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by Mr Ahmad » Tue Oct 09, 2007 1:22 pm
Hi all,

I am taking the GMAT test tomorrow. I'm not good in math. I am sure I'll run out of time with few questions unanswered. I guess I won't be able to even look at the last 7 questions.

What do you recommend for me in such case? Shall I leave the questions unanswered? Or just mark them all As, Bs, Cs …. Etc. What is the best thing to do when you run out of time?

Waiting for your immediate advices…. PLEASE
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by beatthegmat » Tue Oct 09, 2007 3:22 pm
DO NOT leave any questions unanswered! This will severely affect your final GMAT score. If you run out of time, I would mark the remainder of your questions with just one answer choice: all A's, or all B's...

My preference is to pick 'C' if I have to make a blind guess.

Best of luck! Please let us know how it goes...
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by fltingley » Wed Oct 10, 2007 6:30 am
My suggestion would be to focus on educated guessing if you can't figure the problem out.

For example, if 70% of a workforce consists of 42 people, what is the total workforce?

60
70
80
90
100


If you can't do the algebra involved, then think to yourself which makes since:

If 70% of the work force is 42 people, then you know that what's left is 30%of the workforce. 30% is a little less than half of 70%, that means we have a little less than half of 42 people to add. So, 42 + 20ish = about 62 or so. Find out which answer(s) make sense; you know it can't be 90 or 100, since that is more than twice 42, which is 70% of the workforce.

That might be a simple example, but if you can't recall or don't know the concept, try using some process of elimination or common sense to narrow down your choices. 2 or 3 options vs. 5 answer choices is a huge jump.

Good luck!
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by bates88 » Wed Oct 10, 2007 5:25 pm
Yes, definitely guess if you're running out of time. Try to take at least 30 seconds per question to read it and eliminate at least one obviously wrong answer.

Don't stress about this, though. The test has pretty much already honed in on your score by the time you get to the last 5-7 questions anyway, and those last few might only affect your score by 30 points or so. Not 100 or anything too severe. This is what I've read, anyway.

Deep breaths, go forward and conquer!
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by beatthegmat » Wed Oct 10, 2007 7:04 pm
Very solid tips!
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by Stacey Koprince » Wed Oct 10, 2007 8:27 pm
If you get the last 5-7 questions in a row wrong (which is likely if you have to guess) you can have a significant downward impact on your score. Every question on the test is worth the same amount - it's a myth that you can't hurt yourself much at the end. You don't want to put yourself in that position.

Almost everyone has to guess on between 3 and 7 questions in each section - you can't get away from that no matter how much you study b/c the test will just keep giving you harder questions no matter how good you get.

Your only really good choice is to decide which questions are the hardest questions as you go through the test. Those are the ones on which you should make an educated guess (educated, not random, as fltingley points out).

In the last 5-7 questions, you should be able to answer at least half of them correctly - but you won't if you don't have time to get to them. So don't waste a ton of time on a really difficult question halfway through the test (that you're going to get wrong anyway, by the way) at the expense of a question at the end of the test that you might actually be able to answer.
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