lotrgandalf wrote:Please consider the below case, & let me know if it's fine considering that I am currently unable to complete VA on time & do serious mistakes since I rush through questions marking "c" for all options for big RC questions, when just 25 minutes are left, so that I can focus on CR & SC? My VA score is generally around 30-32.
Case: I did first 7 questions correctly, hence the difficulty level of the 8th question was really high. 1)Suppose I do even 8th & 9th questions correctly, then would the difficulty level of successive questions keep on increasing, & hence successive questions would be more time consuming?2) So, after the 1st 10 questions should I speed through q11-q25, focusing more on alternate questions, easy & medium questions, & spend more time only for q30-q41 ?
This is a good question. I wish there were an easy answer. First, while the test is adaptive in the sense that if you're doing well the questions will
generally get more difficult, it's not going to feel perfectly linear. In other words, it's not strictly true that If you get the first five questions right, question 6 will be harder still, and if you get the first 20 questions right, the 21st question will make your brain explode, etc. There will be experimental questions mixed in. You can exhaust the number of difficult questions for a problem-type and get a softball. It's possible that what's difficult for other test-takers isn't as troubling for you and vice versa.
As for where to devote more time, again, it's hard to say. If you speed through questions 11-25 and you miss several questions that the algorithm deems to be on the easier side, you may not be able to salvage a good score with a strong finish. Or, you could get lucky, miss only hard and experimental questions, in which case you'd be in great shape. There's no way to know - we're dealing with glaringly imperfect information here.
Here's what I'd suggest: first, don't rush. You don't want to be making careless mistakes on questions you know how to handle. Better to work methodically and run out of time on the back end than fly through a large section of the test and miss easier problems. Two, if you're looking to make up time, try to do so with difficult-seeming longer questions. This usually means text-heavy CR problems in which you read the argument and recognize that you're going to have to read the argument multiple time to fully understand what's going on. Last, hone your ability to recognize important markers in RC passages. The topic sentence of each paragraph will clearly be important. Transition words "however," "although," "moreover," etc., usually suggest something relevant will follow. I'm not suggesting you skim the passage, but you can become more adept at seeing where the information you're likely to be tested on is likely to be.
Do the best you can, and don't obsess over time. If you don't get to, say, the last 3-4 questions, but you're able to answer a high percentage of the first 37-38 questions correctly, you're likely to do quite well.
