Your Summer Vacation Will COST You GMAT Points (Unless You Plan For It)

By EMPOWERgmat on June 20, 2017

You've been training for six weeks. Your notes are cleaner, your pacing is calmer and your last practice test finally moved in the right direction. Then you get on a plane for two weeks of beaches, family and zero GMAT. You come home tan and happy, sit down for a CAT (a full computer adaptive practice test) and watch your Quant score slide right back to where it was in April. Then comes the panic: "I lost EVERYTHING."

You didn't lose everything. But you did lose something, and it was avoidable. The vacation isn't the problem. Going on vacation with NO PLAN is the problem.

Skills you don't use start to rust

Think about a runner who trains for a marathon, then takes two full weeks off right in the middle of the build. She doesn't forget how to run. She just comes back slower, a little sloppier and more tired than she should be. Her body didn't forget the training. It just stopped getting the signal to keep it.

GMAT skills work the same way. The facts mostly stay put. You won't forget what a prime number is. What fades is the stuff that actually earns points: your habit of taking notes on every prompt, your instinct to TEST THE ANSWERS instead of grinding through algebra, your feel for where the trap is in a Critical Reasoning question. Those are habits, and habits fade when you stop feeding them.

So here's the forced choice. What do you want MORE: two weeks with absolutely no GMAT, or not having to spend the two weeks AFTER your trip rebuilding what you already built? You can't have both. But you can have a great vacation AND keep your skills alive, if you plan for it.

A wall calendar with two weeks shaded as a trip, and a small book icon sitting on each shaded day, leading into an unshaded week with bigger book icons. — Small daily reps on the trip, a real plan the week you get back.

The 5 vacation mistakes I watch people make

The fantasy plan. "I'll study three hours a day by the pool." No, you won't. You'll do it on day one, skip day two and feel guilty for the next twelve days. Guilt is not training.
INSTEAD: Plan 20 to 30 minutes a day, every day, at the same time. First thing in the morning works for most people, before the day takes over. Small and steady beats big and imaginary.
Packing a whole new library. A trip feels like a fresh start, so people pack a book they've never opened and try a brand new approach. Now you're learning a new system with no one to check your work.
INSTEAD: Bring what you already use. If you've been jumping between three sources, read why you need to stop dating your study materials and pick one. Vacation is for upkeep, not for starting over.
Working in your head because you didn't pack paper. Doing questions on your phone in a hotel lobby with nothing to write on is how you train bad habits. On Test Day you'll have a notepad. In practice you should too.
INSTEAD: Pack a small pad and a pen. Every rep you do, you do it the Test Day way: notes on paper, every time.
Doing only NEW questions. A vacation rep isn't the time to chase hard questions you've never seen.
INSTEAD: Redo questions you've already missed. Before you leave, pick a set of 30 to 40 old misses. Redoing them tells you whether the FIX stuck, and that's the whole point.
Coming home with no restart date. "I'll get back into it once I'm settled." Settled turns into a week, then two. That's how a two week trip becomes a five week gap.
INSTEAD: Pick your restart date before you leave and write it on your calendar. If you already have a test date booked, check it against the trip now, and move it if you need to. You can see how booking works on the official GMAT registration page.

What a vacation rep looks like

Here's the kind of question that makes a perfect 20 minute morning rep. It's a Problem Solving question (a regular math question with five answer choices), and it's built so that the cheap way beats the algebra. Do it on paper.

Try it

A traveler on a 14-day trip does GMAT drills every day. On each light day she drills for 20 minutes, and on each heavy day she drills for 45 minutes. Every day is either a light day or a heavy day. If she drills for a total of 380 minutes over the 14 days, how many heavy days did she have?

Show the answer

Notes first. Write down: 14 days total. Light = 20 min. Heavy = 45 min. Total = 380 min. Find heavy days.

TEST THE ANSWERS. The answers are in order, so start in the middle with (C) 5.

5 heavy days means 14 minus 5 = 9 light days. Heavy time: 5 times 45 = 225. Light time: 9 times 20 = 180. Total: 225 + 180 = 405. That's too much, so we need FEWER heavy days.

