Shelly:
It's a great question -- and one that puts you with many students who have prepared for the GMAT over the years. In general many more students struggle with timing on the quant section than do on the verbal section -- but good news, it's not an un-climbable hill.
There's a few things for you to think about:
-The average, of course, works out to be just about 2 mins/question... but remember, averages are just averages!
-You need to think of the quant section as a war made up of 37 individual battles -- your goal is to do as well as you can in the 'war' and not worry as much about every individual 'battle.' In fact, sometimes, you'd be best off to jettison a problem question (with an educated guess, of course) to spend time on more questions you might have a better chance of getting correct.
-As you are working on practice questions and test questions, I'd encourage you to really work on fine-tuning your 'internal clock.' I encourage my students to take the following approach:
-When you feel that you are about a minute into the question, do a quick green/yellow/red assessment of your progress to-date on that question. If green/yellow, keep going. If red, pause quickly and determine whether you think you can get on the right path, if not, educated guess, and move along.
-When you are near the two-minute mark -- green/yellow/red again. Green (and no answer yet), get to that answer as quick as possible. Yellow -- tough call, but aim to get to answer quickly. Red -- stop immediately, educated guess, move along.
It might seem counterintuitive to 'give up' on a question, but you are simply reallocating your resources (time) to other questions that you might have a better shot at getting correct. Remember, the worst thing you can do on the GMAT is leave questions blank at the end. The next worst thing you can do is have to guess on questions at the end. The goal is to give yourself a 'real shot' at every question.
My final piece of advice / guidance (think of this read in the voice of the 'Most Interesting Man in the World', "I hate seeing a student spend 3:30 on a quant problem, but when they do, they better get it right." Don't spend 3:30 on a question and still get it wrong!!!!
Good luck.
