As we’ve discussed in other articles, there are 2 levels at which one can address time management issues on the GRE: at an individual question-level (getting faster at individual questions) and at a “global” or section-level (getting better at managing your time through whole sections of the test). Both are critically important to success on the GRE, but in this article we’ll focus on the latter of the two.
Establishing the Right Mindset
The first step to having better “global” or section time management ability is something that we discussed in length in a previous article: Effective Time Management on the GMAT and GRE: You Must Have the Right Mindset! If you haven’t read that article yet, you should pause and go read it now! No amount of tweaking how you approach the sections will help if you don’t have the right mindset to begin with. The following summary will not do the article justice, but here goes: You need to go into the sections of the GRE, especially the more difficult ones, knowing that you will likely miss some questions and expect to make guesses and move on. In doing so you’ll be setting yourself up to “outperform” other test takers who foolishly waste time on questions that they are likely to get wrong anyway. Again, you’d be better off reading the entire article, but in case you don’t, that summary will give you some quick context.
Now, on to the Verbal section of the GRE…
Question Order and Time Management on the Verbal Section of the GRE
Not everyone struggles with timing on the Verbal section of the GRE. But many people do! The first, and probably most helpful, piece of advice that we have (and that many students have described as enormously helpful) deals with the order in which you do the questions. For reasons that we will explore, it is best to tackle the “sentence completion” questions first and save the reading comprehension for last. And there’s even a strategy for WHICH reading comprehension passages to tackle first and last. Let us explain…
You might imagine that it shouldn’t really matter which questions you do first and which you do last. At the end of the day, you need to spend the amount of time that you need to spend on each question anyway, right? Does it really matter in which order you do them? Yes, we would argue that it does! Let’s imagine that on the first verbal section, in which you have 18 minutes, you will likely spend 6 minutes on the 6 sentence completion questions and 12 minutes on the 6 reading comprehension questions (you don’t always get 6 SC and 6RC on the first section, but for this thought experiment let’s imagine that you do). Psychologically, it will feel better to tackle the 6 sentence completion questions first and then look at the clock and realize that you have 12 minutes left to answer just 6 questions. Conversely, if you do the reading comprehension first, you will look up at the clock and realize that you have only 6 minutes left to tackle the remaining half of the section (6 minutes for 6 questions). Yes, in theory if you were going to spend 6 minutes anyway, then you should manage to finish on time regardless, but the difference is in the psychology of having fewer questions remaining with more time on the clock. It just feels less stressful to know that you have a lot of time left and not that many questions remaining to answer.
Additionally, we recommend saving what you anticipate will be the hardest reading comp passage for last. Again, there is a logic to this. To see this, let’s flip the ordering. Imagine that you start the section by trying to tackle the hardest reading comprehension passage first. If you struggle as you read it, you will likely start to panic, knowing that you have the entire rest of the section ahead of you and that you can’t squander too much time. There’s a good chance that, given those circumstances, you will read the passage more quickly than you should and not really understand it, likely missing most of the questions that accompany it. If, however, you save that passage for last, you can then take your time knowing that you’ve answered all the other questions on the section and that you have only this passage and the two or three questions that go with it remaining.
How, you might ask, would you know what passages are on the section and which one to do last? Well, you should preview them before reading! Let us explain…
Usually, the Verbal sections of the GRE start with a batch of sentence completion questions followed by some reading comprehension questions, which are then followed by a second batch of sentence completions and then a second grouping of RC. What we advise our students is as follows. First, answer the initial batch of sentence completion questions. Then skip ahead to the second batch of sentence completion questions, but as you pass by the reading comprehension questions, take a quick peek to see what types of passages are there. You should not start reading the passages, but just make a quick mental note of what types of passages are there and how long they are. Then, after you finish the second batch of sentence completion questions, skip ahead to the last question in the section, again taking note of the reading comprehension passages that are there.
You will now have finished all of the sentence completion questions and have an overview of what remains for reading comprehension on the section. You can now select the order in which you’d like to do the reading comprehension. You don’t necessarily need to save the longest passage for last, although that is often a good strategy. But if you see a shorter passage that you anticipate will be difficult for you (such as a passage dealing with astronomy or some obscure literary figure), that might be the passage to save for last.
