- Eight hours a week for ten weeks is 80 hours, enough to move a score if the Sunday test and review are never skipped.
- Protect two 90-minute weeknight blocks and one Saturday hour; the Sunday four-hour block is the practice test plus review.
- Data Insights gets 40% of the method weeks because it is a third of the score and the section most quant professionals under-prepare.
- Review takes longer than the test: budget at least 90 minutes after every Sunday sitting and finish the review on Tuesday.
- Spend the official practice exams on weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9; use timed sectionals on the other Sundays.
You work 60 hours a week, you have a Round 2 deadline, and you need a GMAT Focus score in about ten weeks. The plan below is eight hours a week, placed where a consultant’s or banker’s calendar can actually hold them: two 90-minute weeknight blocks, one Saturday hour, and a Sunday block of four hours built around a practice test.
Eighty hours is enough. It is not enough to waste, so this plan is specific about what each hour is for, and it assumes you will miss one week to a deal or a client. The weeks are written so that a missed week costs you a sectional, not the plan.
Why eight hours and not twelve
Twelve-hour study weeks look better on paper and fail in practice. The candidates we see who promise themselves twelve hours tend to hit it twice, then miss it twice, then stop tracking. Eight hours is the number a 60-hour job will tolerate for ten straight weeks without the plan collapsing in week four.
The hours also go further than most people expect because the test is short. GMAC (mba.com) publishes the Focus Edition format: three 45-minute sections, Quantitative Reasoning with 21 questions, Verbal Reasoning with 23, and Data Insights with 20, for 2 hours 15 minutes of testing plus one optional 10-minute break, with up to three answer changes allowed per section (GMAC exam structure). There is no essay and no geometry. That is a narrow syllabus, and a narrow syllabus rewards method over volume.
Here is the weekly shape. It does not change for ten weeks.
| Block | When | Length | Job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block A | Tuesday night | 90 min | Finish Sunday’s review, then the week’s method topic |
| Block B | Thursday night | 90 min | Timed problem sets in the week’s topic |
| Block C | Saturday morning | 60 min | Mixed timed set, all three sections |
| Block D | Sunday | 4 hr | Practice test (or sectionals) plus the first 90 minutes of review |
Four hours on Sunday is the block people try to negotiate down. Don’t. The practice test takes 2 hours 25 minutes with the break, and the first pass of review is where the score actually moves. A test you do not review is a 145-minute mood.
The pacing numbers you are training toward
Every timed block in this plan runs at test pace, so you should know the three numbers before week 1. Quant gives you 2 minutes 8 seconds per question, Verbal gives you 1 minute 57 seconds, and Data Insights gives you 2 minutes 15 seconds. Those are averages, not rules; a multi-source reasoning prompt with three questions attached should take longer than a single table-analysis question, and a 30-second critical-reasoning question is fine if you saw the structure.
Set a timer for every set. Write the number down.
Week 1: diagnostic and baseline
Sunday of week 1 is a full-length official practice exam, taken at the time of day your real sitting will be, with the break taken and the phone in another room. If you have an official score already, you can skip this sitting and start the plan from your Enhanced Score Report; the section-by-section breakdown there does the same job.
Tuesday and Thursday this week are review only. Sort every miss and every guess into one of three bins: you did not know the content, you knew it and used a bad method, or you knew it and ran out of time. Count the bins per section. Most 60-hour-week candidates discover that fewer than a quarter of their misses are content gaps. The rest are method and clock, which is the good news, because method and clock move in weeks and content takes months.
Saturday this week, build your error log. One row per miss: section, question type, bin, and a one-line note in your own words about what you should have done.
Weeks 2 and 3: Data Insights first
Data Insights gets the first method weeks for a reason. It is one third of your total score, it contains five question types most people have never seen before, and professionals from quant-heavy jobs routinely assume it will take care of itself. It does not.
