GMAT Pacing Strategy: The 15/25 Rule

Hi jsheppa,

I understand your concern, but without performing well on the critical first half of questions, you have basically zero chance of achieving an elite GMAT score. So although the questions do get generally harder when you answer them correctly, it still makes sense to spend about 60% of your time on the first 50% of questions, given their outsize importance to the scoring algorithm.

It is true that in general, the questions keep getting harder the more you get right. However, also keep in mind that if you get a bunch of questions right in a row, then you will not necessarily keep getting a harder question every time. The GMAT makes adjustments to the overall difficulty levels of questions, but also makes sure to assign you questions from all areas of test content, which might mean serving you an easier question than the question you just answered correctly. There is also a roughly 13% chance that you will see an experimental question with a difficulty level that is set in advance and might not reflect the overall difficulty level of the questions you are earning (in other words, it might be very easy).

For example, even if I get all of the first 10 questions right, and I were to rank their difficulty levels from 1 to 5, then it might look something like this: 2,3,4,5,5,2,4,3,5,1.

Sometimes it really is worth an extra minute or two to get a super-hard question right, especially at the beginning of the section, where the scoring algorithm makes its initial estimate of your ability level.

Yes, this will also have the side effect of serving you very hard questions for the remainder of the test--but in order to get a great score on the GMAT, that's what you need--a bunch of hard questions answered correctly.

As the test proceeds, you will have to speed up slightly while confronting even harder questions. This is where you have to start "trusting your gut" more and being more aggressive with your answer selections in order to finish on time. Having a sound GMAT game plan, and an in-depth understanding of Data Sufficiency, Sentence Correction and Critical Reasoning strategies can help you save precious time for the Problem Solving and Reading Comprehension question types, which tend to take longer.

Leveraging the GMAT Scoring Algorithm to Your Advantage

From Q42 to Q44 to Q46 to Q50: my GMAT Quant Journey (with ESRs)

-Brian