Calibrate Your Internal Clock
Use your timed practice with GMAT Verbal questions to calibrate your “internal clock,” so that you have a fairly accurate sense of how much time has passed when you’re working on questions.
Once you are well-versed in GMAT Verbal content, you can use your Verbal practice time to calibrate your intuitive sense of how much time is passing when you’re working on a practice question. Doing so will allow you to get a feel for what an appropriate amount of time is to spend on a question, and more importantly, when you’re spending too much time on one.
For instance, perhaps during one of your study sessions, you’re going to complete a set of 10 Critical Reasoning practice questions. You start a timer as you start question #1 and stop the timer when you finish the question. Now let’s say it took you 2 minutes to answer question #1. Did it feel like 2 minutes? Like 1 minute? Like 3? Start your timer again as you start question #2 and check the timer when you think 2 minutes have passed. How close are you? How much more time do you need to answer question #2? Or were you able to finish question #2 and stop the timer before you hit the 2-minute mark?
Maybe you took only 1.5 minutes to finish question #2. Did that amount of time feel shorter to you than the amount you needed for question #1, or could you not really tell the difference? As you’re performing this analysis for each of the 10 questions in your set, note your actual time for each question down in a notebook, and at the end of the practice set, see how your times relate to the general and typical time ranges associated with the given question type.
Then, the next time you do a Verbal practice set — whether of CR questions, some other type, or a mixed set — perhaps simply set the timer at the beginning and glance at it at key moments to gauge how far your internal clock is from the actual time. Maybe you’re working on an RC question and you think 3 minutes have passed. Are you correct? How far off are you? Is your internal clock ahead or behind? Maybe you think you spent a minute longer than you should have on that RC question; does the timer bear that out? Or does it simply feel as if you spent a minute longer than you should have, though you actually are moving on to the next question within a reasonable time range?
At those times when you discover that you’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on a question, consider the cause. Did you spend too much time debating between your final two candidates for the correct answer on an SC question? Did reading and re-reading an RC passage consume a surprisingly large amount of time? Were you being over-vigilant about checking your answer to a CR question when you should have just moved on? Noting the causes of your time-management issues can help you recognize when you start engaging in those behaviors on future questions, so you can correct yourself in real time.
Now, I certainly don’t recommend that you compile an extensive breakdown of your time per question on every batch of practice questions you do; the process can be somewhat laborious. But as you start to consider timing more in your Verbal practice (that is, after you’ve mastered the material), you can perform some of those more detailed per-question time checks in order to help calibrate your internal clock and see how well you’re managing your time.
Remember, when you start sitting for practice exams toward the end of your GMAT prep, and of course on test day, you’ll need to have some awareness of the on-screen clock on your computer. So, it’s a smart idea to get used to occasionally checking the clock as you’re completing GMAT questions. Moreover, it’s smart to develop an intuitive sense of how much time has passed, so that you don’t need to constantly check the clock in order to stay on track, a task that would be very distracting during your exam.
