So many people suffer from timing woes on the GMAT and GRE. Literally, almost everyone we tutor needs some help in this domain, often a lot of it! In fact, for some people it is the ONLY thing keeping them from a high score. So if you are struggling with timing and wondering how to practice the skill of better time management and efficiency, you have come to the right place!
Before we dive into how to practice improving these skills, let’s first differentiate that there are really TWO levels at which you can improve your timing on the GMAT and GRE:
- Being faster/more efficient on individual questions
- Having better “global” time management skills as you work through the sections of the test
Let’s begin with the first and discuss how you can learn to be faster on individual questions…
Understanding How to Be Faster/More Efficient on Individual Questions on the GMAT and GRE
First, this may be stating the obvious, but it is worth emphasizing because many test takers fail to really understand the following truth: getting better = getting faster! If you are very clunky and slow when dealing with exponents, you may just really need to drill exponent questions to become more fluid and efficient. So getting faster can just be a matter of getting more “reps” in on the kinds of questions that are slowing you down.
However, it may also be that the WAY in which you are approaching questions needs to fundamentally change. If you don’t really know how to attack an overlapping sets question or weighted average question effectively, then just doing lots of those questions without considering HOW you could be attacking them more efficiently may not solve your problem! For example, if you are not using a chart or Venn diagram on an overlapping sets question, you’re likely going to be slower than you could otherwise be. And if you are approaching a weighted average question algebraically when it could be done using what we call the “weighted average criss-cross method,” your problem may not be that you are just too “slow” in what you are doing but that you are missing faster and more effective ways of approaching questions in the first place.
One final point here. The above describes what we would call “content-specific” strategy, strategy that applies to questions in a particular content area, like overlapping sets or weighted average. But there is another level at which one can learn to approach questions more effectively: understanding how to be more strategic and clever on ALL Problem Solving questions or ALL Quantitative Comparisons, etc. This is what we would call “question-type-specific strategy,” strategy that applies to ALL questions within a question type (again, Problem Solving or Data Sufficiency or even Critical Reasoning on the Verbal side). One can learn, for example, how to use numbers instead of variables, estimate instead of calculate, etc. Arguably this is the MOST important way to improve speed on an individual question basis!
Practicing How to Be Faster/More Efficient on Individual Questions on the GMAT and GRE
Ok, so how does one get better at all of this? Well, it’s not easy and it requires a lot of self-reflection and practice. By self-reflection, what we mean is that you need to practice very deliberately, being mindful of how you are approaching questions and whether you could be doing things differently. In other words, you don’t want to just bang through a million questions and then check to see how many you got right or wrong. You want to have a short feedback loop and really examine, after every single question, whether you approached the question well or could’ve taken a different approach that would have been more effective.
In some cases, it might be that you really are approaching certain question types well and just need to do more practice. Again, using overlapping sets as an example, once you know that you’re approaching those questions more or less effectively, then it’s a matter of doing enough of those questions to really become familiar enough with the process that you can do it more quickly.
More often, however, you may find that the WAY you are approaching the question is fundamentally not as effective as it could be. But how do you know this in the first place? Well, if you have a tutor who you are working with, it is definitely the tutor’s job to identify these inefficiencies and help you understand how you could be approaching things differently. That is at the core of almost everything that we do at Reason Test Prep. What if you don’t have a tutor? Well then things are a little bit harder because you really need to self-diagnose. You need to look at a variety of explanations to the questions that you are doing in order to see if there are better ways to approach those questions. Official explanations from ETS and GMAC are notoriously poor and almost always very “un-strategic,” so you often need to look elsewhere. Explanations in the forums, such as GMAT Club, can be very helpful. But even there, you often need to read past the very first explanation to find more clever and more effective ways of approaching the questions.
Once you understand HOW to approach questions more effectively, then it’s a process of doing a lot of practice questions and, again, really being very deliberate about applying those techniques and reviewing questions afterwards to make sure that you are finding optimal ways of approaching the questions. This really is at the core of how one improves one’s ability on the GMAT or GRE, which again leads to greater speed on individual questions.
One final, and crucial, point. You need to understand that, in the context of the actual test, not every question should be “approached.” In other words, you will often have to make educated guesses on questions or straight up dump them. This is certainly something that you also want to practice on an individual question basis. But because this bleeds into more of a section or “global” time management issue, we will address it in the next section…
Understanding How to Be Faster/More Efficient on Whole Sections of the GMAT and GRE
Now, it might be that even after you learn how to be more effective on an individual question basis, you still just can’t quite answer all the questions in a particular section in the amount of time given. That is very common and probably describes the situation that most test-takers find themselves in! That is where “section” or “global” time management strategy comes in!
In a separate article, we discussed, at length, the need to have an understanding of the right “mentality” in order to succeed in managing the individual sections of the GMAT or GRE well. If you have not already, it would be worthwhile to pause and go read that article before continuing, because much of what follows will be filtered through the lens of that “mentality.” We also have a couple of upcoming articles that will discuss specific strategies for how to tweak your approach to each SECTION of the GMAT and GRE (i.e., which question types to try to be faster on, what order to do the question in, etc.). Stay tuned!
Once you understand the broader mentality, you then need to appreciate the fact that you do not necessarily want to dive in headfirst and fully “solve” every question that you see. Most people operate like frontline soldiers in a trench warfare battle of attrition. They climb out of the trench and run headfirst into every question. That is not how you win a war. You need to think strategically and decide where to allocate your resources optimally. The same is true on a standardized test. You have a limited amount of time and need to allocate that time optimally throughout the section.
Therefore, you need to understand that, while on some questions you might dive right in and fully solve the question, in other cases you would be better off doing one of two things: 1) completely dump the question and move on or 2) go into educated guessing mode and spend a little bit of time processing the question and narrowing down the choices in order to make an educated guess. These are skills that you can specifically practice, and should practice, as we will discuss below!
There are many specific tactics for making educated guesses, far too many to discuss here, so we will explore some of these tactics in future articles. For now check out this slightly older article where we discuss, in general terms, the different kinds of guesses that can be made. Additionally, if you like podcasts, we have a great podcast episode from GRE Snacks in which we discuss much of what is in the above article and, in particular, some of the specific strategies that one can apply to make educated guesses on the GMAT and GRE.
Practicing How to Be Faster/More Efficient on Whole Sections of the GMAT and GRE
Once you have the right frame of mind in place, the first step is to practice this mentality on individual questions. That might seem counterintuitive: shouldn’t I practice on sets of questions in a timed setting or on full practice tests, you might ask? No, you should not. And that is because you’re better off working on cultivating this mentality on an individual question basis before jumping into longer sets of questions or practice tests. As before, part of the reason for this is that it’s good to have a short feedback loop in which you can evaluate the decisions that you are making on each question, thus permitting you to tweak your approach on the very next question as opposed to having to wait to see the outcome of a 20-question set before recalibrating.
There are a few things you can do to make this more fruitful. First, you can create a “context” for each question to simulate the actual testing experience. For example, you can say, “for the next 5 questions I do, I am going to pretend that I am in the middle of the section and running 5 minutes behind…what would I do with each of these questions given that circumstance?” Another thing you can do is just tee up very hard questions with the goal of specifically practicing “letting go” of questions and making educated guesses. It can be hard to do this when you are just doing your normal practice and running through questions, but when your entire GOAL is to work on guessing or dumping questions, it can be MUCH more fruitful.
Another “method” that we often advise students on is what we call “have your cake and eat it too!” In other words, you can practice strategic guessing AND fully solving the same question. You don’t have to choose…you can do both! For example, you might encounter a question that you think you would be wise to guess on, if you saw it on the actual test. You could register that thought, go through the steps of choosing an answer, and then, BEFORE checking to see what the right answer is, take whatever time you want to fully answer it. In this way you’ll get the best of both worlds: you’ll be working on time management and strategic guessing, but you’ll also be giving yourself an opportunity to learn how to actually solve harder questions.
Another tool you can use to work on timing is what we call a “Timed Two Ways Drill.” This is somewhat similar to the above method except that it’s a more formal process that will allow you to learn how to be faster on certain questions AND evaluate the extent to which you are spending unnecessary time on certain question types. For reasons that we will explain below, it doesn’t work equally well on all questions on the GMAT and GRE, but for some question types in particular, Verbal included, it can be very helpful.
Essentially, the process is as follows: When working through questions, you register your “tentative” answer as soon as you have one and mark how much time you spent up until that point. Then, without checking what the right answer is, restart the clock and spend as much additional time as you might otherwise have spent in order to select your final answer (again writing down what answer you would have picked and how much time you spent). You can do this across many questions and then compare the amount of time you spent on your initial answers versus your final ones and what the difference was in terms of the number correct/incorrect. When we have had students do this, it often illustrates how a person is spending a lot more time than they necessarily need to. For example, across the span of 20 questions, a person might get 1 more question right but have spent 15 minutes more total! Another benefit is that you train yourself to try to get to a “tentative” answer quickly AND learn what your threshold of confidence is such that, above that threshold, your tentative answer tends to be right!
On the “quantitative” question types (including Data Sufficiency, which technically appears on the Data Insights section of the GMAT), the Timed Two Ways Drill is probably most useful for Quantitative Comparisons on the GRE and Data Sufficiency on the GMAT. That’s because in both cases one can often come to a conceptual hunch or tentative answer quite quickly and reach a decision point regarding how much FURTHER to go in proving that hunch or confirming that tentative answer. For example, on QC’s, it might be obvious that Quantity A could be bigger than Quantity B. At that point, the answer is either A (Quantity A is always bigger than Quantity B) or D (not enough info to determine the relationship). However, it may be that you perceive A to be a trap answer and have a strong hunch that there will be other cases in which Quantity B can be bigger than Quantity A, thus making the answer D. On the actual test you might be better off choosing D, marking the question, and then coming back later. Well that is effectively what you are mimicking with the Timed Two Ways Drill. The “extra time” that you spend in coming to your final answer in practice is analogous to the extra time that you might spend if you came back to the question later on in the real exam. And you can compare the outcomes! Was it worth spending that extra time? Was your initial hunch correct anyway? How much additional time did you spend confirming your tentative answer? You might not have any grand takeaways from doing a single question, but if you do this drill across many questions, you will see trends and learn a lot!
For GMAT test takers, this way of approaching questions applies VERY well to Data Sufficiency. In fact, it probably applies more to that question type than to any other question type on either the GMAT or GRE. We have two articles about Data Sufficiency that directly address these issues and that you will likely find helpful. One is a more general article about the need to be fast on Data Sufficiency and the idea of making “educated guesses” there, and the other gets into the nuance of how to decide whether to “go on a hunch” or “prove it” on DS questions.
Most people struggle with timing more on the Quantitative sections than the Verbal sections of the GMAT and GRE, and it might appear as though most of what we’ve been discussing in this article applies a bit more to Quant (and Data Insights on the GMAT) than to Verbal. But much of it does indeed apply to Verbal as well. And this Timed Two Ways Drill, in particular, is very applicable to Verbal questions too, especially Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning (“Argument” questions on the GRE).
To make this clear, let’s take the example of reading comprehension. We generally do not advise trying to be much faster in how you READ the passages, because if you do not understand the passage well, you will very likely struggle at the questions. However, if you read the passage well, there may be an opportunity to be much faster at the QUESTIONS. And this is something you could explore with the Timed Two Ways Drill. For example, after reading the passage and looking at the first question, you might decide within 30 seconds that you think the answer is probably D. You could mark that, and then perhaps spend an additional minute confirming that D is indeed right and that the other answers are wrong. In doing this, again you will learn a lot. You might find that you are very often right with your initial hunch. Or perhaps you will notice that there are certain situations in which you can tell that you are not confident enough with your tentative answer and that spending the extra time is definitely worth it.
