Pacing on the Verbal Section
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I'm in the process of bulding my GMAT gameplan as I prepare to take the exam in a little over two weeks. I'm having a hard time figuring out which questions to dump on the Verbal section. I feel like it is easier to spot harder questions in the quant section because their are certain topics we know are a weakness or not spending time to solve. With Verbal I feel as though no matter how hard a question you can reason and eliminate answers, which takes time rather than looking at a question and knowing its not worth it, guessing and moving on.
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Yeah, verbal is a different beast than quant. Whereas on quant, you can have a somewhat fixed strategy in terms of the number of questions you plan to guess on and what types of questions are good candidates for guesses, you'll need a bit more flexibility for verbal, and this flexibility is best cultivated by taking regular practice tests. The good news is that timing on verbal tends, in general, to be less of an issue than timing on quant. You'll get a sense from your practice tests of whether you'll even need to budget some guesses in. You may not. So that's the first assessment: when you take a practice exam, how close are you to finishing the verbal section when time expires?sgraves wrote:I'm in the process of bulding my GMAT gameplan as I prepare to take the exam in a little over two weeks. I'm having a hard time figuring out which questions to dump on the Verbal section. I feel like it is easier to spot harder questions in the quant section because their are certain topics we know are a weakness or not spending time to solve. With Verbal I feel as though no matter how hard a question you can reason and eliminate answers, which takes time rather than looking at a question and knowing its not worth it, guessing and moving on.
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Hi sgraves,
Even if you don't have a pacing issue in the Verbal section, dumping a tough Verbal question can still provide you with some benefits (you won't get mentally 'bogged down' in it, so you can avoid the frustration and you won't expend a bunch of energy on it, so you can spend that energy on other questions). If you're looking for a couple of questions to dump, then keep an eye out for "EXCEPT" questions and tough Inference questions (although not all inference questions are that difficult, you will likely see 1-2 on Test Day that are).
GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich
Even if you don't have a pacing issue in the Verbal section, dumping a tough Verbal question can still provide you with some benefits (you won't get mentally 'bogged down' in it, so you can avoid the frustration and you won't expend a bunch of energy on it, so you can spend that energy on other questions). If you're looking for a couple of questions to dump, then keep an eye out for "EXCEPT" questions and tough Inference questions (although not all inference questions are that difficult, you will likely see 1-2 on Test Day that are).
GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich