Time on questions

[twhansbury]

Some questions I am able to solve and move quickly through, others I find I am spending a lot of time on. Does anyone have a breakdown of what too much time on questions is?

I understand that i am able to "bank" time i saved on the ones i do quickly and use on the more time consuming questions but how much it too much time to spend on any question.

[dtse86]

The breakdown of straight minutes per question are as follows:
IR: 2.5 Minutes/question
Quant: ~2 Minutes/question
Verbal: ~1.8 Minutes/question (1 minute 48 seconds)

There will be some flex depending on how fast you answer questions along the way.

I think this article explains a good strategy by suggesting you check your time at intervals after every 10 questions or so. https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/07/ ... t-part-2-2

I am working on my timing as well and I have been finding that I've been getting a lot of really hard questions (which isn't a bad thing) on my CAT's but it tempts me to spend 3+ minutes on a question and really crunches me towards the end of the section.

I've been suggested to do timed practice with a bunch of questions (20-30) at any one time. I hope this helps!

[David@VeritasPrep]

For Quant:

You need to get around 25 questions right on the Quant section in order to get a very good score. (As long as you are doing your job and getting easy questions right the 12 that you miss will be hard questions...and many of the ones you get right will be tough, too).

In order to do this you can guess at some questions that are not going well for you on that particular test day.

For example, I had a bad day the last time I took the GMAT and I had to guess at 8 Quant questions! It was a humbling experience that I learned a lot from...but it was also very successful as I earned a 770 on that exam and a 90th percentile on the Quant section.

The principles that I used to get a great score (even on a bad day) are discussed in these three articles:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/04/ ... at-success

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/10/ ... -handrails

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/12/ ... n-the-gmat



The experts on Beat the GMAT got together a couple of years ago and discussed these questions of timing on the Quant and we came up with a few suggestions:

1) For must people, who are usually pressed a bit on time, if you can tell that a question will take you more than three minutes it is not worth the attempt; even if you get the correct answer 3 minutes plus is too long. (Of course at the end of the exam if you have extra time you should attempt it).

2) Once you are into a problem and you feel like you have spent 2 minutes or so, you should be within a minute of solving. If not then you should guess and move on. This is where it is so important to develop an "internal clock" using the drills in the article above. It is not good to be looking at the clock to see if you spent two minutes already - you need to "feel" the two minutes.

3) Guessing on a question is still guessing, even if you narrow down to just 2 choices it is still a guess. So the consensus was that narrowing down the choices is only really worth about 30 seconds.

[David@VeritasPrep]

Continuing with the Quant:

twhansbury - I just read this part of your question and wanted to caution you:

I understand that i am able to "bank" time i saved on the ones i do quickly and use on the more time consuming questions but how much it too much time to spend on any question.

It is true that you can "bank" that time - but it needs to be something that happens naturally. On the Quant section for example, there is no such thing as being able to force yourself to go more quickly. One of the great things that the GMAT does is it asks questions in such a way that anyone who is moving too quickly will fall into a trap.

Let me give you too scenarios.

1) You take your time and do well on the questions that seem EASY to you...and you have to guess at the occasional question that is proving difficult at that time. You get the questions right that you can and you earn the best score you could that day.

2) You rush through the questions that seem easy (in other words the ones that you have a great chance of getting right) in order to spend more time on the questions that you are likely to have some trouble with anyway. You miss several of the "easy" questions because they were not that easy had traps in them, or they were easy and you missed them through carelessness (even worse).

Scenario number 2 is a tragedy and you score will suffer, scenario number 1 is called "beating the opponents you can beat and is the subject of this article https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2014/02/ ... ou-deserve


Now there will be questions that are naturally less intense and types of questions that you are simply better at and some of these will take around 1 minute allowing you to take 3 minutes on another question. So it is okay to have some questions take longer than 2 minutes but others will need to naturally be quicker or will be quicker because you decided it was better to guess on the question as opposed to taking the time.

Here is one of the most popular articles in the history of Beat the GMAT discussing strategic guessing and the penalty of being stubborn. https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2011/01/ ... n-the-gmat

[David@VeritasPrep]

For the Verbal Section:

It is really a matter of Trusting Yourself and your techniques on Verbal. People spend too much time on verbal questions because they are debating the answer choices and stuck between two choices. If you have good methods you can keep a consistent pace.

Suggested time for verbal is based on Sentence Correction being the quickest of the three.

So 1:15 on SC

2:05 on CR

2:05 on RC (per question avg - this includes your time spent reading the passage as well as answering the questions. So it is more like 1 minute to answer each question and 3 to 4 minutes to read the passage).


There is really no way to "rush" on the verbal section either. You need to develop techniques that use the momentum of the question to do the work for you. Verbal is also a matter of focusing on the correct portion of the passage, argument, or sentence. Once you learn to focus correctly time becomes less of an issue on verbal.

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Hi twhansbury,

When assessing the amount of time that you're spending on an individual question, you should define exactly what you're DOING with your time. If you're staring at the screen, then you're wasting time. If you honestly can't figure out what to do with a question, then you're wasting time. When you DO answer a question correctly, you should think about HOW you solved it and if that method was actually fastest. Most questions can be solved in a 3-4 different ways, so you might want to ask yourself if your way was FASTEST.

Most pacing problems occur because of bad decision-making. Instead of restricting yourself to a particular amount of time per question, put your emphasis into proper note-taking and organization and learning the various approaches to each type of prompt. Also, you have to be mentally prepared to quickly "dump" a question if you can't figure out how to deal with it.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich