Should one enforce strict timings ?

[TkNeo]

I have had a few tests in which i spent a lot of time on earlier questions and in the end i had to be very fast and sort of played catch up.. Although it worked out fine since i knew it was just a practice test. I think in the real test, running short of time would take the confidence out of you making things worse...

So should one enforce strict time constraints on every question ? Lets say you are 3 min into a math problem. you are confident that you can solve it in the next 30 seconds. should you try ? or just skip it ? of course there is always a chance that those 30 seconds can end up being 45 and then you are seriously in trouble ?

i have in some test followed strict timings. if i am running behind i would just skip the question... what ends up happening is that i have lots of extra time left in the end which could have been well spent earlier...

[beatthegmat]

In my opinion, you should enforce strict timing with each and every GMAT question. If you run out time on a question, make an educated guess and move on. If you finish a question early, doublecheck your answer to ensure it's correct.

90-120 seconds per question! Keep up the practice, and there shouldn't ever be a reason why you need more than 2 min per problem.

I know, it's tough, but achievable with a lot of practice.

[parore26]

The amount of time one should spend attempting a question is different for everybody. However, I disagree with Eric. I don't think you should enforce a strict timing of two minutes on every single question. You're better off in working with blocks and ensuring that you remain time conscious within each of those blocks.

When i prepared, I worked with blocks of 5 questions each. I knew that I should roughly spend less than 10 minutes on each of these blocks. The way I saw it. Consider, that you are thrown a real difficult question that takes you about 3 minutes to solve. You may or may not get the answer but you eliminate incorrect choices. Within the next five questions you see this question:

2^3*3^2 = 36*2^y. What is y?

Now, if you understand prime factorization. This question should take you about 45 seconds to solve. Maybe a whole minute if you're going to verify your calculations. By skipping a question after 2 minutes you're robbing yourself of extra time that may have given you the right answer. This approach worked for me but it may not be for everyone.

I'd suggest you to try both these strategies on practice tests and see which makes you feel more comfortable. After all that is the most important thing.

[Stacey Koprince]

I agree that you should work in blocks rather than question-by-question, simply because you don't want to watch the clock every minute on the test, and you will also have some questions on which you will go a little under or a little over.

Having said that - don't go over 3 minutes on any one question. Each question is designed to be done in 2 minutes. If you need more than 3 minutes, that primarily indicates that you don't really know how to do that problem. And if you don't really know how to do that problem, the chances are very good that you're going to end up going a lot more than 30 more seconds, or you're going to get it wrong, or (most likely) both.

The test is going to give you stuff you can't do in 2 minutes. Accept it, find some way to get an answer within the time constraints, and move on. Don't put yourself in the position of having to guess on problems that you could actually do but you no longer have time to do them.