Can I Re-Take The GMAT And Write My MBA Essays At The Same Time?
Maria |
November 24, 2020

 So, it’s CRUNCH TIME.

A big b-school deadline is right around the corner, and you’re getting in the zone. Buckling down to start to assemble your application.

As you spend more time on schools’ websites, you start to get a sinking feeling when you look at their “accepted student” statistics. You either haven’t take the GMAT / GRE yet, or you have, but your score is WAY below their averages. Maybe it’s even below their “mid-80%” cut-off.

UH OH.

First of all. Do NOT necessarily abandon hope. As you may have learned in the ApplicantLab’s “Strengths and Weaknesses” module / learned via my “AdCom Hierarchy of Needs“, there are several ways to combat / counter a low GMAT score.

IN SUM: YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE TO RE-TAKE IT.

“But — if I really, really want to (re-)take the GMAT (or perhaps better, switch to the GRE instead?) AND write my essays at the same time, can I?”

Yes.. (see below)… I don’t recommend it, and it’s not ideal… but hey, we don’t live in an ideal world, right? 

So — here’s how you can power through and try to do BOTH things in a COMPRESSED time-frame:

There are actually 2 ways you can try to do MBA essay-writing

AND

GMAT / GRE Prep

at the “same time” (in a compressed time-frame):

More details are below, but in sum: 

  • Method #1 (if you feel your low score was a “fluke”): Do some pre-work on the application now, get the ball rolling with your recommenders, take the GMAT in a few weeks…and then save a week or two prior to the deadlines to chain yourself to your desk and write, write, write.
  • Method #2 (if you think you need as much test prep time as possible): Sign up to take the GMAT as close as possible to your earliest school’s deadline this round. Spend a week or two right now getting your WHOLE APPLICATION set up — yes, even write your essay drafts and fill in the application short-answer forms, get the recommender ball rolling. Upload it all, but don’t hit “submit” just yet.
  • (A potentially more sane way, but does NOT involve re-taking the test): Sign up for an online course in statistics, finance, business writing, etc. — something related to the subject in which your GMAT score is weak. “But I won’t be finished the course and therefore will NOT have a good grade in it before the application deadline!“. Yes I know. But in your optional essay you can say that you are in the process of taking this class. Cite any mid-term / initial grades if any. This at least lets the AdComs know that you’re taking active steps to bolster your deficiencies. It shows humility, maturity, and also is frankly a helluva lot less stressful than trying to re-take the test.

If you have other “evidence” in your profile that you really ARE good at quant/verbal, and the score is just a fluke… you might be able to get away with this instead…but, all else being equal, having a solid standardized test score will go MUCH further!

Let’s dissect the 2 (re-)testing options in a bit more detail, since that’s why you’re here:

Option 1: Taking the GMAT a few weeks before the deadlines, and then powering through essays right up until the deadline (not as recommended)

Here’s what you would do:

  • Spend a few hours to power through crafting your Career Vision / Why MBA story, AND then brainstorm the stories your recommenders are going to write about you.
    • You wouldn’t need the FULL story; just enough to be able to get your recommenders up and running.
  • Realize that most recommenders are asked basically 3 things: Ways in which you are exceptional, usually one “leadership” / “triumph” / “positive impact on a group or whatever” example, and examples of a time when you have messed something up but then recovered.
    • Given this, you can [THEORETICALLY, BUT AGAIN I DON’T FULLY RECOMMEND THIS] get away with only brainstorming 6 stories: 3 for each recommender:
      • 1 way I stand out vs. my peers; 1 “thing I was amazing in” and 1 “weakness I had but here is how I’m recovering” story.
  • If you use the ApplicantLab modules for Career Vision, Why MBA, Brainstorming, and Recommendations, you can probably power through this initial step in 1 – 3 hours.
  • Meet with your recommenders to get THAT BALL ROLLING so that they submit their stuff on time!
  • Put the application OUT OF YOUR MIND. Focus ENTIRELY between “now” and “test day” on taking the test. (see my blog post on my 3 tips for the GMAT here)
  • Take the test.
  • After taking the test, take the night off and watch cat videos on YouTube to give your brain a chance to recover. You’ll be fried, and you’ll need to re-charge.
  • THEN the next day — with your remaining 1 or 2 weeks, the same laser-focus you HAD given to test-prep will NOW go to essays….and you can follow these ten steps to get there.

I realize that I am tooting my own proverbial horn, but if you go through the exercises in the ApplicantLab, you CAN get to essay drafts, and the polish those drafts, within a couple of days. Last year, a user told me he got to a draft of an essay he had “stared at for weeks” within only a few hours. Another user told me he was able to write essays for FOUR schools in ONE WEEK. Would the essays have been better with more time? YES, ABSOLUTELY, 100%.

But – CAN THEY BE WRITTEN QUICKLY, once you know what AdComs are looking for? YES INDEED. (Start here for a quick infographic that tells you which steps to take)

When would someone choose THIS option?

I’ve only begrudgingly “allowed” one person to it this way — the reason being that she felt that the score truly was a fluke, and with the test prep material so fresh in her mind, she wanted to re-take ASAP — within 16 days. Practice tests had been much higher; and the questions in quant seemed oddly very easy, which to me said that a mistake must have been made early on in the test which led to Low Scoresville — thanks a lot, computer-adaptive algorithm — and the low score really was due to botching an early question vs. a true reflection of this person’s grasp of the material. Therefore, the challenge was more about “keeping things fresh for a few weeks” vs. “starting test prep over from scratch”.

 

OPTION 2: Sign up to re-take the GMAT as close as possible to the deadline date. Power through essays / applications in a couple of days or a week or two. Then devote remaining time to test prep (this is the more recommended option)

Why do I prefer this option?

This might sound a little weird, but bear with me. If you’ve already taken the GMAT, or even a practice test, you know what a beast it is. As a result, I find that people take it more seriously than they take essay-writing… because you might not have written essays yet, so it might be a bit of an esoteric concept.

If I say to you, “The faster you finish your essays, the more time you’ll have for that super-important GMAT prep”, then it tends to strike more fear into your heart….and is therefore a BETTER motivator than the other way around.

In other words, fear of the test might motivate you SO much that you sit down and do the full ApplicantLab from start-to-finish in a matter of a few days. After all, the more quickly you power through assembling the pieces you need for your application, the MORE time you’ll have (precious, precious time) to devote to GMAT prep.

Which is presumably what you want! It’s a real pain-point you’ve experienced before!

Put another way: after a certain point, the “marginal benefit” of each extra hour you spend on your essays starts to diminish, whereas each extra hour of GMAT prep can make a big difference. So I advise to hammer out the essays as quickly as you can, and give yourself as much time as possible for the GMAT.

So in this scenario, you block out several hours of time over several days, or perhaps lock yourself in your room for a full weekend, and see if you can get to full essay drafts / resume / etc. within a few days or a week or two. The ApplicantLab can be incredibly helpful here — you won’t need to waste time Googling around for generic articles, panickedly trying to figure out what to say (or what NOT to say). Just follow the steps, read the advice tailored to you, and GO, GO, GO!

Upload your application (don’t hit submit yet), and then spend the rest of your time on preparing for the test (in case you missed it, my article with 3 tips for the GMAT is here). This then lets you look at your application, post-GMAT, with a “fresh” set of eyes — which, trust me, can be much more productive than continuing to re-re-re-re-re-read it in back to back sessions (the essays start to melt together if you don’t take a break from them).

If you take the test the day before a school’s deadline, then that evening or the next day you can double-check the application materials (that are already waiting to go) to give them one more sanity-check, and hit submit. THEN: spend several hours doing absolutely nothing to decompress. If you like laughing, let me know and I’ll send you a bunch of funny videos that will help you unwind from the past few weeks!

“Can I do both at the exact same time?”

You’ll notice that in NEITHER work-scheme is there a version that suggests “spend 1 hour a night on test prep and 2 hours a night on essays”, or vice-versa.

That’s intentional.

ONLY contaminate your time that way *IF* you find that [preparing for the GMAT / writing the essays] is SO stressful, that [writing the essays / prepping for the GMAT] is actually a welcome mental break; a nice chance to think about something else for a while.

For most people though: brain scans and neuro-sciencey things have shown that multi-tasking usually doesn’t work. Mentally jumping between two tasks is very inefficient, brain-wise.

Plus, the anxiety from one might start to seep into anxiety from the other…turning you into a big ball of anxiety, which leads to a decrease in productivity, which leads to MORE ANXIETY, and….whew.

WHAT A MESS! Don’t do it!!!

 

In sum, you CAN quickly pull together a full business school application AND prepare to take (or re-take) the GMAT in only a month or two.

It will totally suck, but it CAN be done.

No matter what, it hinges upon you be able to power through the creation of the essays, resume, and “figuring out what you are going to ask your recommenders to say about you”, in as efficient a way as possible.

And this is where I can totally help you!

Application Tips | GMAT | MBA Admissions Advice | MBA Essay Advice | Test Prep Advice
Can I Re-Take The GMAT And Write My MBA Essays At The Same Time?
Maria |
November 24, 2020

Video transcript, for you skimmers out there: 

I love the fact that they. Report on this metric, right? The salary percentage increase, I think is an incredibly valuable metric because there are so many business schools out there that are great for so many people. And at the end of the day, these programs are in fact able to do what a lot of business school applicants are hoping for.

They are in fact able to provide a real change in the trajectory of someone’s career. They are, in fact, able to help people leapfrog. Into a higher career stratum than they would’ve otherwise been able to be in. So from that perspective, I love the fact that the FT reports on the salary percentage increase.

So valuable. I think it helps, when sometimes I talk to people at the beginning of the business school journey, I will frequently hear something like, well, it’s M seven or bust, you know, it’s Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or bust.

And I’m often like, look, slow your roll, man. There are so many programs out there that are going to get you. They might not be the first ones that you think [00:01:00] of, but wow, does that even matter? I mean, whew. Look at some of these numbers. $170,000. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it’s one and a half times more than what you were making before business school.

I mean, wow. , That is life changing. , And these schools can really change people’s lives. And I think it’s important to have this metric available because I think it helps open people’s eyes. To, To be a little bit more open-minded. , And I think that’s wonderful.

Where my little quibble is. Is that I believe this is an important metric to report upon. However, I do not believe that it is a metric that should have significant amount of weight in the rankings because if we think about what is the purpose of a ranking, it is meant to be some sort of a representation of relative quality.

Now rankings. The entire concept of them is flawed the entire, for me, the entire concept of an ordinal ranking is ridiculous. Like school versus two versus four, versus seven versus six . You know, like, there, there’s sort of [00:02:00] these tiny miniature marginal differences. I think that school rankings should instead be in buckets.

Like, here is the top bucket, and then here is the also very good, but just underneath the top bucket, the next bucket. Um, but no one, no one listens to me. Uh, but so anyway, to the extent that a ranking. Is intended to be some sort of a measure of a program’s quality. I don’t think that this metric is one that should be included in the weighting.

Look, again, . Life-changing levels of improvements in salary. But when I look at, okay, so these were the top five programs by the salary percentage increase, but now when I look at it by the weighted salary, right, the top five US programs, by weighted salary, it’s not entirely accurate to say that.

Well, these programs, you start with people who have lower incoming salaries and they end up in the same place as the other programs. The numbers do not [00:03:00] really, , the numbers would tell a slightly different story. So if you look at the weighted salary a few years out for the top five programs by salary,

we’re talking about a $70,000 a year difference, roughly 240 a year versus 170 a year. That’s about a 40% difference, which I don’t think is a small, you know, if we were talking 5%, even 10%, I’d be like, yeah, 10%, that’s nothing. It’s, you know, nothing but 40% I do think is a pretty, I think it’s a pretty significant difference, uh, that is worth noting.

