Premiergrad Start practising

Strategy

Diagnostic strategy

These guides are about your process, not the content of the exam.

They exist because the most common preparation failure is not studying too little. It is applying the wrong correction — training speed when the problem is recognition, re-reading a chapter when the problem is a target label, doing another two hundred questions when the last two hundred were never reviewed properly.

Each page starts from a symptom you can actually observe and gives you a test that distinguishes the possible causes.

Start from the symptom

I get questions wrong and the explanation always makes sense

You are probably reviewing to the point of comprehension rather than to the point of correction. The two feel identical and are not.

→ How to review a wrong GMAT question

I keep making "silly" mistakes

Almost always a mechanism, not a mood. The mistakes cluster far more than "careless" would predict.

→ Why "careless errors" aren't really careless

I run out of time, so I am training speed

Worth checking first. Time is a visible symptom of several different causes, and only one of them is fixed by going faster.

→ Timing problem or knowledge problem?

What these pages will not do

They will not give you a study schedule, a guaranteed score, or a list of tips. A schedule you did not build around your own diagnosis is somebody else's schedule, and it is the first thing to break in week three.

They will also not tell you to practise more. More practice is the correct advice roughly as often as "drink water" is correct medical advice — rarely wrong, rarely the answer.

Start with your last five wrong answers

Every framework on these pages is worth more with evidence in front of you. Before reading, pull the last five questions you got wrong and have them open.

If you cannot find them — if they were never recorded anywhere — that is itself the diagnosis, and the review guide is the page to read first.

Find the pattern behind your mistakes

Reading about a trap is not the same as knowing whether you fall into it. The free diagnostic takes your answers and tells you which patterns actually recur in them.

Take the free diagnostic Everything on this page stays free and open — no account needed to read it or to attempt the questions above.

All strategy