yates wrote:Can someone give me a ballbark figure here? How many minutes is "too many minutes" to spend working on a quant question?
Today on GMATPREP2, I did well on the early quant questions, but I took too much time. I had to rush through the final nine or ten questions, taking wild guesses on questions that seemed to become progressively easier. I just didn't have any time left.
Thanks.
you know the 2 minute per question rule, but that is actually a rule of thumb - some questions will take you longer than 2 minutes, and some will take you less than 2 minutes, and that's fine. As a general rule, no question is worth more than 3.0 minutes of your time, but all that isn't really important. What IS important is what you do once you realize that you're falling behind schedule.
what most people do is exactly what you desribe - rush through the questions at the end, making wild guesses and getting wrong even the questions where you stand a perfectly good chance of getting right, given enough time.
Let's say that you have 10 questions for 10 minutes. You will not be able to do all of them right. You will not be able to even READ all of them. 10 minutes is enough time to do 5 questions right, 4 questions if we're being realistic about your regular pace. Ideally, you would read each question and make an intelligent, informed decision whether you even want to try it and then work calmly on the few questions you decide that are doable, but at this point you have a little voice in your head screaming "No time!", and it's really hard to solve a question - even a carefully chosen, easy one - with someone screaming in your own head. Given this situation, your best bet is to resign to a "try one, guess one" routine, just so you'll be able to calm yourself down by telling yourself that you're not wasting time on reading questions you will not be attempting in the first place.
However, what if you didn't get to this stressful state in the first place? Having 10 questions in the last 10 minutes means that you're ~10 minutes behind schedule. That kind of gap doesn't open instantly. The earlier you catch on to the fact that you're falling behind schedule, the wider your field of options. You can start making the intelligent decisions you need to make - read the question and decide, given the fact that you're 2 minutes behind schedule (and not
10 minutes behind), whether THIS particular battle is the one you want to fight, or perhaps you are better off moving after 30 seconds to make up for lost time.
The bottom line is this - given what you're telling us here, I don't believe that you will be able to do all of the questions in the quant section - at least not do them well. Accept this fact, and start making strategic guesses early in the section, so at least you can keep the voice howling "no time!" in check and make conscious, intelligent decisions.
