We recently released an article that covers similar ground but for the GRE. If you’ve already read that article, just note that most of what we say in the introduction and in the section about “establishing the right mindset” is very similar.
There are 2 levels at which one can address time management issues on the GMAT: 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 GMAT, 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 all of the sections of the GMAT, especially Quant and Data Insights, knowing that you will likely miss some questions and expecting 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, the above summary will give you some quick context.
Now, let’s get into some specific “global” time management strategies for the GMAT…
“Skipping” Questions and Coming Back on the GMAT
New to the GMAT in 2024, test takers can go back and review questions once they reach the end of a section and can change answers to up to 3 questions. There are a handful of important things to say about this feature and how to use it optimally!
First, it is surprisingly difficult for most test takers to even make use of this feature! Most people just simply spend too much time on questions and then just barely finish the section (or don’t finish the section…more on that below), leaving no time to go back and review questions. We don’t want to belabor the point about “mindset” that we expound upon in the aforementioned article, but going in with the right mindset really is most of the battle! You just have to accept that there will likely be questions that you just don’t know how to answer or that will take you too long, and you must be ready to “let go” of these questions and move on. Remember, you can go back to these questions anyway!!! You are not “giving up.” You are “saving the question(s) for later!” Embodying this mentality is easier said than done, but with practice it IS possible and it WILL have an impact on your score!
One note about scoring that may help you with this mentality. On the GMAT, you will be given questions at varying levels of difficulty. The way that the algorithm arrives at your score is by assessing how you answer questions at those various levels. Most people will have a pretty predictable pattern whereby they will get the “easier” and “medium” questions right, up to a point, and then, once they reach a certain level of difficulty, will tend to get questions at or above that level wrong. The higher your “ceiling,” the higher your score.
But what happens if you get certain hard questions right but then get several or many easier questions wrong? This can happen because of poor time management! You might spend a lot of time on some very hard questions, get them right, but them miss easier questions because of lack of time. This is bad! At a recent GMAC Conference, the head psychometrician and test designer for the GMAT confirmed this fact. If you are going to miss 5 questions on section, you’d be better off missing the 5 hardest ones and getting the rest correct rather than missing 5 easier questions and getting the others correct. It’s a little too complicated to explain the details of this fact, but just understanding the takeaway is enough. And it’s critical!!! You are NOT getting “extra credit” for getting the hardest questions right if getting those questions right comes at the expense of easier questions! So again, you MUST accept that there will almost certainly be questions that are above “your level” and if you foolishly squander time in an effort to get them right, you will jeopardize your ability to get the easier ones that you should be getting right correct.
To repeat, you can go back to questions and revisit them anyway! USE this feature and you will likely outperform the very large percentage of test takers who do not!
Some Additional Strategies for the Review and Edit Feature of the GMAT
Ok, so how do you use the review and edit feature optimally? Let’s discuss!
First, some people worry that, since they can only change answers to 3 questions, they must be pretty certain about their answers to most or even all of the questions on a first pass. This is NOT something you should worry about. In reviewing HUNDREDS of official GMAT tests and practice GMAT exams on mba.com with scores of students, we can report that it is VERY rare indeed for a person to run out of edits! It almost never happens. You may end up reviewing many questions, but changing answers to more than 3 of them is just not something that is likely to happen. It’s far more common for people to not take advantage of the review and edit feature than to overuse it!
But can one be too aggressive with “letting go” of questions? This is complicated, but the simple answer is yes. Let us explain! Because the GMAT algorithm adapts to a test taker’s performance, if you get many of the early questions wrong (because you choose to let them go with the expectation that you’ll come back to them at the end) you run the risk of getting “demoted” to easier questions. That may sound like a good thing, but getting easier questions right is not what leads to a high score. You need to be seeing hard questions and getting some or most of them right! And we have seen evidence, not only from the official practice tests but also from the diagnostic reports of actual GMATs, that you CAN be too aggressive about dumping questions early on, even if you come back and edit those questions later and get them right! For example, you probably don’t want to “dump” questions 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7, even if you’ll have plenty of time at the end to come back and get them right, since you’ll likely encounter easier questions through the middle and end of the section and not encounter enough of the harder questions to achieve a high score.
