In a couple of previous posts I discussed some of the main reasons that people don’t see much of a score increase when preparing for the GMAT. In this post I will turn to yet another common cause of artificially low GMAT scores: poor time management!
Over the years I have tutored a number of students whose lower than desired GMAT scores have been almost entirely the result of poor time management. One girl in particular stands out. She came to me with a 560 score on the official test, but after I had my first session with her it was clear to me that she should be in the 700 range. Unfortunately she had no idea how to properly manage her time on the test, particularly on the Quant section, and the result was a score that was really well below her potential. I tutored her for about 6 weeks focusing almost entirely on time management and she managed to score a 710, which is probably the score she should have had in the first place had she known how to manage her time better!
First of all, one must have an understanding of how the scoring algorithm works on the GMAT. The exact algorithm is unknown and is undoubtedly far more complicated than I will be able to convey in this post, but there are some generalizations that can be made and an understanding of these general principals will go a long way toward achieving a better score.
Most people understand that the number of questions right is not the main determinant of a person’s score. Actually, at the higher levels of the Verbal section the number of questions right definitely does matter, so you need to be careful on Verbal not to put yourself too far behind because a string of wrong answers at the end of the test will definitely lower your score, especially if you were doing really well and tracking towards a very high score. But on Quant, most people get around half of the questions wrong and even people who score at the top end of the scale still get between 1/3 and ½ of the questions wrong. It is the level of difficulty of the questions that you are able to answer consistently right that really determines your score.
It is important to understand and really accept this fact – people whose score is artificially low because of poor time management often do not fully appreciate this fact and it is often the principal reason that their scores suffer. You can’t think of the GMAT the way you think about most tests (where, in order to score well, you need to get almost every question right). Because the questions will just keep getting harder and harder, it is a simple fact that at a certain point the questions will be too hard for most test takers and at that point it becomes foolish to waste time on questions that you are likely to get wrong anyway. This fact about the GMAT is one of the things that makes the GMAT so great, in my opinion. Just think of it – you know you are going to get about half of the questions wrong anyway, so it takes a lot of the pressure off on a questions-by-question basis. In my opinion this is much better than a test in which you need to get almost every single question right in order to do well (the GRE is actually an example of this and that is one reason that for some people the GMAT is a better test than the GRE).
Even if you believe that you are capable of answering all or most of the questions correctly, you need to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. If you can’t and if you try anyway, one of two things will probably happen (both bad): One is that you will spend a ton of time on the question and obviously if you do that too many times you will run out of time before you get to the end of the test. The other is that you will spend 2 minutes on the question, realize that you can’t answer it in a reasonable amount of time, and then make a guess, having now wasted 2 minutes. One of these scenarios is what plays out for most people who have time management issues.
The first step in correcting this is realizing that you will likely get ½ the questions wrong no matter what you do. So it doesn’t make sense to “go for it” on every question, especially if it’s a question that you recognize is hard and/or will take a long time to solve. My next post will cover strategic guessing and the different ways you can guess, both to save time and maximize your score, so stay tuned for that. A second consideration that will help is to realize that 2 minutes per question is just an average (75 minutes divided by 37 questions), but that does not mean that you should aim to spend 2 minutes on EVERY question. I wrote another post about this titled “The Myth of 2 Minutes Per Question” so I don’t want to rehash all that I wrote there, but basically it is fine to spend 3 or 4 minutes on some questions (if you are reasonably confident that you can get them right in that amount of time). If you couple that with some strategic “let-gos” (questions that you quickly dump once you realize that they are really hard or time consuming), you get a much better result than spending 2 minutes on every question since you can spend 3 or 4 minutes on some questions, thereby allowing you to get those right and much less than 2 minutes on other questions that you probably wouldn’t have had right even if you had spent 3 or 4 minutes!
One last thing I will mention and come back to in a later post: the early questions definitely matter a little bit more and warrant slightly greater attention. Again this topic deserves its own blog post, but it is a pretty accepted fact in the GMAT world that the first 5 or 10 questions on the test have a greater impact on your score (and all of my experience over the last 11 or 12 years tutoring people for the GMAT supports that). Now, some people go overboard with this and spend way too much time on the early questions and then completely run out of time way too early in the test. Basically what I advise my students is that you should be A LITTLE MORE WILLING to go for it on the early questions. So if you are close to an answer and you need an additional 30 seconds, I would take it. Or if it’s a question that you are not sure that you can answer but you think maybe you can or you anticipate that it will take a long time but that you can do it, then I would go for it if you are on question 2 or 3 or something like that. BUT, you should not feel like you have to get all of the early questions right – that is almost certainly not going to happen and aiming for that will almost certainly cause you to fall way, way behind. The other thing to throw in here is that the questions decrease in importance the further you move away from question 1, so you should be less and less willing to spend extra time as you move further into the test and by around question 10 it doesn’t really matter anymore.
Remember, time management is an issue for almost everyone who takes the test. I scored a 790 on the GMAT and even I have to push myself on both sections to make sure I finish on time. Even if you are slow in the way that you work, it just means that you need to learn how to be more selective in choosing which questions to really go for it on so that you have time to answer the ones that you really can answer. The flip side of that is that you obviously need to be willing to let go (quickly let go) of questions that are low percentage questions for you or that will clearly take a long time to answer. My next post will expand upon how exactly to judge when to skip a question and the different types of guessing that can be employed in order to save time and maximize your score. Stay tuned!