Hey Piyush,
No problem - I'm glad you brought up the "debate". Different people will find that different strategies work for them - one of my favorite Dave Chappelle quotes is "some people think cucumbers taste better pickled" - and because confidence is one of the biggest keys on test day, if you find that a consistent emphasis on pacing will work best for you, by all means go that way.
From my experience, I do think that people tend to focus a little too much on pacing too early in their study process, though. Where I've seen that backfire is:
1) When pushing the pace on a 2-minute question, people will default to memorization more often then understanding - "I think you multiply by sqrt 3, but maybe it's sqrt 2" - and accept that as a valid excuse when they get the problem wrong ("I applied the wrong formula...I'll get that right on test day") without having had to think about the rule. Very, very few GMAT rules need to be "memorized" per se - it's a pretty beautiful test when you break down what they ask you. Memorization is helpful, but it's best supplemented for most by knowing why the rules are what they are (
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/02/ ... n-the-room). If you're confident that you know the rule because you've had to prove it to yourself, you can be much more relaxed on test day.
2) When using the timed constraints in practice to "do more problems", people tend to spend less time analyzing what they're learning from each question. The most important thing you can get from any practice session is a list of a few takeaways that you can apply to future questions - things you've learned about the way questions are written to make them trickier, mistakes that you tend to make and need to be aware of, etc. It's just a habit of "intense" studiers that they tend to want to do more practice, but in doing so have less time or put less emphasis on synthesizing what they've learned from that time.
3) Maybe most importantly, some questions just take some time to "get it" in practice, but once you do you can extrapolate that knowledge to many others. If it takes you 3 minutes to answer a tough question, but then you look back and realize that you can do it faster, you've just learned how to do a tough question quickly. If you stop and guess at 2 minutes, you may well lose that opportunity to really understand the problem. Most would agree that the solutions in the Official Guide series are pretty unhelpful, and even if you're using books with helpful solutions, you'll learn a lot more from doing it yourself than you will from being told how it should have been done.
Some of the best advice I got as a kid was "basketball games are played in the winter, but basketball players are made in the summer". Our coach was telling us that you get to demonstrate on game day (or test day) what you've learned in practice when you were working on specific skills - getting faster and stronger, being able to use your left hand effectively, being able to control your dribble when making quick cuts, etc. The GMAT is similar - on test day, or even practice tests, you'll have the opportunity to demonstrate the things you learned in practice. The same way that LeBron James will spend hours in August only working on specific moves - left hand dribbling, three-point shooting, etc. - you can improve your GMAT results by spending study sessions working on specific skills without the need to go full-speed.
Again, do what feels comfortable and most productive for you, but I'd caution most on this board (by nature of the fact that people are here, they're fairly "intense" studiers for the GMAT) against their own tendencies to put too much pressure on themselves too quickly, to try to do too many problems at once without taking time to fully understand them, etc.
Cheers,
Brian