Week 2 is data sufficiency and two-part analysis. Tuesday: the data sufficiency logic (evaluate each statement alone, write down what “sufficient” would require before you look at the statements, never solve for the value when the question asks whether a value exists). Thursday: 20 timed data sufficiency questions at 2:15 each, then ten two-part analysis prompts. Saturday: a 20-question mixed set. Sunday: two timed sectionals, Data Insights and Verbal, back to back with the break between, then review.
Week 3 is multi-source reasoning, table analysis and graphics interpretation. The method for all of them is the same: read the question stems before the sources, decide which source answers which stem, and only then read the source. Candidates who read every tab first lose two minutes per prompt. Sunday of week 3 is full-length official practice exam number two.
Weeks 4 and 5: Quant and the mental-math problem
There is no calculator in Quant. For most bankers and consultants this is the first real shock, because you have not done long division by hand since school. Week 4 Tuesday is arithmetic speed: fraction and percent conversions, squares to 25, the first dozen cubes, and the habit of estimating before computing. Thursday is number properties, the topic that produces the most “I knew that” misses: divisibility, remainders, even and odd, positive and negative, and the behavior of fractions between 0 and 1 when squared.
Week 5 is algebra and word problems under the clock. Tuesday: translating word problems into equations and recognizing when the answer choices can be tested instead. Thursday: 21 questions in 45 minutes, exactly the real section. Saturday: mixed. Sunday of week 4 is sectionals (Quant and Data Insights); Sunday of week 5 is full-length official exam three. Register for your real test date this week.
A note on volume. Two weeks on Quant will feel thin if you came in weak there, and that is a deliberate trade. The plan assumes a quant-heavy career. If your week 1 diagnostic put Quant below 78, swap one Verbal week for a second Quant week and tell your tutor.
Weeks 6 and 7: Verbal as pattern recognition
Verbal is 23 questions in 45 minutes, split between reading comprehension and critical reasoning. Week 6 is critical reasoning. Every argument on the test uses one of a small set of structures, and the fastest Verbal gains come from naming the structure before reading the choices. Tuesday: the structures, with a prephrase for each. Thursday: 30 timed critical-reasoning questions at 1:57 each, logging which structure each one was.
Week 7 is reading comprehension. The method is structure-mapping: a four- or five-word label per paragraph as you read, written down, so that detail questions become lookups. Thursday is three passages under the clock, then critical reasoning mixed back in. Sunday of week 6 is sectionals (Verbal and Quant); Sunday of week 7 is official exam four.
By week 7, your error log should show a repeating pattern in each section. If it does not, the log is not specific enough. “Careless” is not a bin.
Weeks 8 and 9: full tests and the three edits
Weeks 8 and 9 are both full-length Sundays, official exams five and six, and the weeknight blocks become review-driven rather than topic-driven. Tuesday is the rest of Sunday’s review. Thursday is a 45-minute timed section in whichever section the review flagged, at real pace, with the review-and-edit protocol in use.
The protocol matters more here than anywhere. GMAC lets you bookmark questions and change up to three answers per section before time runs out. Candidates with no plan for this either skip the review screen or burn four minutes re-reading questions they got right. The plan we teach is to bank the first two-thirds of the section at pace, flag at most four questions as you go, and keep a fixed reserve (about four minutes in Quant and Data Insights, about three in Verbal) for the flagged ones. Week 8 is for practicing the reserve. Week 9 is for trusting it.
Sleep matters now too. Shorten Thursday to 60 minutes in week 9 if you are tired. Tired candidates do not learn methods; they rehearse errors.
Week 10: taper and test
Week 10 has no new content and no full-length test. Tuesday: 45 minutes of your single weakest question type, from the error log, at pace. Thursday: a 30-minute mixed set at pace, then stop. Saturday: nothing. Sunday, or whichever day is your sitting: the real test, with the same breakfast, start time, break habit and noteboard routine you rehearsed on six Sundays.
If your test date is the following week instead, repeat week 10’s Tuesday and Thursday. Do not add Sunday back.
