3 Most Common Reasons for Failing the NTS GAT
Why do some GAT test-takers fail to perform to their potential? Is it a lack of preparation or a lack of understanding of the fundamentals? Do they lose the race against time, or are their careless errors to blame? It is actually all these reasons, as discussed below.
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail – Benjamin Franklin
As you know by now, GAT tests you on your junior high and high school level curricula. Naturally, you need to know the material cold. More importantly, you need to train your mind to apply the knowledge to the mind-bending questioning style you’ll encounter on your GAT exam. Don’t remember high school algebra? You won’t do well on the Quantitative Section. The same is true if you’re not as comfortable crunching decimals, fractions, and percents. Your language skills may otherwise be solid, but your knowledge of the grammatical rules and stylistic conventions learned years ago may have become a bit rusty. It increases the likelihood that you will spend more time on the tough questions in the Verbal Section. All of this ties into the basic mistake of not understanding the fundamentals well enough.
- Some areas of the curriculum may come easily to you, and you may face no problem getting through with them correctly and swiftly. Other areas may confuse you a bit and take up time. Every GAT test-taker has his/her own strengths and weaknesses. Naturally, you want to devote some more time to your weak areas with more practice and preparation. But how do you figure out where you’re lacking? Take a stab at the tests provided in this site and more if you wish; you can join The CAT Online Test Prep
- If you’re not getting a particular answer and want to save time trying to figure it out by searching your math book or the dictionary or an online educational resource, select practice tests that come with explanations to each question. When you go wrong, you can always refer to the solution, figure out why you made the mistake, and learn, relearn, or unlearn something to be able to solve all other similar questions correctly. It also helps to maintain notes that you can revisit when in doubt or review right before the exam.
- Time is of the essence in the GAT. Many test takers score poorly because they answered slowly and ran out of time. Poor time management means not finishing every question on the test, which can pull down your score. It is critical that you have a time plan for each section and stay on track every step of the way. If it’s been a long time since you took an academic-oriented test, time management can become a lot more challenging. Preparation and practice become even more important in this scenario.
- You obviously cannot keep checking the clock after every problem. What you can do is develop a time sense, specifically a 50 seconds time sense.
- For Reading Comprehension, Sentence Correction, and other one-minute questions, you must be almost done with the problem in one minute. For Quantitative and Critical Reasoning questions, you must be on track to solving the problem (knowing what to do) at the end of the first 30 seconds, and get to the answer within the next30 seconds.
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