This notion of arriving at a tentative answer and then deciding whether to spend additional time to go further, while clearly applicable to QCs, DS questions, and most of what appears on the Verbal sections of both exams, is slightly less applicable to Problem Solving questions (which, on the GMAT, make up the entire Quantitative section). This is because on most PS questions it can be very hard to arrive at a tentative answer without fully solving the question. In effect, PS questions tend to be more “all-or-nothing.” If a PS question takes you 3 minutes to solve, it’s very likely that you will have no idea what the answer is at the 2 minute mark. However, there are often opportunities to make educated guesses on PS questions that we explore in another article: Practicing Strategic Guessing on GMAT and GRE Quant Questions. As you can read in that article, these opportunities amount more to choosing, IN ADVANCE, to guess instead of fully solve the question. This is not the same as the strategy of getting to a tentative answer and then choosing whether to go further, as we’ve discussed above for the other question types. But, as we describe in the above article, it is a skill specific to PS questions that you can and probably should practice!
Putting It All Together into Test-Like Practice!
Once you have practiced all of the above on an individual question basis, it’s time to put it all into practice by doing sets of questions and then eventually practice tests. Most people want to jump directly into full practice tests at this point, but there are a couple of reasons not to. One is that there is a limit to the number of official practice tests out there, so you don’t want to waste them before you’re really ready. Additionally, as noted before, it can be helpful to have a shorter feedback loop so that you have more opportunities to address your issues and self-correct. Doing a practice test takes a couple of hours whereas doing a set of 5 or 10 questions takes much less time and allows you to evaluate your performance at more frequent intervals.
So it’s best to begin with small sets of mixed questions, ideally official ones. For example, you can create a set of 10 Problems Solving questions to mimic roughly half of the GMAT quant section. For the GRE, you can take 3 QCs and 6 PS Qs to mimic a shorter version of a Quant section (the Quant section of the GRE usually has a 1 to 2 ratio of QCs to PS questions). After each set, you can evaluate your performance and consider what you could’ve done differently. If you think you just need more practice on the sets, you can create more and continue to evaluate. However, if you suspect that you’re just fundamentally having issues with particular topics or that you have not fully embodied the ways in which you can be faster on QC’s or Data Sufficiency questions (by going on a hunch occasionally, for example), then you might be better off going back to individual question practice before resuming these mixed sets of questions.
Once it is clear that you ARE performing well on the mixed sets, then it is time to “graduate” to an official practice test. This will give you a really good understanding of where you stand, not just in terms of your score, but also in terms of how well you are managing your time. And, if you are very thoughtful about how you review the outcome, you should be able to pinpoint specific things that you could do differently on the next test. On some level, this could be unrelated to timing. For example, you might realize that you are just not skilled enough at exponent questions or Reading Comprehension and that you need more practice. However, if you are like most test-takers, it is very likely that some of your woes will be related to timing issues. The key, then, is to identify specifically what those issues are so that you can go back to the drawing board and work on them. Again, it could be that you need more practice on individual questions so that you learn better which questions would be good to guess on vs which ones would be worthwhile to attack when you see them. Or, it could be that you just need more practice with sets of questions so that you can work on your overall pacing and the anxiety that seems to affect you when you’re in a more test-like setting.
After you address these issues with more practice, you then jump into another practice test and repeat the whole process. But remember, just doing practice test after practice test is not a good idea if you are not very close to your score goal. In that case, it is very likely that there are more foundational issues (timing included) that you need to work on and that you would be better addressing outside of the context of practice tests. For example, if you are never guessing or dumping questions, it’s likely that you need to change your mentality or get better at the art of identifying which questions are worth your time and which are not, and this will very likely be better addressed in the context of individual questions.
If you stayed with us that long, congratulations! That was a long article! We’ll have more coming on the topic of time management on the GMAT and GRE, so stay tuned!