Reduce Note Taking

Often, when people are having trouble completing the Verbal section of the GMAT on time, one thing that they don’t realize is taking up time is taking notes. Some people find that taking some notes can help them answer a Sentence Correction question or focus on the passage of a Critical Reasoning or Reading Comprehension question. At the same time, what can be helpful in small doses can be score eroding in large ones, because you can get caught up in taking notes on many aspects of the questions and use up a lot of time in doing so.

So, if you’ve been taking many notes when answering GMAT Verbal questions, to speed up consider taking fewer notes. A CR passage is only a few sentences long, and you can quickly reread key parts of it, such as the author’s conclusion, if necessary. Also, when you’re answering an RC question, you can go back to the passage to find information you need. So, there’s no need to note many details. In fact, what happens in many cases is that people take a huge quantity of notes on an RC passage only to completely ignore those notes when answering the questions.

The truth is that many people score high on GMAT Verbal without taking any notes at all. So, you may find that you can improve your GMAT Verbal time management and increase your Verbal score by simply refraining from taking notes. At the same time, if you feel that taking some notes helps you, then you can seek to optimize your note taking so that it benefits you without wasting your time.