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It’s about three weeks since you took the GMAT. You are sorting through your mail when you find your official score report. You tear open the envelope to find your Quant and Verbal score just the same as the score you were presented on the day: the target score that you worked so hard to achieve. You feel that same sense of elation as the one you felt on the test day, but as your eyes scan the rest of the report, your mood plummets. Your AWA score is not what you were hoping for. In fact, it is quite a bit lower. You begin to worry. How will this affect your applications? Do you still have a chance at getting in? Should you retake the GMAT?

It’s just over two hours into the GMAT, and you are working your way through the Verbal section. Critical Reasoning prompts? You know the best strategy for each one. Sentence Correction? You could spot these errors in your sleep. Then up pops your first Reading Comprehension passage:

“According to a recent theory, Archean-age gold-quartz vein systems were formed more than two billion years ago from magmatic fluids that originated from molten granite-like bodies deep beneath the surface of the Earth.”

…What? That was English, right? You recognize most of those words, but you’re not quite sure how they fit together. And that’s only the first sentence of a passage that can be up to 350 words long. Yikes.

1) The best way to advance your score on the MCAT is to take as many mock exams as possible. Preferably, you should take one exam a week for 12 weeks prior to the actual MCAT.

2) When you are doing individual passages, do a number of them at a time. Every morning, do ten passages in a row before going to class or work. These should consist of two verbal, two physics, two chemistry, two biology, and two organic chemistry passages. Mark these sometime later in the day.

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