A different perspective on timing

Question

When people ask for help with the GMAT on this forum, the majority state that they are struggling with timing. Many GMAT strategy posts emphasize timing as something absolutely critical. Does timing deserve the attention it has garnered?

Imagine yourself being in this situation. You're on the Math section, with 30 questions answered and 5 minutes left. What do you do? Keep going at a normal pace until there are 30 seconds left, then randomly guess all remaining questions, or speed up and try to cram as many questions as you can into the remaining 5 minutes?

It is well known that in the GMAT, earlier questions are more important than later ones. The optimal strategy in this scenario is to get as many questions  correct  as you can, and then randomly guess the rest in order to avoid the penalty for leaving questions unanswered. If you rush to try to deliberately answer more questions, your accuracy will suffer and so will your score.

Imagine a different scenario. Let's say you need 2.5 minutes on average to answer a Verbal question correctly. But at this speed you will get a chance to seriously answer only 30 out 41 questions. What do you do then? Be content with answering 30 questions with confidence, or try to answer each question in 1 minute and 50 seconds and hope that the stars align and not diminish your accuracy?

Again, the optimal strategy is to tackle the section at a pace you're comfortable with and randomly guess when there is a minute or so remaining.

My point is this. Instead of forcing yourself to follow a pace suggested by GMAC who set the time limit on each section, you should determine your own pace through un-timed practice. If a question takes you 5 minutes to solve, you are either not approaching it right or unable to answer it under reasonable conditions. As you get more exposure to GMAT questions, you'll learn your strengths and weaknesses, the most efficient approach to each type of questions, and how to determine if a question may look too difficult to try to seriously tackle. As you know the test and yourself better, you will naturally increase your speed. You don't learn how to ski fast right away; you learn to ski first, and ski gradually faster as you become more familiar with skiing. If after getting familiar with Verbal questions, you still spend 3 minutes on average to solve a Verbal question, then so be it. "Timing" will only serve to decrease your accuracy and your score.

I've noticed that people complain about getting poorer performance on their practice problems and tests when they introduce timing to their practice routine, but the problem is rarely that they run out of time; rather, the primary issue is that their accuracy goes down when they race with the clock. Looking at the clock is very distracting.

I am not saying that there isn't a benefit to imposing a time limit on yourself during practice. You could set a time limit and try to solve the allotted questions during the time window, if that would force you to look for more efficient ways to approach the questions. Or, you could make it a goal to automate the steps to go through to solve a particular kind of question, and routinely practice the system so you get better at using it. If you have done the same thing 10 times, you get faster. If you have done it 50 times, you get even faster; otherwise, it's boring. And never worry about timing again. Getting questions right is enough trouble.

mikemcgarry · Answer

Dear HiLine , I'm happy to respond. :-)

My friend, I disagree with some of your premises. I would say, in the sophisticated psychometric programming that goes into the CAT on the GMAT, all the questions are equally important. This is the consistent claim of all the folks with Ph.D.s who design the CAT. Psychometrics is a profoundly sophisticated discipline and I only understand the basics of it. The questions are in no way weighted favoring the earlier question. People have this misconception that the first few questions establish a route and then there is no recovering from that trajectory once you are on it. This misconception profoundly underestimates the profound robustness and power of the psychometric analysis that the CAT is performing. On the topic of end of section guessing, this is also not nearly as simple as most people thing. In fact, the Ph.D. folks at GMAC did a study themselves and came to some surprising conclusions, which I outline here: Guessing Strategies for the GMAT I also disagree with your recommendations. I would argue that people should introduce the clock as early as possible in their study process, so that they have thorough integrated their intuition for how a 90-second-time interval feels by the end stages of their studying. See: Pacing and Timing Strategies for the GMAT Finally, it's true that fixating on the clock is counterproductive and it's true that anxiety reduces performance, but here, rather than temporarily removing a stressor that inevitably will be re-introduced at some point, I think it is much more worthwhile to put serious and determined effort into practicing stress-reduction techniques, which are notoriously neglected in the modern world. See: Overcome GMAT Exam Anxiety Those are my thoughts. Let me know if you would like to discuss any of this. Mike :-)

ccooley · Answer

I agree with Mike on pretty much everything in the post above, particularly the myth of earlier questions being more important in any absolute way.

