Executive Assessment Prep: How to Study for the EA
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Succeeding on the Executive Assessment is about increasing the odds that you’ll know how to solve the greatest number of questions efficiently. The stages that everyone needs to take to get there via Executive Assessment prep are similar, but the amount of time and resources required, and the most effective way to get through those stages, varies considerably from person to person.
A full EA course like the ones that we offer at TestCrackers will help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and offer frameworks that save you considerable time in this process, but there are several reasons why choosing to invest in that outside help might not be the right choice for everyone.
For those of you who are interested in Executive Assessment self-study, this article (part 2 of my three part series) outlines a study guide covering the major stages of prep; the best Executive Assessment prep materials and how to get the most out of them; and suggestions about how to structure your study and see the greatest score improvement from the work that you’re putting in.
How to study for the Executive Assessment: Foundations
As mentioned in my previous article, all successful study builds on a strong foundation. If your fundamental math and language skills are already in great shape then you might not need a lot of review here, but for most people taking the EA it has been a substantial time since they’ve used these skills at all, and it is worth starting studies with some refreshing and sharpening.
EA Quantitative Reasoning prep
For math, any “high school math” up to and including algebra is on the table (excluding geometry). The top 10 topics that I find students gain the most from reviewing are:
- Fractions and Decimals
- Exponents and Roots
- Absolute Value
- Systems of Equations
- Inequalities
- Algebraic Translations
- Quadratic Equations
- Divisibility and Prime Factorization
- Least Common Multiple and Greatest Common Factor
- Percentages, Percentage Change, and Interest
There are several good sources for this type of review. My last article included a link to these resources from Khan Academy, and I also recommend this resource from the makers of the assessment that gives a short overview of the topics covered.
This is one area in which third party options can also be worth pursuing for anyone who needs more in-depth review. Barron’s publishes a book called Math Review for Standardized Tests that has an enormous number of review problems for anyone who needs to sharpen these skills with repetitive practice. And my personal opinion is that the best book published by Manhattan Prep is their GMAT Foundations of Math (any edition is fine, even the really old ones), which offers a good overview of the topics above and drills at the end of each chapter.
Remember, the goal in all fundamental work is uncover and address any holes in your knowledge of the basic rules or how to solve problems. If I ask a student how comfortable they are with exponents, some feel very comfortable and think that they don’t need to review. But I can pretty quickly find problems that will put them in situations in which they are not quite sure what to do.
The drill problems at the end of each chapter in the GMAT Foundations of Math book do a nice job testing your comfort in a range of situations and my suggestion is that you start by attempting those. Your goal is to know the underlying material upside down, inside out and backwards. If you are at or above 95 percent accuracy on these questions and can quickly address what tripped you up on one or two few of them, move on and attempt the drills for the next chapter. But anything more than a couple errors indicates that you should spend some time working through the entire section and redoing the drills before moving on.
EA Reading Comprehension prep
On the Verbal side of things, I find two main sources of foundations work tend to best prepare students to get the most out of later study of official material.
The best practice for reading comprehension is, perhaps not surprisingly, reading and comprehending. This could be done on any dense, technical material, but you’ll definitely get the most out of it if you go with actual Official Executive Assessment Prep materials that best reflect both the types of passages that you’re likely to see on the exam and the types of questions that you’re likely to be asked about them. I find that the earlier on in their studies that students make a habit of daily reading comprehension practice, the better they’ll eventually do. The latest edition of GMAT™ Official Guide is a great place to start (and you’ll eventually want to complete most of the other work in this book as well – see below for more details).
To practice Reading Comprehension, make a habit of translating every paragraph that you read into your own words. You should be able to cover up the paragraph and write a few words describing the most important ideas without using any words directly copied from the text.
EA Sentence Correction prep
Getting familiar with grammar rules that you may not have ever learned and certainly aren’t used to applying strictly is the best prep here. The specific rules most commonly tested and worth beginning to familiarize yourself with are:
- Subject-Verb Agreement
- Pronoun Agreement
- Dependent and Independent Clauses (Fragments + Run-ons)
- Noun Modifiers and Verb Modifiers
- Verb Tenses
- Parallelism
- Comparisons
- Idioms
Unfortunately, the internet is full of misinformation and half-truths about Sentence Correction, and forum posts are notoriously guilty of allowing user votes to push confusing misrepresentations of these rules to the top. Though not without those flaws, this link offers a decent overview of many of the rules above. In a later article, I intend to address these common misconceptions and proper application of rules in greater detail.
