Resetting and Retaking GMAT Prep Practice Tests – One time is OK, but don’t overdo it, and get smoked.

Retaking official GMAT practice exams can be a good idea. There are only six official practice tests available, and by retaking the tests, you can get some more practice using official tests. Especially if your expected score is increasing, and so the test is serving more difficult questions, while you may see a few repeats, it’s likely that, in a first retake, you’ll see few to no repeated questions. So, via retaking, you can create a fairly accurate representation of the GMAT experience, the first time.

Here’s the thing though. I have seen people do multiple retakes of the official practice tests, and generally, those people have generated scores on the actual GMAT that were not just lower but shockingly lower than the scores they were generating on the practice tests. In fact, in a significant proportion of those cases, the test takers generated scores lower than they had before they started practicing, and here’s what I am pretty sure is going on.

While there are certain concepts that one needs to understand to score high on the GMAT and certain ways of answering questions that can be useful, the GMAT is not really a test of knowledge. It’s a test of skill in figuring out on the fly how to use available resources to get to answers. So here’s what happens when people do multiple retakes of official practice tests and start seeing many repeated questions.

While they do get practice in handling certain types of questions and a good review of certain concepts, they get decreasing amounts of practice in figuring out how to come up with ways to get to answers as they see more repeated questions. Further, because even if they don’t fully remember repeated questions, they can generally get to the answers to those questions fairly easily, they don’t feel the time pressure or experience the degree of mental strain that one experiences when taking the actual test. Time pressure and mental strain are key aspects of the GMAT experience. So retaking official practice tests many times, rather than being a way to get good practice, is a great way to develop habits that won’t work and to become complacent.

So naturally what often happens to people who have used multiple practice test retakes to prepare for the GMAT is that they get totally shocked by the pressures of the actual test and basically bomb it. For example, in one case I saw, a guy who had scored around 600 on the GMAT continued to prepare in order to take the test again. After preparing for months, partly via using multiple official practice test retakes, the next time he sat for the GMAT he generated a score around 500. While he had learned more about concepts and strategies, he was completely unprepared for the pressures he would experience on test day.

So clearly, the multiple retake route is probably not the way to go.

At the same time, there are some alternatives you can go with if you want to get lots of practice taking full practice tests.

One alternative to retaking is to mix higher quality test prep company tests with official practice tests. Yes, the questions on test prep company tests don’t always accurately replicate official questions, but remember much of what you need to practice is finding ways to get to answers on the fly under time pressure. So to a degree it doesn’t matter whether the questions you are answering are exactly like official GMAT questions as long as they involve concepts that show up on the test and require coming up with a way to answer them.

Another alternative is create sets of official practice questions using the online question bank that comes with the Official Guide or using GMAT Club. You can create a set of 21 Quant, 23 Verbal, or 20 Data Insights questions and complete the set in 45 minutes as you would a section of the GMAT. To do so using GMAT Club, you can first set up the questions in multiple tabs in you browser and then answer them.

Whatever you decide to do, remember what the GMAT is actually testing and make sure that all of your preparation, including your practice tests, is optimal for learning to handle what you’re going to experience.