Additional Time Management Strategies for the Verbal Section of the GRE
There are a couple of additional strategies that we recommend for effective time management on the Verbal section of the GRE…
First, it can be tempting to try to save time by speeding through your reading of the passages (or, for some people, by skipping reading them entirely and going straight to the questions), but we do not advise that. In fact, just the opposite! The way to be faster at reading comprehension is to save time at the questions, not at the passages! If you don’t understand the passage well, you will likely waste time at the questions, and, overall, you will spend as much time or more, possibly missing some of the questions that you might otherwise have been able to get right. Conversely, if you take your time and really understand the passages, you will be in a position to be much faster at the questions, and you’ll be more likely to get them right.
A word of caution here. It’s beyond the scope of this article to get into the weeds of reading comprehension strategy. However, when we say take your time to understand the passage well, we are not talking about getting lost in the details. What we mean is that you should have a good big picture understanding of the author’s overall purpose and of the function of the different parts of the passage. In other words, you should have a good bird’s-eye view of the passage and a good understanding of the author’s intention throughout.
Another tip, albeit of lesser importance, is to try not to linger too much on sentence completion questions. This is not to say that SC’s can always be answered quickly. Sometimes the sentence or sentences are complicated and require some deep thought and reasoning. But often test takers waste time deliberating over two words, neither of which they really know the definition of. You should read the sentences, apply some robust reasoning, choose your answers, and then move on. Remember, you can always mark questions and go back. To repeat, we are not suggesting that most or all sentence completion questions can or should be answered quickly. It’s just that you should not deliberate excessively, given that you can always go back to the question later.
Both this and what we suggested above about taking your time on reading comprehension passages and then being faster at the questions is something that you could practice deliberately. In a separate article we mentioned something that we call a “Timed Two-Ways Drill.” Have a look at that article (in the section titled “Practicing How to Be Faster/More Efficient on Whole Sections of the GMAT and GRE”) to understand how to implement it!
Timing on the Quant Section of the GRE and the Special Place of Quantitative Comparisons
The Quant section of the GRE is where most people struggle with time. And we here at Reason Test Prep spend A LOT of time and energy thinking about how to optimize time management for the GRE and on giving students advice on this, so we have many tried and true strategies to offer.
The first thing to point out is that Quantitative Comparisons represent an opportunity to save time on the GRE Quant section. Unfortunately, most test takers spend MORE time on QCs than they do on the Problem Solving questions and completely miss this opportunity. Allow us to explain…
First of all, QCs have 4 answer choices whereas PS questions either have 5 answer choices or are “select-all-that-apply” or “fill-in-the-blank” questions. So, statistically you are more likely to guess correctly on QCs than on multiple choice PS questions and MUCH more likely to guess right than on PS questions that are in the “select-all-that-apply” or “fill-in-the-blank” format. So, if you need to make some educated guesses on a handful of questions on the GRE Quant section in order to save time, you’d be better off doing that on QCs than on the other questions.
Additionally, it’s often not that hard to rule out some answers very quickly on QCs. For example, there are many cases in which it is clear that there definitely IS an answer, so choice D (not enough information to determine the relationship) can be ruled out. That already limits you to 3 answer choices, and this can often happen within seconds of reading the question! It’s almost impossible to do that on Problem Solving questions. Furthermore, it is often clear pretty quickly that one quantity can clearly be bigger than the other, or that they could be equal. In other words, you might look at the question and immediately see that quantity A could be bigger than quantity B. Or you might do some quick number picking to see that. At that point, the answer is either A or D (in other words, either quantity A is always bigger or there are cases in which quantity B would be bigger or in which they would be equal). That’s a 50/50 shot, and that may only take 30 seconds! You may try another number, and again see that quantity A is bigger. At that point, you can either continue testing numbers or select an answer, mark the question, and plan to come back if you have time at the end.
This is the kind of thing that most test takers do not do. They will sit there and deliberate and spend lots of time on QCs, when there are opportunities to be faster and move on, especially given that you can always come back to the question later. And once you get more skillful at QCs and better understand the design of those questions and the way that the test writers try to trap you, what we described above as a 50/50 shot will often become something much better than that. In other words, if it’s obvious that quantity A could be bigger than quantity B, then the answer is probably not A! But, given what we explained above, the answer in a case like that must be A or D (either A really IS always bigger or there are some cases in which B could be bigger or in which they could be equal). Therefore, that “50/50” shot is probably more of an 80/20 shot: D is probably 80% likely to be correct and A (the “obvious” or “trap” answer) is probably 20% likely to be right. Those are good odds and that can happen in well under 1 minute!!!
