做自己的项目经理：Nine Tips for Doing Homework Effectively

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做自己的项目经理：Nine Tips for Doing Homework Effectivelyby David Ragsdale on May 28th, 2010

Whether you prepare for the GMAT by taking a course, buying a GMAT book in the bookstore, or simply studying on your own with the GMAT Official Guide, you should expect to do lots of homework. Becoming better at the GMAT is in many ways no different from becoming better at any specific skill, whether it’s playing the piano or swinging a golf club. Improvement follows from the same two things — instruction and practice. The only way to learn new techniques and develop the ability to spot patterns in GMAT questions is to do lots and lots of GMAT questions. Maximizing your GMAT score isn’t a magic trick. Like most accomplishments it requires hard work.
So if we take it as understood that doing homework is necessary to improve, is there any advice to be given about how to do it effectively? Of course there is.
1. Schedule itYou have a busy life. Between work, friends, family, social commitments, and the other demands on your attention it can be hard to find time to practice GMAT problems. But this problem won’t solve itself. Time doesn’t magically appear on your schedule — you have to make time. When you plan out your week, you need to look hard at the calendar and figure out when you’re going to get your work done. Then write it down so that you formally declare that those hours belong to the GMAT. If your plan is to practice “when I get a chance” you won’t be practicing as much as you should be.
2. Don’t wait too long to beginThis tip applies to people who are taking a GMAT prep course. You can’t wait too long after your class to begin your homework. For example, if you have class on a Tuesday don’t wait until the weekend to begin your homework. Every day you wait, information is slipping away. You need to reinforce what you learn or you won’t retain it. So even if the next day is a busy one, that’s not an excuse for doing nothing. Even 15 minutes of review will help you remember what you have learned.

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3. Do all work on scratch paperAn important principle of GMAT preparation is that you shouldn’t give yourself a crutch during your study that you aren’t going to have on the actual GMAT, because we know what happens when crutches are pulled away. You can’t write on the problems on the real test; you can’t even write next to them. You have to work on scratch paper during the exam, so you need to start practicing that way. Learning to use scratch paper effectively and efficiently is an important part of your preparation.
4. Use the techniques you’ve learned when you practiceIf you’re studying from a book or taking a class, you’re going to be learning lots of new ways to approach GMAT questions. Though this should go without saying, it absolutely has to be said: in order to master these techniques and approaches you need to be practicing them when you do homework. If you fall back on what feels comfortable you aren’t going to make much progress. This is especially so because some of the best GMAT techniques are counter-intuitive. (If this weren’t true the test wouldn’t be as hard as it is and everyone would score well on the GMAT.) New techniques get in your way at first. You spend a lot of time thinking explicitly about what to do next, so they take more time. But if you don’t invest this time and work through the awkward stage, you’ll never get to the place where they become second-nature and automatic. Remember, the goal is to go into the actual test with the most effective GMAT toolkit you can, not to feel comfortable at every stage of your preparation.
5. Develop endurance and concentrationThe GMAT is 3.5 hours long. This means it’s not just a test of your GMAT acumen, but of your physical and mental endurance. You need to start building up to test day. So don’t practice for 10 minutes, check your email, practice another 5 minutes, twitter how much you hate the GMAT, and practice another 15 minutes. Instead, work for 30 minutes straight, and keep building up. The math and verbal sections of the GMAT are 75 minutes long, so your goal is to train yourself to work effectively for that long without a break. And your ultimate goal is to be able to write essays for an hour and then solve multiple-choice questions for another 2 ½ hours without losing any points because you’re tired and mentally wiped. If you don’t have the stamina to stay sharp for the entire test, you’re giving away points. It’s that simple.

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6. Don’t practice when you’re tired, distracted, or unable to give your full effort


It’s important to know when and how to practice—that’s the basic focus of this article. But it’s also important to know when not to practice. Doing homework under unfavorable conditions can be counter-productive and discouraging. The GMAT is a challenging exam and requires your complete focus and concentration on test day. To prepare yourself, you need to practice under conditions that allow you to give your full attention to every problem you do. If you’re exhausted when you do homework, you’ll get little out of it. If you’re surrounded by distractions when you do homework, you’ll get little out of it. So if there’s no way to make your study conditions conducive to effective practice one night, you might be better off skipping it to fight again the next day.


Now it’s true that we live in the real world, a world in which you can’t take a 2-month sabbatical from your job to prepare for the GMAT. There’s a snarky, but not unfair response to tip 6 that goes, “If I never practiced when I was tired or distracted or unable to give my best effort, I’d never practice at all. Nearly every moment I have available to practice falls into one of those categories.” The answer to this is that even if you can’t arrange matters so that every aspect of your preparation is ideal, it’s still useful to know what the ideal situation is, so you can approximate it as closely as possible. Just do the best you can to avoid practicing in unfavorable situations.


7. Do all work under timed conditions


One of the most important parts of preparing for the GMAT is acclimating yourself to working when you know you’re “on the clock.” A huge mistake that many people make is to do most or all of their homework untimed. Then when they take the real test (or even a practice test) the transition to working under time constraints is so difficult that they find themselves unable to concentrate on the problems. Mental energy that should be devoted to solving questions is instead being focused on worrying about the time ticking away.


This doesn’t mean that all your homework should be done as a speed drill. Especially at the beginning it’s more important to focus on technique and accuracy than speed. But everything you do should be accountable to the clock. Give yourself 30 minutes, say. Work until time is up, then stop and acknowledge that a half-hour has passed. Note how many questions you’ve done and write it down. Then decide on another block of time and continue working. The goal is two-fold—to desensitize yourself to time pressure, and to develop awareness of your pacing.


8. Keep track of your questions


This is a simple one, but not less important for that. You have to keep track of the questions that come up during your homework. Not just “Question 58 in Data Sufficiency in the GMAT Official Guide,” but all the questions that occur to you as you practice, like:


“Is there a rule of divisibility for 12?”

“Am I reading the wrong part of the passage?”

“Are strong answers good or bad on weaken questions?”

Keep a notebook or index card handy while you work, and write down questions as you think of them. Otherwise you won’t remember.

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9. Review and analyze your work


This is the most important one of all. Always remember that the problems you practice are not going to be the problems you see on the real test. So in an important way, whether you get them right or wrong doesn’t really matter. They don’t count. What matters is what you learn from the problems that you can apply going forward. Too many people finish a set of problems, check the answers, and move on. If you do this, you’re missing the most crucial point of the whole exercise, which is to understand these problems in their entirety so that you get similar questions right in the future.


Review everything, even the questions you got right. First, because some of them might have been guesses, and second, because for the ones that weren’t guesses it’s good to see them again and reinforce what you’re doing right. For questions you got wrong, really dig in and try to figure out why. Did you misread part of the problem? Did you make a careless calculation error? Did you fail to realize what the question was really about? Did you not notice a key difference between two answers? Did you choose an answer that was too strong? Were you missing some content knowledge that was necessary to solve the problem?


Your goal is to understand everything about each problem—what it was testing, what the traps were, why the right answer is right, and why all the wrong answers are wrong. Once you know this to the best of your ability, ask, “How will I get a similar problem right the next time?” and think hard about that answer. Always keep your focus forward, thinking about the next time you encounter something similar.


Remember, the only problems that ultimately matter are the ones on your real GMAT, so all of your homework, all of your practice tests, all of your preparation serves one purpose—to teach you how to solve GMAT problems you’ve never seen before, and to solve them when it counts.