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Tips on How to Get Fast on Problems

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Tips on How to Get Fast on Problems

by cghan » Thu May 29, 2014 1:38 pm
Hello all, seeking guidance on getting faster at tackling problems:

I've been studying like a madman for the past month, and I have one month left to study. My exam is on July 3rd. I spent this past month working through the Veritas Full Online program, getting a grasp on the fundamentals. I also worked through most of the HW as a part of the program, but I have to admit that there was a lot of hand holding from the book explanations.

Now, as I work through a bunch of practice tests, I'm realizing that it takes me a good 45-60 seconds to read through a problem to really comprehend it. Once I have a full grasp on what's being asked, I can then start working the problem. Of course, if I've seen the problem 2 or 3 times before, I can work through it much quicker, but for the problems I've never seen, it takes me a while.

My strategy between now and test day is to take a practice test once a week, reviewing problems and weakness areas in between. This puts roughly 4-5 practice tests under my belt before I take the actual exam.

Do you guys feel like this strategy will expose me to enough problems that most if not all the problems on the GMAT will look familiar?

Thanks for any help you guys can provide.

Cal
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by [email protected] » Thu May 29, 2014 7:38 pm
Hi Cal,

Certain questions are designed to take longer to solve than others, so we need a bit more context for these questions than what you've provided. Are you taking significantly longer than 3 minutes to answer any of these questions? What type of content are the questions based on? If you are taking over 3 minutes, then there are some adjustments you can make to solve these questions faster, but you will likely have to change your overall approach to the Quant section.

How many practice CATs have you taken so far? Your post implies that you haven't taken many yet. You'll likely have some endurance and pacing problems for your first few CATs because there's no real way to face those issues just by doing homework. These too can be fixed.

Familiarity with question types is a combination of the number of repetitions you do and your tactics/memory. As you continue to do practice questions, your goal is to do more than just answer the question correctly. Your ability to recognize a question for its patterns/concepts/shortcuts/etc. should allow you to answer similarly-themed questions faster. Most of what you'll see on Test Day should remind you of work that you've already done, so you'll just draw on that "muscle memory" and do the work that's required.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich
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by Elizabeth@EconomistGMAT » Fri May 30, 2014 5:41 am
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.
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by cghan » Fri May 30, 2014 1:16 pm
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
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