BUT!!! Please, dear reader, don’t let this fact swing you too far in the other direction. Many people, when they hear the cautionary tale above, think that they can’t afford to let go of questions early on. This is not so! We recently had a student score 85 Quant on an actual GMAT (and 85 is an incredibly high Quant score) after dumping questions 1 and 6 and then coming back at the end to edit them and get them right. So you should not be afraid to do this! You just don’t want to OVERDO it and let go of 5 of the first 6 questions, that’s all.
Also, remember, if you don’t really know how to do a question or are in a flustered panic and are just not “seeing it” in the moment, what are you going to do? Sit there and spend 5 minutes spinning your wheels, only to get the question wrong anyway? That makes no sense! It is really liberating to know that you can let go of questions and come back. Often with a fresh set of eyes and with the flustered panic gone, you will understand better how the question can be approached and get the question right.
Don’t Leave Questions Unanswered at the End of a Section on the GMAT!
There is another critical time management/GMAT algorithm fact that is VERY important to understand. We have a separate article that specifically addresses this issue, but in case you have not read it, let us be clear: you do NOT want to leave any questions unanswered at the end of any section of the GMAT! Never!!! There is a severe penalty for not answering questions, much worse than what would be the case if you just guessed and got the question wrong. So, when you get to about a minute left, start guessing and finish the section. We’ve even had a couple of students report that, though they bubbled an answer for the last question, they did not technically “finish the section” and incurred the penalty for technically not completing the last question.
There is an easy way to prevent yourself from ever leaving questions unanswered: as time is running out, just complete the last question or questions and then, once you reach the Review and Edit screen, simply go back to that last question or those last questions! This is most applicable in cases in which you are at the last question. Just select an answer and then immediately go back to that question and keep working on it! Simple! But even if you have 2 or 3 questions left and 1 minute remaining, select answers for the questions and then you may have time to go back and change your answer to one of them, ideally the one that will be fastest to attack.
Data Sufficiency as Your Time Management Savior on Data Insights
Most of what we’ve said above applies to all sections of the GMAT, but we have some specific time management advice for the Data Insights section. Once again, we have an entirely separate article about this topic that you should read! But we’ll summarize the main points here anyway. Many, perhaps most, test takers struggle with timing on Data Insights. One problem is that some of the question types just can’t be answered super quickly. Multi-Source Reasoning (MSR) is the best example. You can be good about not losing time on MSR questions, but it’s not easy to gain back time there. The same is generally true for Graphs and Tables and it’s mostly true for Two Part Analysis (TPA) questions too. So, how can you make back time if you fall behind on the section or if you are just someone who needs a bit more time on some of the questions that you see on Data Insights? After all, some questions just inherently take more than 2 minutes to deal with, and most of the above questions cannot be done in significantly less time than that!
Enter Data Sufficiency! DS questions present a unique opportunity because, unlike all of the other Data Insights question types, DS questions can sometimes be dealt with quickly (as in, under a minute). Data Sufficiency questions are also the most common question type on the Data Insights section, representing about 40% of the questions, so being able to be very fast on at least some of these questions will go a long way to solving your time management woes.
Don’t misunderstand. Some DS questions can take a long time to fully solve and we are not suggesting that you just guess, willy nilly, on most Data Sufficiency questions. But many DS questions, including ones that take a long time to fully solve, allow for quick educated guesses, often really good, high-percentage guesses!
For example, it is often the case that one statement (let’s say statement 1) will be obviously insufficient and that combined the statements will be obviously sufficient. In that case, it’s likely that the other statement (statement 2), which may appear at first glance to be insufficient, will be sufficient. It could be that it would take several minutes to prove that. Well, if the answer is B or C, and if C feels like a trap/sucker answer, then you’d probably be wise to just guess B and move on. Remember, you can always come back! It’s very hard to make smart, accurate, and quick educated guesses on any of the other Data Insights question types, so just being able to apply the above kind of reasoning on a few Data Sufficiency questions can really be the difference between finishing the Data Insights section and getting a great score and running out of time and getting a subpar score.