I'll also add this: the issue described in this post is basically a strawman. The best response to having 5 minutes and 7 Q questions left isn't to have a triage plan in mind, because no matter how good your end-of-section-running-out-of-time triage strategy is, if you're having to use it at all, something is fundamentally screwed up and you're heading for a score that's much worse than you deserve. The best response is to recognize that being in that situation at all means that you messed up pretty badly somewhere upstream, work out why it happened via careful review, and make changes to keep it from happening next time. If you're regularly ending up in that situation on practice tests,  you aren't ready to take the official GMAT yet, because the scores you're getting still aren't reflecting your real abilities.

HiLine · Answer

Mikemcgarry,

Great to have you join this discussion. I know off-hand that this is going to be a fun and enlightening debate!

First of all, thank you for sharing the information that most test takers, including me, have not been exposed to before. According to the GMAC research, randomly guessing for the last few questions in the Verbal section does not do you any benefit - so test takers, please read this article: https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/guessing-s ... -the-gmat/

Now, on the relative importance of earlier questions, perhaps it is a myth and perhaps it is not. I do agree it is a misconception that there is no recovering from a bad start, but whether early questions tend to be weighted differently than later questions is still a matter of a debate; it is possible that the differential weighting has been caused either deliberately or inadvertently by GMAC psychometricians' algorithm. Has GMAC ever announced that all questions are equally important? Even if they make their best effort, things may not go their way. As you said, this science is complicated.

I find it interesting that we lie on opposite ends of the spectrum. While I claim that timing isn't necessary, you opine that timing should be introduced into the practice regime as early as possible.

When someone learns a new skill, even if he intends to apply the skill under a limited time condition, he should always learn without time pressure first in order to allow the brain to gradually create new neural connections. You have seen my analogy in skiing. I could make a similar analogy in chess, college exams, or any other learning environment in which a learner expects to eventually face a situation where he has to apply under time pressure skills he has recently acquired. For the GMAT specifically, one has to learn how to dissect an argument, how to interpret a math question, how to grasp a reading comprehension passage, etc. In order to adequately perform these tasks, the learner often has to refrain from the urge to gloss over details, and instead focus on observing how the little pieces are tied together to form an argument or a numerical problem.

It is when the learner has acquired the analytical skills and become familiar with the thought process behind the solving of GMAT questions that he can gradually increase his speed while not sacrificing accuracy. Increasing speed through familiarity is a natural process in the brain. Ask anyone that is extremely fast with something whether he learned the skill first and became faster or learned the skill fast from the beginning. Ask a pianist, a blitz chess master, or a swimmer how he became fast at their craft or their sport. Each GMAT practice question, especially in your early stage of studying, is a learning experience. If you make a habit of rushing through the question, especially when you are not yet familiar with applying the new concepts, you will not fully understand the argument or problem, and will miss critical details, a classic error that will prevent you from figuring out the appropriate answer. Answering questions correctly is a good habit. Answering questions incorrectly is not, timed or un-timed.

Ccooley,

In the ideal world, you wouldn't need a triage plan. But avoiding running out of time by sacrificing accuracy is bad practice, which is basically the whole point I'm trying to make here. You could end up in a situation where you have 15 minutes left to answer the last 7 questions, and you wouldn't know, until you get your actual score, whether you screwed up badly by rushing through earlier questions. During practice, if you score well despite running out of time, I'll take that as a clearer sign you're ready for the test than if you score badly despite always being able to attempt all questions.

AjiteshArun · Answer

If that's what you were actually trying to say, I think a lot of people would agree with you (it'll come down to personal preference).

Not really. The tactic you've described is one that the GMAT algorithm is  designed  not to reward.

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