Answering first 10 questions correctly vs timing

thanks for the answer..
What I wanted to ask was not about spending 30 mins on the first 10 questions.. It's about overall timing. What I realized when I solve practice tests, I start to get harder questions as I answer correctly, and in return, after a point, it becomes harder for me to complete the test on time since I start to receive harder questions.. As far as I know leaving couple of questions unanswered causes lower score than giving wrong answers.. On the other hand, as I receive harder questions, probability of having more wrong questions increases and questions become to more time-consuming. My question seems like a paradox to me. And, I wonder whether this fact is included during score calculation.

You took some time to think about this one

The score depends on the number of hard questions answered correctly and easy questions answered wrong. Just answer as many questions correctly as you can. Don't spend more than 3 mins on any question. And keep an eye on the clock.


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During my latest attempt, I finished 8 questions in less than 5 minutes...I scored 49 and got plenty of time (~30 mins left on the screen while at question 32). I can firmly state that GMAT does not care how fast you answer the questions as long as you answer correctly.
One of the good things on the real test is that you will see lots of experimental questions scattered across all 4 parts of each section. While you might see some very tough questions (35-36 questions on Quant for me were very very very very complex ones - i highly suspect those were experimental), most of them might be very easy - so you won't have problems solving them.

Hi bhdrb,

On any given question that you face on the GMAT, you essentially have 2 goals:

1) Get the question correct if possible.
2) Do so in the most efficient way possible (and sometimes the 'best' approach is to dump a question that's too difficult).

One of the great aspects of the GMAT is that most questions can be answered using multiple approaches. If you find that you're spending a significantly large amount of your 75 minutes answering the first 10 questions in either the Quant or Verbal sections, then it's likely that "your way" of approaching those questions is the 'long way.' As such, the 'issue' that you're discussing is really about YOUR efficiency and precision - so you have to take a good look at how much time you're actually spending on individual questions. 75 minutes is absolutely enough time to work through all of the questions in the section, but you're not allowed to 'stare', you cannot afford to read each prompt over-and-over and you have to keep the little mistakes to a minimum. All of those skills take time to develop though.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich