How to Prepare for the Executive Assessment

The best way to prepare for the EA is to take a practice test, figure out exactly how far you are from the score you need, and then spend your limited study time on the specific areas that will close the gap. That’s it!

This article walks through a realistic prep approach for people who are busy, who may not have taken a standardized test in years, and who want to be efficient about finishing their exam requirement for their business school applications.

Before You Study: Figure Out Where You Stand

The single best thing you can do before you start studying is take a full-length EA practice test under real conditions. That means true time conditions, no interruptions, and no looking things up during the exam!

Doing this step first allows you to establish two things: what your score baseline is before your prep, and which sections need the most work.

GMAC offers official EA practice materials through mba.com. Use official materials for your diagnostic – please don’t use third-party tests! Third-party questions often test the wrong things or miscalibrate difficulty, and you’ll get a misleading read on where you actually stand.

Once you have your practice score, check it against your target programs’ reported EA averages. Many executive and part-time programs use readiness bands rather than strict score cutoffs, and once you’re above roughly a 155 to 156 overall, further gains often don’t make much practical difference in admissions. If your practice exam puts you in that range already, you may not need much preparation at all. You might want to consider some light prep and writing your exam sooner rather than later, so you can move on to more interesting things like your applications and interviews.

If there’s a gap between your practice score and your target, read on.

What You’re Actually Studying For

Here’s a secret about EA prep that GMAC would never say out loud: the EA uses recycled classic-GMAT questions. We’ve gone through every question in the EA Official Prep materials, and they’re drawn from the same pool as the classic GMAT. The content you need to learn for the EA is essentially the same content you’d learn for the past version of the GMAT.

This is good news for those interested in taking the EA, because the study advice that works for the GMAT also works for the EA. The core skills for both exams are the same too – they test your ability in quantitative reasoning, verbal reasoning, and data interpretation. For the most part, you can safely use any GMAT prep material to also prepare for the EA (with one small caveat when it comes to sentence correction – see our Beginner’s Guide to EA Sentence Correction).

For a full breakdown of what’s on each section, see What’s on the Executive Assessment?

How to Prioritize Your Study Time

To get a good EA score, you don’t have to become an expert on every topic on the test. The EA is designed to be an efficient exam, and you can bring that philosophy into your prep too.

If quant is your weak spot: 

Focus on building deep understanding of the core topics (arithmetic, algebra, percents, ratios, rates, exponents, number properties) rather than memorizing formulas. The EA tests whether you can reason through quantitative problems, not whether you can plug numbers into equations. Data Sufficiency will probably feel unfamiliar if you haven’t seen it before, so give yourself time to learn the format. The key insight with DS is that you’re evaluating whether information is sufficient, not actually solving the problem.

If verbal is your weak spot: 

The most important thing you can do is slow down and read more carefully. Across all three verbal question types (Reading Comprehension, Critical Reasoning, and Sentence Correction), the core skill being tested is precise reading and reasoning. If you rush through passages or skim answer choices, you’ll miss things the test is specifically designed to catch. For SC in particular, don’t go overboard memorizing grammar rules. SC is roughly one-seventh of your total EA score, and the basic approach (find definite grammar errors, then compare remaining choices on meaning) covers most of what you need. 

See EA Verbal for more on how to approach this section.

If IR is your weak spot: 

Practice reading data in multiple formats (tables, charts, multi-tab displays) and answering questions under time pressure. IR rewards organized thinking and careful reading more than advanced math or verbal skills. The question formats (Multi-Source Reasoning, Table Analysis, Graphics Interpretation, Two-Part Analysis) can feel unfamiliar at first, but they’re learnable with practice.

If your score is close to your target across the board: 

Focus on accuracy rather than learning new content. Read every question twice. Check your work before moving on. On an adaptive test, careless errors on questions you should get right will hurt your score more than wrong answers on hard questions.

What to Use for EA Prep

Start with official EA materials from GMAC. These are the only practice questions guaranteed to match the real test, because they’re drawn from the same question pool.

Beyond the official EA materials, classic GMAT prep resources are directly applicable, since the questions are the same. Official GMAT problem sets and older copies of the GMAT Official Guide that still include SC and standalone DS will work. 

Be cautious with third-party practice tests. They can be useful for building stamina and practicing pacing, but the questions themselves often don’t match the style or difficulty of real EA questions. If a third-party question seems unreasonably hard or tests something obscure, it probably doesn’t reflect what you’ll see on test day.

Set a Realistic Timeline

Most EA test-takers are working professionals, so your study time is quite limited. You’re not a full-time student who can block out 4 hours a day for test prep, after all. You’re fitting study sessions around a job, responsibilities, a commute, and the rest of your life.

The right timeline for your test prep depends entirely on how far your diagnostic score is from your target. If you’re within striking distance after your first practice test, a few weeks of focused review may be enough. If there’s a significant gap in one or more sections, you’ll need longer, but the EA’s content scope is narrow enough that a structured study plan over several weeks can make a real difference. 

Whether that timeline is 4 weeks, 8 weeks, or much, much more is impossible to say – each student will see improvement on their own independent timeline that accounts for how they learn, how efficiently and consistently they study, and where they’re starting from.

Whatever your timeline, a few principles hold:

• Study in focused sessions, not marathons. An hour of concentrated practice where you’re actively thinking through problems is worth more than three hours of passive review where you’re half-watching TV. If you only have 30 minutes on a given day, use them to your maximum potential.
• Keep an error log. After every practice session, write down what you got wrong and why. Not “I need to study percents more,” but the specific mistake: “I misread the question and solved for the wrong variable” or “I didn’t notice that statement 2 was sufficient on its own.” Patterns will emerge, and those patterns shape the path of improvement.
• Don’t save your practice tests for the end. Practice tests serve as limited, highly accurate datapoints to check your prep progress. Take one early on in your prep, study, then take another one once you feel like you’ve tangibly improved in your process and ability. If you’re only taking practice tests the day before the exam, you won’t see the course-correcting benefit that practice tests give.

What NOT to Waste Time On

Geometry. It’s not on the EA. Don’t study it.

Obscure grammar rules and idiom lists. SC is a small part of your overall EA score. Learn the basic approach and move on unless SC is clearly dragging your score down.

Elaborate question-type taxonomies. Some prep resources will give you detailed breakdowns of 12 types of CR questions or 8 types of RC passages. That level of categorization has its place, but for most EA test-takers, it’s overkill. If you can read carefully, think logically, and manage your time, you have the skills. Save the deep categorization for later, and only if your practice scores point to a specific weakness.

Studying past the point of diminishing returns. If your practice scores are consistently at or above your target, stop studying and take the test. More studying won’t help if you’re already where you need to be, and it might make you overthink questions you’d otherwise answer correctly.