GMAT Focus Edition Preparation Course

This GMAT Focus Edition preparation course teaches the exam as it exists now — which matters, because a great deal of widely-used GMAT material still teaches content the Focus Edition removed.

What the Focus Edition removed, and what that saves you

The current GMAT runs two hours fifteen minutes across three equally weighted sections — Quantitative Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning and Data Insights — with 64 questions, all multiple choice.

Three things are gone: the analytical writing essay, sentence correction from Verbal, and geometry from Quant.

That last one is worth dwelling on. Candidates working from older books routinely spend weeks drilling geometry that will never appear. The first thing we do is audit what a candidate has been studying against the current syllabus, and the time recovered is often substantial.

Data Insights is the section people underestimate

Integrated Reasoning used to sit outside the main score, so candidates reasonably deprioritised it. It became Data Insights, and it now counts toward the total as one of three equally weighted sections.

Plenty of preparation plans have not caught up. They allocate Data Insights the attention its predecessor deserved, which is now a direct scoring mistake.

The section covers data sufficiency, multi-source reasoning, table analysis, graphics interpretation and two-part analysis. It rewards structured reading of messy information — a genuinely different skill from either Quant or Verbal, and one that responds well to deliberate practice.

Scoring you can plan against

The total runs 205 to 805 in ten-point steps, with each section scored 60 to 90 in single points.

Equal weighting changes target-setting. On the old exam, weakness in the integrated or writing sections sat outside the headline score. Now a weak section pulls the total directly, so the right plan usually raises the floor rather than pushing an already-strong section higher.

We set section-level targets by working backwards from the range a candidate's target schools publish.

The three edits almost nobody uses

Within each section you may skip questions, return to them, and change up to three answers.

This is one of the few real strategic levers on an adaptive test, and most candidates never use it deliberately — they either never revisit anything, or they burn the allowance early on a question they were never going to resolve.

We train a bookmarking routine: which hesitations are worth flagging, when to return, and how to spend three edits where they carry the most value. It is a small mechanic with a measurable effect.

Adaptivity, and not panicking

All three sections are question-adaptive, so difficulty responds to performance as you go.

Two practical consequences. Rushing the opening questions is expensive, because early accuracy shapes everything after it. And a run of hard questions is usually a signal that you are doing well, not badly — candidates who read it as failure and panic give back marks they had already earned.

Both are rehearsed under timing until the response is automatic rather than emotional.

How we review

Every miss is classified as content, reasoning or timing. A content gap needs teaching. A reasoning error needs a different approach to the question type. A timing error needs a changed allocation, and more content will not help at all.

Candidates who log errors without classifying them tend to plateau: they can see they are missing questions but not why, so they study more of everything and improve at nothing in particular.

Who this is for

Undergraduate and working candidates targeting MBA and masters programmes. No business background is required — the exam tests reasoning rather than commercial knowledge.

About 20 weeks at six hours a week suits most working candidates. Small online groups of up to eight, so full mocks are reviewed individually rather than in aggregate.

Format, scoring and scheduling are set by GMAC and change. Confirm the current details on mba.com before planning around them.