Feeling discouraged about my speed of solving quant problems

I'm not sure if it shows the first time or the average. However, I wouldn't take the timer data too seriously, just because you don't know what those users are actually doing. For instance, I sometimes forget to start the timer until I've already been looking at the question for a minute. In that case, my time would look a lot faster than it really was.



No. If you could do that, you'd be well on your way to a Q51. But you certainly don't need to be able to do it.

That said, there are some things you should be able to do quickly. You should be able to do arithmetic, such as adding, multiplying, dividing, subtracting, factoring integers, combining a system of equations, etc. very quickly and accurately. If you can do that, you buy yourself more time to think about the problems.

You'll get faster at the 'thinking' stage as you do more problems. To speed that process up, you should spend more time reviewing the problems that you do, and asking yourself: 'what was the clue or keyword that told me to use that particular approach? How did GMATClub users manage to figure it out so quickly?' Once you identify a lot of these 'clues', you'll be able to recognize and respond to them quickly.



Not everybody agrees on this. I've seen students succeed using either approach. My own belief, though, is that you should time yourself from the very beginning. When you do a GMAT problem without a timer, you're doing a very different task, mentally, than when you do it with a timer. Doing problems without a timer will let you get away with approaching them inefficiently. It'll also encourage you to stick with tough problems until you finish them, which you can't and shouldn't do on the test. If you train yourself to work with the timer from the very beginning, you'll be doing problems in a way that will be more useful on the actual test.