And so. Your point about like, well, they were letting in the people who were already on a, you know, if you were making, let’s see if we can, if we figure out, okay, so if we take this, these numbers, then we can sort of back into what’s an implied pre MBA salary, you know, that would indicate maybe something in the mid sixties before MBA versus, you know, one 10 something, [00:04:00] 1, 1 10, 1 15, for these other programs.

I get your argument. Your argument is like, look, these people were already clearly high achievers prior to business school, and so, mm-hmm. Is it not true then that the business school, like they would’ve continued to be high achievers And in fact, this is true, some of the most successful, financially successful people I know skipped business school altogether and they didn’t need it.

, However, I think GMAC often does, polls or surveys of MBA graduates, and I think the vast majority of them, at a minimum say that they’re glad that they went to business school, that they do feel that it was worth, their time. So. How much of this is,, nature versus nurture.

We, we will never know. , But I would gently push back on the fact that I, because these numbers essentially to the extent that they’re lower than say these numbers, it effectively penalizes thes e schools in this ranking. And for that reason, I don’t think that it should be part of the ranking because you’re penalizing a school for letting in more successful people.

But there’s a benefit. [00:05:00] To attending. Like, first of all, if you are a more successful person, think of the opportunity cost that you’re giving up. So the fact that these schools are able to lure away people to give up two years of their salary, in order to go to business school in the first place, I think is a pretty good indicator of the desirability or the perceived desirability of those programs.

Also, I do think that there is merit to thinking about like, who are my peers going to be in a business school? and. If a school is attracting people who were more successful prior to business school, I actually think that that is an indicator of the quality of the school, not only because it shows the people that are willing to give up those two years of salary, but also think about who the peer group is once someone is in the school.

Right? That means that if you are attending one of these schools. This percentage isn’t as high, but you’re surrounded by people who, prior to business school, were already achieving on a different level. And also after they graduate, they continue to achieve on a different level. True. The slope is not as sharp.

Right. But the.

[00:06:00] Result is a larger number. So I think that this implies that perhaps at the school itself, you might be surrounded by people who are driven. some people might say more competitive, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but people who are more driven and also after they graduate, they continue to be driven.

And so I think that also implies something pretty powerful about the ultimate benefit of the network because business school isn’t just the two years you go there and it’s not just that first job you get out of school or that third job you have five years out of school.

it’s also who’s your network gonna be and, and who are you gonna call 10, 15, 20 years after graduation? To invest in your company or to partner with your company or to start a company with. so I do think that there is value to attending a school and to have your peers during school and after school be people who were, for lack of a better term, high performers.

[00:07:00] I don’t think that this should be punished because I do think that this does yield a better business school. Experience and a better result in the long term. And so my quibble, again, I love this metric. I think this is an amazing metric to provide, but my quibble is that this should not be given honestly, any weight at all, and certainly not the high level of weight that it’s given, because again, you’re punishing the schools that, you know, you’re basically indicating that I, what I would say is an indication of quality.

An indirect indication of quality, but an indication of quality all the same. You’re basically punishing the schools that have sort of higher quality, quote unquote, coming in. And, and that to me is. Counterintuitive and kind of wrong. And so that’s why I continue to think that this should not be, uh, reported upon.

Absolutely. Tell us. It’s important. I think it’s great to know. I love using this information, but I don’t think it should be used in terms of like, let’s figure out which programs are the , [00:08:00] quote unquote highest quality programs. But what do you think? What did I miss? let me know. Thanks.

Maria

New around here? I’m an HBS graduate and a proud member (and former Board Member) of AIGAC. I considered opening a high-end boutique admissions consulting firm, but I wanted to make high-quality admissions advice accessible to all, so I “scaled myself” by creating ApplicantLab. ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!