EA Integrated Reasoning preparation
In many ways, Integrated Reasoning (IR) combines skills from quant and verbal and your study of those topics should aid with performance here. The main additional requirement is learning to effectively read and use the XY scatterplots and sortable tables that are commonly featured on the exam.
The best prep here begins with the IR question bank available when you register for the online bonuses that come with GMAT™ Official Guide.
Transition to Official Executive Assessment Prep
Once you understand the foundations you can transition to official materials, which are the key to success.
A lot of third-party materials attempt to copy the style of EA problems, but in my experience even the best of them miss the mark a significant amount of time. On Quant, this mostly means that you risk wasting effort learning to solve questions that test concepts that you don’t actually need to understand because they won’t appear on the actual test. But on Verbal, this can be actively harmful as the “answers” are somewhat more subjective, and I’ve seen problems by very well-known companies that actively break some of the standards of official tests. Bottom line: spend as much of your time using Official Executive Assessment Prep materials as possible.
Even within those, it can be tempting to focus on the wrong things. It is best to 100 percent master the easiest problems completely and form good habits and effective strategies there before you even look at the more difficult problems. Fight the temptation to spend an undue amount of time on the hardest problems that you see, as those aren’t really going to impact your score much unless you’re already super comfortable with the more fundamental material.
One huge advantage of the fact that the EA has been derived from the GMAT exam is that it makes a much larger pool of official study material available to you. As mentioned above, recent GMAT™ Official Guides are nearly 100 percent applicable to the EA (geometry is the notable exception), and those books progress from easiest to harder problems within each section. Starting by solving the easiest 25 percent of the problems in each section is a great way to start getting comfortable with the question formats represented on the EA. If you’re able to handle most of the problems in 2-3 minutes, then you’re ready to move on, but if you are not sure how to solve them or if the problems take you longer than that, you likely need more work on frameworks and fundamentals before you’re ready to do well on a full exam.
Executive Assessment Official Practice Premium Collection
It is hard to overstate the importance of timing on the EA, and once you have the basic skills down, it is important to do all of your practice on realistic, official EA-specific questions at exam pace. I’ll spend more time on this topic in the final article of this series, and some of it is similar to the approach that I advocate here in my GMAT pacing article. But while you can use a lot of GMAT materials to supplement your practice of content, the core of your study needs to be on this material.
Before diving into those four practice exams, you want to use the question sets included in the package mentioned above to create timed sets of 12 IR, 14 VR, or 14 QR questions, each to be completed in 30 minutes as you would need to during the real exam. It is key to effective study that you get accustomed to focusing for 30 straight minutes and build habits that allow you to maintain accurate work at this pace, while also making smart strategic decisions.
Best practices for using the practice exams
These exams are like diamonds. Their limited supply and relative hardness makes them extremely valuable. But please don’t tell your partner where you heard that if your exam-themed marriage proposal doesn’t turn out well. Still, treat these 4 exams with the same care that you would an engagement ring: you don’t want to waste them! They lose considerable value if you’ve already used them once! And although you want to make sure that you’re ready before you use one, you also don’t want to procrastinate and put them off for too long, particularly if you have an external deadline.
There is an important case for taking your first full practice exam relatively early in your studies. Until you’ve taken that test, you don’t really know what you’re up against, what you’re working towards, and how far you are away from it. Over the years I have heard countless excuses for why people procrastinate and avoid taking their first practice exam, and I’ve learned that the more reasons a person has for not taking the first exam, the more essential it is to overcome them. A lot of it comes down to test anxiety, and the more stressful you find the idea of taking a practice test, the more you will benefit from beginning the process of working through that anxiety and gaining comfort with the format.
First, a few general notes about how to get the most out of practice exams:
- Only take practice exams under realistic conditions. It is a waste of a scarce resource to take the test untimed, or with pauses in the middle, or in the middle of a distracted environment. Block enough time to treat the exam like a dress rehearsal for the real thing and use it as such.
- Have the right mindset. Don’t think of the practice exams as some sort of machine that measures your pulse (or abilities). Think about it like a private performance that you give for a small audience, who will not pass judgement on you, but will offer you valuable feedback before you have to try your routine in public.
- Learn everything you can from each exam. Take the time to review and learn from the feedback that the exam offers! It isn’t useful to take another test until you’ve learned everything that you can from the previous exam. The primary value comes from time spent reviewing from the exam, understanding your mistakes, and identifying weaknesses in both content areas and strategy. You should also examine the questions that you got right. Are there more efficient ways to solve the problems? Are there patterns that emerge about the kind of problems that you take too long to solve?
This self-reflection on non-exam work is also key to improvement. Errors and negative results should be viewed not as a source of frustration, but as a warning flag. Raising your score begins with identifying what about your process isn’t working, finding a solution, and working to address it.
One of the major benefits of a good course or tutor will be their ability to leverage years of experience helping people recognize and address these issues and can potentially streamline the process for you considerably, but it is very much a process that you can also conduct on your own.
Step-by-step guidance for using the four Executive Assessment Official Practice Exams
Exam 1: As mentioned above, this should happen relatively early in your studies. If you think that you may not need significant foundational work or overall prep, taking this cold can serve as a great way to confirm that and get a realistic estimate on how much time and resources you may need to devote to your studies. Otherwise, I’d suggest that you take it after no more than 1 month of serious foundational study.
Exam 2: This exam should come when you’re comfortable with the foundational material and format or EA questions; when you have completed timed sets and have a general understanding of pacing strategy (again, more on that in the next article); and when you’re ready to devote the time to take it under realistic conditions and then review it in depth.
Exam 3: Because there are only four exams, you want to save this for a time at which you have a realistic expectation for scoring in your target range. If Exam 2 did not reach this range, you need to have addressed the issues that you believe were holding that score back and be in a fundamentally different place. Additionally, you really need to be clear on your timing strategy before taking this exam.
Exam 4: You want to take this exam precisely 1 or 2 weeks before your actual scheduled exam, ideally at the exact same time of day. In the best-case scenario, this exam is pacing exercise/ dress rehearsal to reaffirm that you're fully ready. If you have already taken 3 exams without achieving your target, it is one more opportunity to focus in on achieving that result and create a new data set from which you can derive final lessons for improvement before your actual test.
In no cases does it make sense to take this (or any test) within the final 3-4 days before your actual exam! Not only is it likely to create mental fatigue leaving you less than 100 percent refreshed and ready for the real thing, but there also isn’t enough time to derive the lessons from it as to what was holding your score back and then subsequently address those lessons. The final few days should involve some brief timed sets to stay sharp, and a focus on personal wellness to stay fresh and ready to perform at your optimum level.
When to take the Executive Assessment
Using the exams above is the best way to know when you’re ready for the actual exam. Ideally, you’ve hit at or above your target score on two or more of the Official Practice Exams taken under realistic, timed conditions (for the first time, not a retake) before you take the real test. This means that you don’t need to improve further and can instead focus on executing a performance that you’ve already rehearsed. Remember, as of the publication date for this article, you’re only allowed to take the EA twice in the test center and twice at home, so you don’t want to waste those opportunities until you have good reason to believe that you’re ready.
In an ideal world, all of this takes place far enough in advance of any external deadlines that you can make these decisions on your own terms. But if the reality is that you have a limited time to achieve your desired score, you also need to think about the fact that you likely want to budget time for a potential retake before that deadline.
When to retake the Executive Assessment
Thankfully, programs won’t penalize you for having a bad score on one official exam if you’re able to subsequently achieve your target on a later exam. There is no shame in retaking this test, and in fact quite a few students do that.
Just as with practice exams, however, it doesn’t make sense to schedule multiple official exams too close together. Instead, give yourself adequate time to meaningfully change your level of preparedness. In most cases, one month is about the minimum to do this.
Summary: How to approach Executive Assessment prep
The best EA preparation covers the full range of topics tested on this exam, has time built in to learn from your mistakes, and approaches the test strategically so that you get the most for your efforts. The outline above hits upon the major topics that you need to address, materials that are useful in doing so, and suggestions for how to structure your use of materials and self-diagnose your areas to improve in.
The final installment of this three-part series will get into greater depth on the strategy required within the exam to ensure that you can get a score reflecting the hard work and successes of your studies.
And in the meantime, don’t hesitate to shoot me a message, seth@testcrackers.org, with questions, requests, suggestions, or anything! Check out everything Test Crackers has to offer on the Executive Assessment.