Pacing Strategy

[nislam]

I'm working on my pacing. I initially consciously ignored the 2 min/Q rule so that I could focus on content and eliminately careless mistakes. I know many have debated this but in my case I've been out of school for 8 years. My timing has varied 2-4 min/Q.

In order to help myself in hitting the 2 min/Q rule I'm considering the following. If after the 2 minutes on a particular question use POE and make a final guess. I tried this on a couple of tests. It has helped me but not so much on very difficult questions. The problem I'm running into is that on very difficult questions I am unable to eliminate 1 or even 2 answers at best resorting to randon guessing.

Does anyone have any other suggestions or theories on improving pacing and better guessing on very difficult questions?

[beatthegmat]

There are a lot of tips for pacing available on https://beatthegmat.blocked and https://www.beatthegmat.com/resources.html

2 minutes should be the absolute max per question. Ideally, you should be pacing yourself closer to 90 seconds per question. When I was practicing my pacing it helped to use a timer to get a feel for how much time I needed. And yes, if you get to the end of your time, you must guess and move on! It's hard to do psychologically (especially if you feel like you could answer with more time), but spending any more than 2 minutes per question is a huge mistake.

Good luck!

[solaris]

The 2-min. max. per question can sometimes turn out to be a double-edged sword.

I practiced using the same strategy and employed it the day of the test as well. I actually ended up making (educated) guesses on 2 seemingly VERY hard quant questions once I'd hit the 2-min mark and moved on.

Eventually however, I was able to speed through some easier questions and as a result had a good 6 minutes to spare towards the end of the section! I've been ruing not spending more time on those 2 questions since the day of the test

[cpfirth]

I managed to get a very good rhythm going in a practice CAT...by accidentally getting the easy first question wrong. Not only did I complete the test in time but I got my highest score. It seems I was able to pick up more points by getting more slightly easier questions right than by rushing thru difficult questions after getting first question right.

Wonder if this is a valid strategy? Sounds counter-intuitive.

[Stacey Koprince]

It's next to impossible to "play" the test. Your best bet is to keep a steady pace throughout and to do your best within 2 minutes.

On any given problem, you should know whether you're on track by the halfway mark (eg, 1 min if it's a 2-min problem).

If you're not on track (which means you know exactly what's going on and how to solve the problem, you just still have to do the work), then you spend the second minute making an educated guess. Then you move on at the 2-min mark.

If you don't practice how to make educated guesses, you won't be able to do this effectively when you need to. Practice on questions that are right within your range right now - when you answer a question and think, wow, that wasn't super easy but I nailed it, that's when you say, okay, how would I teach someone who can't do it how to make an educated guess?

Don't try to learn how to make educated guesses on problems that are super-hard for you. If you don't understand how the problem works, you aren't going to be able to use it to figure out how to make an educated guess.

For math, use logic, estimation, and knowledge of how the test works (eg, every piece of info in math is necessary for the problem, so if you can get an answer using only two of four pieces of info, that's almost certainly the wrong answer). On SC, you should at least be able to eliminate a couple based on some grammar rules, even if you can't deal with all of the grammar issues in a sentence - always focus first on whatever rules you know best. For RC and CR, study the wrong answers just as carefully as you study the right answers. Tell yourself very explicitly why the wrong answers are wrong. In particular, you'll notice that some RC and CR wrong answers are "obviously" wrong and others are more tempting. Why are the more tempting ones tempting but still wrong - how do they try to trick people? Then, when necessary, you can switch to looking for wrong answers to narrow things down.