It sounds like you really need to work on your timing strategy, and the only way to do that is practice, practice, practice!

A tactic you can employ to develop your time management skills is to group five Quant questions together and spend no more more than ten minutes on them. For Verbal, give yourself nine minutes to answer five questions. You can use this strategy on both practice questions and simulation exams.

If during a ten minute stretch, you find yourself falling behind schedule, make a strategic guess or two to catch up. Make strategic guesses on questions about which you aren't confident or that would take you much longer than two minutes to answer. By making strategic guesses, you can recover precious time that you can spend on questions on which you have a better chance of answering correctly.

Do know that it's OK to take longer than two minutes on a question. Just make sure you counter-balance this by taking less than two minutes to answer other questions. But...

Don't ever take four minutes or more to answer a question. It is tempting to try to answer each question correctly, even at the expense of time, but this strategy will likely hurt your score more than strategically guessing at several questions will.

Do use a clock or timer to strictly keep track of your studies while practicing. You will soon know what a ten minute stretch of time feels like.

Hi Rich,

I don't have any specific question type I spend more time on than others (maybe I do spend more time on word problems than straight arithmetic or algebra problems). I suppose my problem is that I re-read a question maybe 2 or 3 times before I understand it. I suppose there's no other way to really get better at comprehending questions unless I keep practicing.

It's good to hear that some muscle memory can be leveraged during the test. When I review practice problems that I got incorrect or felt uncomfortable with, I go back and master the problem and try to understand the concept as much as possible.

Now, I'm reviewing my latest practice test and mastering the problems I got incorrect. No surprise is that time was the killer because when I went back and looked at the problems with no time pressure (maybe spending 4 minutes on it), I understood and got the question.

Cal