Again, this is something you can practice with what we referred to above as a “Timed Two-Ways Drill.” If you missed that reference above, let us again urge you to read about it in our article about how to practice better time management (go to the section titled “Practicing How to Be Faster/More Efficient on Whole Sections of the GMAT and GRE”).
Question Order and Time Allocation on the Quant Section of the GRE
All of this leads to a second, more general, and more important point about time allocation on the GRE Quant section. Below we’ll come back to the place of QC’s in the larger picture of how to manage your time through the whole section of the GRE. But zooming out to a bird’s-eye view of the section for a second, it is important to understand that there is a big difference, both in the psychology of how it feels and in the results it produces, between getting to the end of the section with one second left and getting to the end of the section with five or so minutes left and then having time to go back and review questions that you skipped or made a guess on. It is hard to overstate how different those two modes of operation feel and how different the outcomes tend to be in terms of the score.
The problem is that it can be hard to achieve the latter. After all, if you are struggling to finish the sections on time, how are you going to “flip the script” such that you are able to get to the end of the section with lots of time to spare? That probably sounds crazy! Well, there is an interesting paradox here. If you believe that you will just barely make it to the end of the section and that you will almost certainly not have any extra time to go back to questions that you let go of, it makes it that much more difficult to let go of questions in the first place. In those moments when you are deciding whether to move on from a question, you will know that it’s almost certain that you will not have a second chance to see that question and will then, paradoxically, spend more time on that question than you perhaps should, thus making it even less likely that you’ll have that extra time at the end of the section! It’s a vicious cycle. On the flip side, if you know that you will get to the end of the section with time to spare, then it becomes much easier to let go of questions in the first place, which in turn makes it more likely that you will get to the end of the section with extra time! The vicious cycle thus becomes a virtuous cycle!
But how to “flip the script” in this way? Well, it can be difficult for the paradoxical reason explained above. Until you prove to yourself that you will be able to get to the end of the section with time to spare, it can be difficult to let go of questions. So here is one thing that we recommend to students that you can try. It has worked for many, many of our students:
Roughly the first 1/3 of questions on each Quant section will be QCs. Given what we discussed in the previous section, it is important to get through those QCs relatively expeditiously. You should probably aim to spend not more than 1.5 minutes per question on the QCs. Ideally less than that even. If you have 5 QCs and spend 6 or 7 minutes, you are off to a great start. Remember, you can always come back to the questions, so we’re not saying that you’d necessarily spend 6 or 7 minutes total, just 6 or 7 minutes on an initial pass! Once you’ve finished the QCs, skim the rest of the section! Yes, you read that correctly, skim through all of the remaining questions! In other words, click “next” through all of the Problem Solving questions that follow until you reach the end of the section, taking quick note of the questions that you see as you pass them by. You should NOT spend a lot of time looking at each question – just a handful of seconds. To be concrete, what this would mean is that on the second Quant section, you would answer the first 5 questions (the QCs) and then literally scan through questions 6 to 15 in about a minute or less.
It may seem crazy to do this or, at the very least, a waste of time. But trust us! We have had many students do this and most report that it has helped them immeasurably. Let us explain some of the benefits that accrue from this strategy.
First, you will have a bird’s-eye view of what’s in the section. For example, you might see a pair of chart questions at 11 and 12, a very hard looking geometry question at 9, and a tough looking probability question at 14, one that also happens to be a fill-in-the-blank variety. You can then decide which questions you’ll do first and which you’ll save for last. That hard fill-in probability question should probably be among the last (hard fill-in questions should usually come last since, statistically, you are probably least likely to get those right). You might decide to save that hard Geometry one for the end too. You might feel great about chart questions and try to tackle those first. It’s not hard to see the benefit of this strategy!
Second, for people who can’t manage to get to the end of the section with time to spare and who always run out of time on the last couple of questions, this is an easy way to just blow that problem out of the water. Are you having trouble getting to the end of the section with time to spare? Ok, well skip every question and get to the end of the section! Voila, you did it! Once you do this, it really “opens up” the section for you and allows you to choose the order in which you would like to do the questions. It’s just a very different experience to have “previewed” all of the questions and to choose the order in which you will do the questions rather than letting the TEST choose that for you!!!