GMAT Verbal Section Time Management: Don’t Skimp on the Passages/Arguments!
There are a lot of pretty specific, nuanced adjustments that you can make to deal with the particular issues that might be causing you to struggle with time on the Verbal section of the GMAT, but often these are particular to individual test takers and not especially generalizable. And then there are some innate things that can be difficult to change, such as your natural reading speed (for what it’s worth, I am an innately slow reader). So, we are going to focus here on one general piece of advice that really matters and that is applicable to everyone: on both Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning, the way to be faster is NOT to read the passages/arguments faster but to accelerate at the answer choices. Let us explain.
If you read a reading comp passage faster than you are really able to, you will likely not understand the passage very well and will likely struggle when you get to the questions, probably spending much more time on the questions than you otherwise would have and getting many more wrong. The same is true for a Critical Reasoning argument. If you speed through the argument and don’t really understand the gaps in the logic, again you’ll likely spend more time dealing with the question and answer choices and will be more likely to get the question wrong.
We are not advocating spending an eternity reading a RC passage or a CR argument and there definitely is a skill to how to read both types of passages effectively. But the simple fact is that if you read them skillfully and without rushing, you’ll be in a position to be much faster when you get to the questions and answer choices AND you’ll be more likely to get the questions right in the end.
The second part of this time management strategy relates to the questions and answers themselves. Many test takers just spend way too much time deliberating, often fruitlessly, over 2 or more answers. There are a few ways to avoid this. First, often a failure to perceive the right answer stems from a failure to understand the passage or argument in the first place (this obviously reinforces the point above about not rushing the reading of the passage/argument). Just understanding this truth can itself help you because rather than reading the answers over and over, sometimes the right move is to go back to the passage or argument and reread it (or the relevant part). This is especially the case with Critical Reasoning. Most people fail to differentiate the right from wrong answers because they just don’t understand the argument, and especially the gaps in the argument, well enough in the first place. So especially on CR, if you find that you are spending time deliberating excessively over the answers, try to get in the habit of immediately going back to the argument to make sure you understand it at the precise level at which you probably needed to in the first place!
The other major factor worth reiterating here is that you can always come back at the end of the section and review the question and edit your answers! This feature is probably a little less useful on the Verbal section than it is on the other sections since it’s a little more difficult to revisit a reading passage 30 minutes later (especially after reading a couple of other passages and a bunch of CR questions), but it’s still useful! And this is especially true when you’ve gotten a good understanding of the passage on your initial read. You might come to a question and, without even looking back at the passage, have a sense that choice E is correct. Perhaps the other answers just don’t even seem consistent with the author’s purpose and the scope of the passage and perhaps E does. Perhaps you feel like it’s an 80-90% chance that choice E is correct, and you’ve arrived at that answer in only 40 seconds. If you are someone who struggles with time on Verbal or if you happen to be running behind on the section, then your best option might be to just choose E, move on, and flag the question for review. THAT is how you can accelerate and make back time on the Verbal section of the GMAT.
To repeat, generally speaking, the way to deal with time management issues is not to try to read faster than you can actually read and comprehend. You may need to learn how to attack RC passages and CR arguments more skillfully, but just going faster is unlikely to help and will probably hurt. However, there may be ways to cut down on the time you spend “circling the wagons” at the answer choices and utilizing the review and edit feature can be a useful part of that strategy!
Conclusion
Ok, that was a lot to digest! The truth is that solving time management issues on the GMAT is not easy. The above advice will give you a better understanding of what needs to be done, but be warned that it often takes a lot of hard work and very deliberate practice to make these adjustments and to make them stick, especially in the pressure-filled situation of the actual test. We have a separate article with specific advice on how to PRACTICE time management tactics, so please read that one if you haven’t already. Solving time management problems on the GMAT takes understanding and practice. Hopefully this article has given you a better understanding of what can be done. And the above article will give you the tools to practice these strategies and help form them into habits.