Doing Timed Verbal Practice Early in Your Prep Usually Doesn’t Work
One problem with doing timed practice in the earlier stages of your Verbal prep is that 2 minutes or less is generally not enough time for a novice to fully analyze a question and arrive at the correct answer.
When people do timed practice early on, they tend to rush through questions and get many incorrect. Then, they either get the missed questions correct the second time around or try to learn from answer explanations what they need to do to get the questions correct.
This process does not reflect what test-takers have to do to get questions correct when taking the actual GMAT. You won’t get second chances to answer questions or have explanations to refer to. So, practicing in this way, people don’t really develop their Verbal skills.
A second problem with timed practice is that it lets you off the hook. Rather than deal with the mental and emotional challenges of working your way to correct answers, you give yourself an excuse to say, “Oh well,” and move on to another question. Your time is up, so you just have to guess and call it a day, right?
With that kind of easy out, how will you ever train yourself to do what you need to do to find correct answers? How will you hone your analytical and logical reasoning skills and build your stamina and mental toughness? How will you sharpen your eye for nuance and detail? You won’t!
That you’ve learned about a question type doesn’t mean you’re ready to answer those questions at test pace. A more accurate view is that, having learned the concepts and strategies related to a question type, you’re ready to start training to answer those questions, in whatever amount of time you need for each question.
Achieve High Accuracy Before Adding Time Constraints
In the initial stages of your GMAT Verbal prep, the best approach is to practice untimed until you’re consistently getting questions of a particular type correct. In other words, your first goal is to do whatever it takes to achieve high accuracy.
In fact, I would not consider it unusual for a student who is just starting to practice with Weaken the Argument questions to spend 30 minutes analyzing and gaining a full understanding of a single question. I would not be worried about that student’s prospects for earning a good GMAT Verbal score—or even a perfect score. On the contrary, this level of slow, methodical practice, without the pressure of a timer, is precisely what I recommend.
The truth is, if you can consistently answer a particular type of question correctly in 10, 20, or whatever number of minutes, then you’ve developed the baseline skills necessary to get that type of question correct faster. Moreover, as you continue to correctly answer questions of that type, you’ll naturally speed up.
If you never follow through with the difficult work of sticking with a question until you find the correct answer, you won’t build those necessary skills. Thus, correctly answering those questions within a few minutes will always be somewhat of a struggle.
So, once you’re achieving high accuracy untimed, you can work on speeding up to test pace while maintaining high accuracy.
Don’t put the cart before the horse! Accuracy first; speed will follow.
Warmest regards,
Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep
