GMAT Strategy

Hi all,

I took a practise CAT yesterday and had to rush the quant section which I was disappointed with. However, I bounced back this morning and am determined not to make the same mistake again. I put this framework together as I had difficulty calculating where I should be (given the clock counts backwards!). Can I get your thoughts on this? Any flaws?

QUANT
37 questions
75 mins
average 2 min per question

when clock says X, I should be on question Y
X --> Y
60 min (1/5 through) --> 7
45 min (2/5 through) --> 15
30 min (3/5 through) --> 22
15 min (4/5 through) --> 30
5 min --> 35


VERBAL
41 questions
75 mins
average 1 min 50 seconds per question - 1.83

when clock says X, I should be on question Y
X --> Y
60 min (1/5 through) --> 8
45 min (2/5 through) --> 16
30 min (3/5 through) --> 25
15 min (4/5 through) --> 33
5 min --> 39

I tried a system like this, but found myself spending too much time trying to memorize the number targets and figuring them out in an adhoc way. For example, if I'm on question 13 and I felt that that question too a large amount of time and wanted to determine how "backed up" I was, it was difficult because of the static nature of the time goals.

What I did instead was simply take the question number I was on, multiply by 2 (for 2 minutes each problem) then substract from 75. That gave me a very simple quick no nonsense way to figure out how far behind or ahead I was (and I could do this at any point during the exam). For example, by question 13, I should have spent 26 minutes. Subtract that from 75 is 49 (this simple substraction you should be able to do easily by the time you are ready for the GMAT) so if the clock said 50, I'd know I am still ahead of my target, but if it said 48 then I've spent too much time and need to speed it up.

mayonnai5e wrote:What I did instead was simply take the question number I was on, multiply by 2 (for 2 minutes each problem) then substract from 75.

Hiya... this is great thanks for suggesting it... I'm trying to get my head around this.... why does this method work? Are you basically assuming 2 min per question? What do you do when it comes to the Verbal section where you need to be quicker?

Thanks,
Jon

On average, each question should be about 2 minutes on the quant section and verbal section. For verbal, you have to use a little more judgement based on how many RC passages you've seen. If you haven't seen any yet this trick will work fine, but once you see an RC passage you have to use your intuition taking into account that there are 3 or 4 RC passages per cat. You can practice this during your cats and hone your intuition.