Everything You Need to Know About Time Management - Part 2
Welcome back! In the first part of this series, we established some overall principles for time management on the GMAT:
(1) Why is time management so important on the GMAT?
(2) Know (generally) how the scoring works
(3) When solving problems, follow two principles
Today, were going to dive into per-question timing.
(4) First, train per question: Develop your 1 minute time sense
In order to maximize your score on the GMAT, you have to make good decisions about when to keep going on a particular question and when to stop. In order to do that, you need to have a very rough sense of how long you are spending.
Heres the basic idea: on the GMAT, 1 minute is enough time to get oriented on a question and make a good decision as to whether things are going well enough to warrant investing more time. Its also enough time to realize that things are not coming together and this time would be better spent on some other question.
But youre not going to want to check the clock every minute during the test. Youll drive yourself crazy before the test is over! So how do you know that its been roughly a minute since you started working on this question? Youre going to develop something we call the 1-minute time sense.
[Note: you do not need to time yourself when you are just reading / studying or doing non-GMAT-format practice. Just learn at a pace thats appropriate for you. Only use this 1-minute time sense when you are doing Official Guide or other GMAT-format questions.)
Why are we focused on 1 minute?
The 1-minute mark is the half-way point for quant, CR, and some RC questions. If youre actually going to finish this question around 2 minutes, then by the 1-minute mark, youve got to understand the question and have a plan for how to move forward. If so, then it's smart to invest another minute or so on this problem.
If you dont understand it, or if you don't have a good plan for solving the problem, then move to educated guessing (if you see a good path for that) or just guess outright and move on.
On SC and some RC questions, the 1-minute mark is approximately the three-quarter point. If youre on track on these, you should have eliminated at least some answer choices by 1 minute. Further, you should know that youre close to done. If not, guess randomly from among the remaining choices and move on.
In all of those scenarios, youre making the best decision based on the current circumstances. In other words, youre maximizing your ROI (return on investment). When its worth it to invest more time, you do so. But when its not, you actually have the presence of mind (and the discipline!) to pull back and allocate that time elsewhere. You're exhibiting strong executive reasoning skillsand that's really what the GMAT is testing, at heart.
Okay, so how do we develop this 1-minute sense?
Grab your phone and pull up whatever stopwatch / timer function you have. Play around with it. Does it have lap timing? (Note: on some phones, you may not see the lap button until you start the timer. Then, the start button turns into a lap button.)
If your phone doesnt have a lap button, then search for a stopwatch app that does allow lap timing.
When you push the lap button, the timer will mark the time at which you pushed the button but the timer will keep running. You can do this multiple times to get a bunch of time intervals.
Find something non-GMAT-related that engages your brain fully: write up a memo for work, do some research, read something in The Economist, and so on. Set up your stopwatch but cover the timer itself so that you cant see what it says. Start working, but push the button every time you think one minute has passed. After some number of times (5, 8, 11? whatever!), stop and check your data.
If youre within 20 seconds on either side (40 seconds to 1 minute 20 seconds), youre fine. If youre consistently too fast, then try the exercise again, this time telling yourself to push the button at what feels like 1 minute 15 seconds. If youre consistently too slow, push the button when you feel like its been only 45 seconds. Do this a few times a day for 5 to 10 minutes at a time, and after a week or two, youll get yourself pretty consistently into a good enough time range.
How do I practice this on GMAT questions?
Glad you asked. Set yourself up with a set of 4 quant or CR questions (its best to start with 2-minute-average questions when youre still getting used to this).
Start your timer (remember to cover up the actual time) and dive into the first problem. When you think its been about a minute since you started, push that lap button. When youre done with the problem, push the lap button again (pretend its the real test: when youre done, you have to click next and confirm to move on to the next question, so pretend thats what youre doing here).
Repeat until youre done with the problem set, then analyze. Looking back over the whole set, did you make good decisions about when to keep going and when to let go? Wherever you think you didnt, figure out what decision you should have made instead and what, specifically, should have prompted that decision. Next time you face a similar scenario, youll be able to make a better decision. We call this maximizing your ROI on the test; read more about how to do this here.
Sometimes, youll decide that you dont know how to really do a problem, but you do think theres a way to narrow down the answer choices before you guess. Educated guessing can be a great way to improve the odds that your guess ends up being correct (as long as you dont spend too much time making this guess).
Check out these two articles for more: Educated Guessing on Quant and Educated Guessing on Verbal.
Spend 2 to 3 weeks internalizing and practicing these time management concepts. If youre in one of our classes, come back to the third part of this series about a week before your second practice CAT.
In part 3, well discuss how to manage your time across an entire section of the GMAT.