here are the guidelines:
QUANT
2 minutes / problem, on average, for both DS and PS.
you should try to limit difficult questions to 2:30-2:45. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, TAKE MORE THAN THREE MINUTES TO ANSWER A PROBLEM, unless you are finishing up the final steps of an algorithmic process that is GUARANTEED to yield the correct solution.
VERBAL
feel free to tweak the following a bit according to your relative skill levels and english proficiency (the latter especially if you're a second-language english speaker, as are many of the posters on this forum):
* SC: 0:45 to 1:30 (the upper end only for
very long sentences with
very long answer choices, such as, say, #46 or #50 in the OG11 diagnostic test).
* CR: 1:30 to 2:30 (the upper end only for
very long passages)
* RC: 2:00-3:00 to read shorter passages, 3:00-4:00 to read longer passages, 0:30 for main idea questions, 1:00-1:20 for detail-oriented questions
acerche wrote:Have heard that more time/effort should be directed to intial 10 questions for Q & V as these are the questions that really determine your score...
bad idea.
if you follow this advice, you will (consciously or not) start to spend a disproportionate amount of time on those problems. while that MAY** help you do a better job on the first ten problems, there's an insidious tradeoff:
you'll be behind the clock for the remainder of the entire section.
that is really,
really, really not a good situation to be in, because then you'll have to scramble to finish; you'll probably make silly mistakes (or be unable to complete time-consuming solution processes) because of the rush, and, if you
don't finish, the resultant penalty is huge.
what's more, we have it on the word of the head of exam development at gmac (!) that the first ten questions are
not, in fact, any more important than the remaining questions.
just allocate time evenly throughout the test; "all questions are created equal" is the mantra.
--
**and it probably won't, anyway. for the vast majority of students, time spent beyond about 2:30 has negative utility: the longer the students take (beyond 2:30) to answer the problems, the
fewer problems they get correct.
