Sorry, I meant 2-3 min *MAX* for Quant. For most of the questions in the OG and in the practice exams I would be under 2 (~1:00-1:30), anything over 2 I would flag during my OG sets for review. During the exams I would keep track of the time (via my scratchpad methods) and if I went over 2 mins, I would do a quick check to see where I was at. If I was 'near' the end (i.e. I was working through some logic) I would go for it. Only if I had extra time would I go over the 3 mins. If I was stuck, I would cut my losses and make an educated guess. If I didn't have a solid lead at 2 minutes I wasn't going to get the answer in 3 (or, 4, or 5...) minutes.
I will have to go back and look at my practice exam notes to see if I went 'faster' on questions I thought were 'easier' ones... and potentially made a silly mistake or two. Certainly on test day I may have gone a bit too fast on some of the 'easier' ones so I could make more time to attack the harder ones...
For verbal, I tried to do <2 for SC, around 1-2 for CR, and then 1-2 for RC with a 3 min time for reading. It is quite complex... I know on SC, during practice, I would be very close to 2 mins a lot of times when it was a hard question... For the most part though I just tried to keep track of where I was supposed to be at overall during the Verbal.
So, for SC, I'll need to work on knock down that average time to around 1m15s like you mentioned. That should give me more time to spend on the trickier CR and RC questions. I know on RC I had to work on going faster in the reading+outlining so I could make my overall time. Doing SC faster should give me more time to spend here. BTW, do most people finish Verbal early? I don't think I've ever finished this section with more than 1-2 mins left.
Essay
>>It is important to do the essays. I know we don't care about the score so much, but the mental energy it takes to do the essays draws down on your total energy - so you're not as mentally alert for the later portions of the test.
I think this is a very good point, I had always skipped over the practice essays because it added an hour to the practice test... but that's actually why I should have done them, because they add an hour to the test! This will help me work on my mental stamina and also my new nutrition plan (eating something between AWA and Quant and then again between Quant and Verbal)
Day Before and Day Of
My review the day before the test was mostly high level (reviewing the tougher OG questions), but it was definitely more than 2 hours. Probably closer to 6
I guess I just wanted to make sure I knew/remembered how to tackle the toughest questions in the book. If I had seen a similar question during the test and couldn't solve it I knew I would have been mad at myself if I hadn't reviewed all the tough questions in the OG. But, that may have tired me out a bit on Friday.Same thing for my 'warmup', I picked tough questions. I do like your suggestion of easy problems, just do a light jog instead of a hard sprint right before the test.
So, the plan now is to get find the cracks in my game and seal them up. Picked up the Manhattan GMAT books and am reviewing all the material again. SC is my big and obvious crack in Verbal right now, so I'm going to work on that one a lot. On the Quant side, I find that I am 'weaker' on certain types of questions, like DS Number Property Inequality questions. I can get to the right answer... but it takes me longer than it should, and I tend to have to 'test' a lot of numbers to get comfortable with the answer.
I'm hoping that shoring up some of these weaker points will help my Quant score too. I think SC is the clear cut culprit in Verbal... but I don't see the clear problem on Quant... and both my Q and V scored dropped hard on the actual exam. So still need to figure that out...
Oh, I found out what one of the 'new' questions I saw on Quant was... it was a wonky Unknown Digits Problem. I had never seen one of these before! I was tempted to just skip it but I was OK on time so I spent 1-2 mins on it trying to work through the logic. It didn't look hard, but I don't think I attacked it right and am not sure if I got it right. Oh well, next one I see I'll know how to do!
Thanks!
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