

At the End of Your GMAT Prep

​​In the final phase of your GMAT prep, you should switch from learning and quizzing yourself to measuring your GMAT ability with full-length tests. Let’s discuss.

The Practice Test Phase

We know that before you start your GMAT prep, you should take a practice test to determine your baseline score. ​​In the final weeks of your GMAT prep, after you’ve mastered all of the content the GMAT tests, you should sit for the remaining 5 practice tests that GMAC offers.

Taking these 5 remaining tests serves a number of purposes. You can use these tests to get more accustomed to the test-taking experience, build your stamina for test day, and hone your pacing strategies.

These tests will also be your main way of measuring whether you’ll be able to hit your score goal on the actual GMAT. How test-takers score on official practice exams is a good indicator of how they’ll score on the GMAT. So, if you want to accurately measure your GMAT ability before test day, GMAC’s full-length practice tests are the best way to do so.

Now, let’s talk about how to take these tests.

Spacing Out Your Tests

Ideally, you should space out your remaining practice tests so that you take one per week and have some days right before your actual GMAT to take it easy. Spacing out your practice tests serves a couple of important purposes. First, you have time to recover mentally between exam sittings, so you don’t get burned out.

Second, you have time to thoroughly review your incorrect answers on each test. This review is key because it will allow you to uncover any lingering weak areas and brush up on those concepts before your next test. This is the point at which analyzing your performance at the question level is warranted.

Remember, there isn’t much point in taking test after test without correcting your mistakes in between. In that case, each successive test will merely tell you the same thing the previous tests told you!

Moreover, you want to continue to refine your GMAT ability as you approach test day. So, if you take the first of those remaining 5 practice tests and aren’t quite at your score goal, don’t despair. You still have time to fill your knowledge gaps, improve your pacing, and re-assess. Of course, if you’ve taken 4 of the 5 remaining tests and are still far from your score goal, you may want to consider pushing back your test date if possible.

With all of that in mind, we can see why these remaining practice tests are crucial for assessing whether you’re GMAT-ready.

After You Take the GMAT

If you’ve measured your GMAT ability at the appropriate points before and during your prep, hopefully you’ll hit your score goal on test day and have no need for further assessment. However, we all know that even the best laid plans don’t always pan out.

So, for those GMAT test-takers who need to go back to the drawing board after a disappointing GMAT performance, an Enhanced Score Report is yet another way to gain insight into GMAT ability.

Enhanced Score Reports

After taking a GMAT (not including practice tests), you may purchase an Enhanced Score Report (ESR) from GMAC for $30. Importantly, you can order an ESR even if you canceled your score on that exam. And, your ESR is available to you only; schools will never see it.

An ESR is a useful tool because it gives you a general sense of where your strengths and weaknesses were on a given GMAT and how you managed your time. For instance, did you tend to lose steam in the latter half of each section? Did you spend too much time on the first quarter of the Quant and Verbal sections only to rush through the last quarter? Did you spend an inordinate amount of time on Reading Comprehension questions, yet answer relatively few of those questions correctly? These are the types of measures of your GMAT ability that an ESR can provide.

What your ESR won’t provide is information about specific questions or concepts you missed. Furthermore, we have to remember that the data in an ESR relates to a small sample of questions. So, I don’t recommend crafting a retake study plan based solely on one ESR.

Nevertheless, your ESR provides more insight than your section scores alone. In addition to providing valuable time-management data, it may reveal weak points you didn’t realize you had. For example, if your Verbal score was lower than expected, it would be useful to know that, in that particular test sitting, Reading Comprehension was the score-lowering culprit, while Critical Reasoning and Sentence Correction were strengths.

Key Takeaways

• At the broadest level, the GMAT tests skills that are important in the business world, including quantitative, verbal, data analysis, and writing skills.
• One thing that all sections of the GMAT have in common is that they are designed to test your ability to think critically and reason logically. At its core, the GMAT is a test of logic.
• You should measure your GMAT ability before you start your GMAT prep, during your prep, and at the end of your prep.
• To measure your GMAT ability before you start your GMAT prep, take a full-length, official practice test.
• There are two main ways to measure GMAT ability during GMAT prep: with reinforcement tests and with periodic review sets.
• To assess whether you’ll be able to hit your score goal on the GMAT, take the remaining 5 official practice tests in the weeks leading up to test day.
• An ESR is a useful tool for GMAT test-takers planning a retake because it gives general data on your strengths and weaknesses and how you managed your time on your exam.

What’s Next?

Now that you know how to measure GMAT ability, check out these expert tips on how to improve Verbal ability for GMAT exams.

You also may be interested in these 25 tips to increase your Quant score.