Last time I talked about anticipation stress and how it can impede your prepration for the GMAT.  But you’ve conquered that kind of stress, done a great job studying and made it to test day.  Congrats!  On test day, there is a chance that you might experience one of the following three situations:

1) Get stumped on a question
2) Lose focus
3) Start to panic

If you get stumped on a question, don’t spend an unnecessary amount of time on it.  Think about employing a guessing strategy and move on.  Good test takers realize that everyone misses a point here or there – they have to get the MOST points, not all the points.

If you start to lose focus, you must get it back as soon as possible.  There are a couple tricks you can employ to regain focus – one, skip the question.  This is a good strategy if you lost focus because the question is difficult; however, it isn’t a great strategy if you are tired or distracted.  If you lose focus because of something going on in the testing room, raise your hand and engage the proctor.  The testing room should be quiet and free from distractions.  The proctors are there to enforce this decorum.  If you lose focus because of general test anxiety, close your eyes, put your head down on the table, or just look away.  Do something to change your focus from what is on the screen.  You have the time to take 20 seconds and breath deeply, disconnecting from the environment for a short period of time.  Doing this will help control the adrenaline in your system and put the situation in perspective.

If you start to panic – stop.  Actually, if you employed the techniques above, you shouldn’t even come close to panicking.  Panic comes from letting your anxiety and adrenaline get out of control.  In this situation, make sure that you pull back away from the screen for a few seconds and take a couple breaths.  In the worst-case scenario – you may need to raise your hands and leave the testing room (this is permissable – but you won’t get your time back) and grab a drink of water.

The key to a great test day performance is to know thyself.  If you start feeling that the adrenaline and anxiety are building up, pause.  Think about your breathing, skip the question, or find a way to take a very short break.  The GMAT tests your ability to answer quantitative and verbal questions and it also tests your ability to deal with stressful situations.  Don’t let it beat you.  You have prepared well, so keep your cool and fight for the score you deserve.

As if life weren’t stressful enough:

1) Student Loans
2) Securing an impressive job
3) Networking with friends
4) Attempting to date in the Facebook world…

You get the idea. Now, you want to go to business school and all the admissions individuals and literature is talking about how important the GMAT is for successful applications.

Did you need any more stress??

Stress can be a good thing: Stress produces adrenaline which can help increase concentration as well as focus your mind. On the other end of this, however, adrenaline can cause an increase in anxiety, sweaty palms, nervous ticks, and nausea. You are going to have adrenaline when you take the test – you MUST learn to control and use it to increase your score.

Kaplan and I want you to think about building a stress mitigation strategy early on. There are two ways to think about stress: Pre-test stress (anticipation) and test day stress (performance). Let’s look at these two stress drivers and ways to reduce them:

Anticipation Stress
When you pull out your GMAT books to start studying, does your mind wander? Do you start to day-dream? Do you think that you’ll never be able to get into your target school? We need to stop thinking these thoughts. The primary lever to reduce this sort of stress is creating a specific, targeted studying schedule. Work backwards from your planned test day (hopefully more than a month away) and pull out a blank sheet of paper. Build a quick calendar and place your current appoints (classes, work, community service, etc.) – things that you can’t skip – into the calendar.

From this standpoint, build in time (everyday??) to plan to study for the GMAT (See Doug’s post on Studying for the GMAT). Ensure that you work every subject area. The key to this study schedule is to ensure you are constantly in the material. Think of this test like training for a marathon – if on Saturday you go out and run 10 miles and don’t run at any other time during the week, you won’t complete the marathon. If you run a couple of miles every day or every other day (with a big run once a week), you will finish the marathon.

Studying all topics several times a week according to a pre-defined schedule will ensure your Anticipation Stress is reduced.

The mere act of planning your GMAT preparation and engaging in a trusted, proven program can greatly reduce anticipation stress and help you get down to the business of raising your score.

Next time, we’ll talk about another form of GMAT stress, performance stress.