Additional Time Management Strategies for the Quant Section of the GRE
There are a few additional time management strategies for the Quant section of the GRE that we’d like to share with you.
First, building off our above discussion about QCs and how you should aim to be pretty “aggressive” on those questions, there are certain question types that are inherently lower percentage questions and often more time consuming, to boot. We already mentioned fill-in questions. Any fill-in question that seems very difficult to you is a question that you should absolutely skip and come back to. Without the benefits of answer choices, those questions are just much more difficult. Even if you know how to do a fill-in question, if you make a careless mistake you won’t even know that you made it because you won’t have the benefit of answer choices to confirm that what you arrived at is correct. Additionally, the select-all-that-apply questions tend also to be more time consuming and more difficult. If a select-all-that-apply question seems easy, go for it. But if it seems hard or time consuming, that is probably NOT a great place to spend your time, until you’ve answered easier or less time-consuming questions.
Another nuanced question that test takers face on the GRE Quant section is whether to put in an answer or just outright skip a question that you’ve chosen to let go of? Here’s what we would suggest:
If you’ve spent time thinking about the question (let’s say for more than 30 or 45 seconds), put in an answer. You can always mark it but put in an answer. There are two reasons for this. First, once you’ve spent some time thinking about a question you probably have a slightly better than random chance of getting the question right, so lob in a guess. Secondly, if you’ve spent some time thinking about the question and have not gotten very far in solving it or haven’t even started it, there is a decent chance that you won’t have time or be able to fully answer that question anyway. So just put in a guess. Obviously you could always come back to the question anyway, but we often see people omit questions because they left them with the intention of going back and then never had time. Don’t do that!
The only reason to leave a question blank is because you didn’t really give it any thought at all. So, what we described above about scanning through all of the Problem-Solving questions is an example of where you would fully skip questions and not put in answers. Or, if you come to a question and just realize instantly that it’s a hard question or one that you will likely struggle with, you can fully skip the question and not waste time selecting an answer. But! Remember, if you are skipping the question completely and not selecting an answer, you are kind of committing to coming back to that question, even if only to select a random answer. If you do not think that you’ll even have time to do that question or perceive that it will just be too hard and will be a waste of time, you’d be better off just selecting an answer, even randomly, and then moving on.
Pro Tip for the Second Quant and Verbal Sections of the GRE
We’re saving one little goodie here for last. And this actually applies to the Verbal section as well, although people find it more helpful for the Quantitative section, since most people struggle with timing more there.
If you do well enough on the first Verbal or Quant section, the second section will be more difficult. But, coming out of the first section, which will have been easier, you may have a deluded sense of the urgency that you need to have. In other words, you may finish the first Quant section with time to spare and think, “that wasn’t so bad…my timing felt good.” However, you need to adjust your mindset for that second section because, assuming you bumped up to the harder one, it WILL be more difficult and you WILL have to have a greater sense of urgency. Again, this is true of both the Quant and Verbal sections. Assuming you bump up into the harder Verbal section, you can expect the words on the Sentence Completion questions to be more obscure and challenging and the Reading Comprehension passages to be more difficult, so you need to adjust your pacing such that you don’t get bogged down by these harder questions. And obviously this is true on Quant as well, where the questions will be, on average, significantly more difficult and where you will need to have a slightly different mentality. You’ll need to accept that there may be questions that are just too difficult or time-consuming and go into that second section with a slightly more aggressive mindset.
So, you should get in the habit of having a little self-talk after the first sections of the test that might go something like this: “Ok, assuming I did well enough on those first sections, I need to remember that these next sections may feel more difficult and that I am more in danger of getting bogged down by difficult questions. So, I need to be extra alert and on guard here to make sure I move swiftly and with a sense of urgency. I will NOT linger on really difficult questions and squander my time!”
Putting This All into Action
Ok, now that you have a better understanding of how to address timing issues on the GRE, how do you practice all of this and make it actionable on the test? Well, there is a lot to say there! Clearly it can require a lot of very deliberate practice. Luckily, we have an article that addresses this! It’s the article that we referenced twice already in this article! At risk of redundancy, here is a link to the article one more time. If you haven’t already done so, go and read it now. Or, if you just read the part that we referenced, go read the entire article and start practicing these strategies. A world in which you DON’T run out of time on the GRE awaits you!