I mentioned this timing drill in another post. It has helped a lot of our students. Try it and see if it helps you speed up:

A timing drill that students find very useful:

Quick First Step
Select a set of 10 or 20 questions, and give yourself 30 seconds per question to get started on each. When you’re completed with the set, go back and finish each question, checking to determine how accurate your first steps were. The goal of this drill is to begin working through each question quickly and accurately – even if all you do is transfer values, variables, diagrams, etc. from the screen to paper. Students who begin working quickly are at a tremendous advantage, as prolonged hesitation not only wastes time, but also increases anxiety.

You will also learn through this drill where your initial errors are made when attacking a question quickly. Often students will find a pattern in the way that they start questions incorrectly – misinterpreting equations, making incorrect assumptions, etc. – and can improve substantially by simply correcting one or two major error categories.

If the above drills are tough to complete in 30-40 seconds per question, then you may simply want to train yourself to categorize by not even getting started on the problems, but taking 30 seconds to just identify “what are they asking” and “what skills will be necessary” so that you can start to see the similarity between questions and not just the differences.

Check out the links below for more on timing strategies:

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2010/10 ... for-field/

http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2010/08 ... algorithm/
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Yes. I would suggest that you look at questions as blocks of 5 where you take your time (not more than 2.5 minutes) to do the first 4 and guess the 5th one. This way, instead off running out of time and guessing 8 questions towards the end, you can distribute the guesses evenly across the test.




Manhattan Books cover the theory dude... But problem solving is a skill and skill can be honed only with practice.
Therefore, use the Manhattan Books to familiarize yourself with the concepts tested in GMAT and then use reliable sources of problems to understand HOW to apply these concepts to answer various types of questions.


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Hi All,

While most of the posts in this thread are from years ago, the basic 'pacing issue' that many Test Takers face is the same as it's always been.

To start, pacing problems do NOT exist on their own - they're the results of OTHER problems. That's important to realize - something about the way that YOU handle the Quant and/or Verbal sections is wasting time.... and as a result, you have very little time at the end of the section to handle the final 'block' of questions.

The ultimate cause of your specific pacing issue could come down to a handful of likely factors, including:

1) The approach that you take to answering the question (there's usually more than one way to do that; is YOUR way the fastest?)
2) The notes that you take (or don't take)
3) How often you reread the question
4) How often you make a little mistake (that you then have to go back and 'fix'), etc.
5) The number of specific questions that you 'overcommit' to (and spend far too much time on).

Thankfully, all of these issues can be 'fixed', but you might need to invest in some resources that actually train you how to fix these issues (or eliminate them altogether).

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich
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do your best to just pace yourself, not every question you get is solvable in exactly 2 mins, some are slower some are faster. if you feel like you reach a question that is taking forever, you may just have to let that one go and build yourself back up with the remaining questions.

Take a practice test and see what happens if you DO speed things up. You say you are worried that you don't know what will happen if you try to work more quickly, but you haven't tried it. You should not be so afraid of sacrificing accuracy for speed, be confident and do an experiment.

The more you practice working at a quicker pace, the better you will get.

Think of it this way, you know you will get a low score if you run out of time by working too slowly, so what have you got to lose by working faster?

Good luck, I hope it works out for you!

Also if you can go back and view the amount of time you spent on each question, this can be very useful in determining why you're running out of time.

If you find that most of your questions you finish in under 2 minutes, except for a few 5+ minute questions, you can easily address this by setting a time limit per question. Or getting better at realizing if you're attempting a question you simply dont know how to attack.

However, if you're finding that you're consistently taking more time than allotted per question, you need to find a way to speed up your process.

VeritasPrepKarishma

Excellent post!




Do you mean to say: Do not not try to COMPLETELY solve the problem and just concentrate on the INITIAL APPROACH/ first few steps.




If someone is unable to get answers to above questions in time limits your mentioned, does that mean he / she needs to works back on basics or there could be another causes?
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Yes. If one is facing timing issues, it is unlikely that he/she will be able to solve a question in 30-40 sec. All one needs to do is work on the first few steps, just start. Later on, one needs to get back to them, fully solve and figure out whether the start was correct or not. This drill helps one practice the skill of a quick and accurate start.
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It seems like you are spending too much time in first 20 questions. For me, what worked was being true to myself. Whenever I find myself looking at the screen and doing nothing. I will just do educated guess and move on. Looking at the screen without any intention is what is causing your timing issue.

stick to average 2 mins per question, don't marry to a question, guess and move on

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