Keep Testing Yourself

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This goes without saying. Practicing without testing is akin to wandering in a maze with no idea as to where you’re going.

You can’t improve something you can’t measure.

If you have one month before your exam, you should take a test every five days, or at least once a week. This is so you can monitor your progress and get acquainted with the act of sitting in the same location for four hours and thinking critically.

Get this out of your way at the beginning when you’re conducting all the research to collect resources. Based on the number of weeks you have before your actual exam, allocate one test for every five days, or every week if you have more than a month to prepare. Ideally, you should spend the day before the main exam either relaxing or doing some very light review of your material.

Both the GRE and TOEFL give you a one-minute break after each section except the third one (or during the half-time), where you can take a ten-minute break. Do your best to follow the same schedule, and use the ten minutes to go to the restroom or eat a protein bar. Strictly stay away from your phone, close all the other applications on your laptop, and mute notifications.* If you take practice tests that don’t have an inbuilt timer, it’s very important that you time yourself using a stopwatch (preferably not your phone).

Remember Dangal, the biographical drama film about how a father trains his two daughters to become world-class wrestling champions? When Aamir Khan, who portrays the protagonist and father, sets out on a mission to improve his daughter’s performance, what does he do? He finds a way to watch all the previous recordings of her fights and notes down the moments where she committed rookie mistakes. He then asks her to watch the same recordings and points the mistakes out to her, so she can avoid them the next time. Assuming this scene mirrored the true story well, that was the turning point in her career.

We’re asking you to be your own Aamir Khan.

Go through the results of every single test to understand your pitfalls. If you see most errors taking place in the text completion section under verbal, it means you haven’t memorized the words and their meanings as well as you thought you did. Open a sheet and note down the feedback you have for yourself based on that test. Try being as detailed as you can. Your focus area over the next week should be the places where you did poorly in the previous exam. What’s the point in learning something you are already good at, as compelling as it might be?

So by constantly testing yourself in a simulated environment and meticulously going over the results to find your weaknesses, you will see an improvement. Eventually, as the test day nears, you will find yourself feeling more and more jittery. The remedy here is to talk to yourself.

When you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, speak confidently about your capabilities.

You can do this.

You’ve come far and put in an incredible amount of effort. If you have been following most (or all) of our suggestions so far, nothing can stop you from seeing that dream score pop up on your screen soon.