Try (B) 4. That means 14 minus 4 = 10 light days. Heavy time: 4 times 45 = 180. Light time: 10 times 20 = 200. Total: 180 + 200 = 380. That matches.

Check it the long way. Call heavy days h. Then 20(14 minus h) + 45h = 380. That's 280 + 25h = 380, so 25h = 100 and h = 4. Same answer.

The trap: people divide 380 by 45, get about 8.4, and grab (E) 8. That ignores the light days completely. Eight heavy days alone would be 360 minutes, leaving only 20 minutes for the other 6 days. The notes on your pad are what stop you from making that mistake.

The answer is (B).

Now a Data Sufficiency rep. Data Sufficiency (DS) is the GMAT question type where you don't solve for the answer. You decide whether the facts you're given are ENOUGH to answer it. The five choices are always the same:

(A) Statement 1 alone is sufficient, but Statement 2 alone is not.
(B) Statement 2 alone is sufficient, but Statement 1 alone is not.
(C) Both statements together are sufficient, but neither alone is.
(D) Each statement alone is sufficient.
(E) The statements together are still not sufficient.

Try it

Over a 10-day trip, a traveler drilled either Quant or Verbal each day, never both on the same day and never taking a day off. On how many days did she drill Verbal?

(1) She drilled Quant on 4 more days than she drilled Verbal.
(2) She drilled Quant on at least 6 days.

(A) (B) (C) (D) (E), as listed above.

Show the answer

Notes first. Q + V = 10. Find V. Write "AD / BCE" on your pad so you can cross off choices as you go.

Statement 1: Q = V + 4. Plug in: (V + 4) + V = 10, so 2V = 6 and V = 3. One answer only. Sufficient. Cross off B, C and E.

Statement 2: TEST VALUES. Q could be 6, giving V = 4. Q could be 7, giving V = 3. Two different answers. Not sufficient. Cross off D.

The trap: people skip the first sentence and treat Statement 1 as "one equation, two unknowns," so they think they need both statements and pick (C). The prompt already gave you Q + V = 10. If you didn't write it down, you lost it.

The answer is (A).

Two questions, about 20 minutes with a careful review. That's a vacation rep. It keeps the habits alive: notes, testing answers, spotting the trap.

The restart week

Your first day back is NOT the day for a full practice test. You're tired, your sleep is off and a bad score will just mess with your head. A CAT is a measuring device. It doesn't make you better, and measuring yourself while jet lagged gives you junk data.

Instead, run a simple restart week:

Days 1 to 3: Longer review sessions of 60 to 90 minutes. Redo your old misses. Rebuild your note taking rhythm.
Days 4 to 6: Timed sets of mixed Quant and Verbal. Get your feel for the clock back.
Day 7: A full CAT, taken the real way, at the time of day you'll test.

And "the real way" means the WHOLE exam, not just Quant and Verbal. On Test Day you sit the Analytical Writing essay (30 minutes), then Integrated Reasoning (12 questions, 30 minutes), then Quant (37 questions, 75 minutes), then Verbal (41 questions, 75 minutes), with two optional 8-minute breaks. It runs about 3.5 hours, and you can't go back to change an answer. You can check the full format on the official GMAT format page. If you've only ever practiced the two scored sections, you've skipped some of the aspects of Test Day you probably haven't trained for.

A staircase of seven steps, each step slightly taller than the last, with a small flag planted on the top step. — Build back up one step at a time, then measure.

If that Day 7 score is a little lower than your last one, don't get too down on yourself. A small dip after two weeks away is normal and fixable. Look at the data. Which questions did you miss, and WHY? You are not allowed to say "I have no idea." Name the cause, then fix it.

Your move, today

The choices you make right now about your summer are the ones that cement where you end up this year. So don't read another article. Before you go to bed tonight, do three things. Open your calendar and write a restart date in it. Pick the 30 old misses you'll redo on the trip and put them in one folder. Then put a notepad in your suitcase, even if the trip is a month away.

I'll bet that takes less than 15 minutes. And I'll bet it saves you two weeks of rebuilding.