The week-by-week table
| Week | Tue (90) | Thu (90) | Sat (60) | Sun (4 hr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Review diagnostic | Review, build error log | Error log | Official exam 1 (or your ESR) |
| 2 | DS logic, two-part analysis | 20 DS + 10 TPA timed | Mixed DI | Sectionals: DI + Verbal |
| 3 | MSR, tables, graphics | 20-question DI set | Mixed DI | Official exam 2 |
| 4 | Mental math, number properties | Timed Quant sets | Mixed | Sectionals: Quant + DI |
| 5 | Algebra, word problems | Full 21-question Quant section | Mixed | Official exam 3 (register this week) |
| 6 | CR argument structures | 30 timed CR | Mixed | Sectionals: Verbal + Quant |
| 7 | RC structure-mapping | 3 passages + CR | Mixed | Official exam 4 |
| 8 | Finish review | Timed section, edit protocol | Mixed | Official exam 5 |
| 9 | Finish review | Timed section (60 min) | Mixed | Official exam 6 |
| 10 | Weakest type, 45 min | Mixed, 30 min | Rest | Real test |
Screenshot the table. The whole plan fits on one phone screen, which is the point.
When a week goes wrong
A week will go wrong. A deal closes or a client flies you to Houston, and a Sunday disappears. When that happens, the rule is to drop the weeknight blocks first and the Sunday last. A lost Sunday test is the only thing that genuinely sets you back, because the Sunday score is the data the rest of the plan runs on.
If you lose a Sunday anyway, do not double up the following weekend. Shift the remaining weeks by one, push your test date if the registration window allows it (mba.com lets you reschedule for a fee that rises as the date gets closer; check the current policy), and keep the cadence. Two full tests in one weekend produce two tired scores and no information.
Most of the professionals we work with lose about one week in ten. The plan survives that. It does not survive three.
Rick’s note: the candidates I see fail this plan don’t fail on content. They fail on the Tuesday review, because reviewing a test you just took is tedious and Tuesday night after a 12-hour day is when tedium wins. If you are going to protect one block with your life, protect that one. It is where the points are.
What to do this week
- Put the four recurring blocks in your work calendar for ten weeks, labeled so nobody moves them.
- Download the two free official practice exams from mba.com and buy the paid set; you will need six full sittings.
- Take official exam 1 this Sunday at your intended test time, break included, phone out of the room. Or pull your Enhanced Score Report if you have an official score already.
- Build the error log with the three bins (content, method, time) and sort every miss from the test into it on Tuesday.
- Decide now which section gets the fifth method week: Data Insights unless your Quant came in under 78.
Questions people ask
Can I compress this into six weeks at 13 hours a week?
You can, but the Sunday test cadence is the part that works, and six Sundays is not many tests. If you must compress, keep every Sunday test and cut the weeknight review of easy questions, not the hard-question review. Most working professionals who try 13-hour weeks miss two of them, which is why we built the plan around eight.
What if I travel Tuesday through Thursday every week?
Move the two weeknight blocks to Monday and Friday, or to hotel evenings. The content does not care which night it is. What matters is that both blocks happen and that Sunday is untouched. Sessions with us are scheduled around your travel for the same reason.
Do I need the paid official practice exams?
GMAC gives two official practice exams free and sells more. The plan uses six full-length sittings, so you will want the paid set. The official exams use the real scoring algorithm, and nothing else does, which makes them the only trustworthy score estimate you have.
Should I study Quant first since that is where I am strongest?
No. Start with Data Insights in week 2. It carries a third of your total, it is the section most quant-heavy careers neglect, and its methods (data sufficiency logic especially) transfer back into Quant. Your Quant strength is why you can afford to start elsewhere.
When should I register for the real test?
Register in week 5 for a date one to two weeks after week 10. Registering early forces the plan; registering late means your preferred test-center slot is gone. Check availability at mba.com before you pick a date.