How to improve on time?

Question

Can anyone recommend a decent tool/trick to help me improve on time. As odd as this sounds, I seem to be going slower and slower with each CAT. I was able to finish both verbal and quant on my initial CAT. 4 CATS in (3 months) and I had to guess on the last 12 quant questions and last 9 verbal in order to finish. Needless to say, my scores are not improving. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi johnnaa,

Many Test Takers deal with pacing issues during their studies, so you're not alone. However, pacing issues do NOT exist on their own - they're the results of OTHER problems. We need to define and 'fix' those other problems first before your pacing will improve.

I'm hoping that you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

1) How long have you consistently studied?
2) How have you scored on each of your CATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores)?
3) Did you take the FULL CAT each time (with the Essay and IR sections)?

4) When are you planning to take the GMAT?
5) When are you planning to apply to Business School?

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

johnnaa · Answer

Rich,

I study about 3 hours a day- 1 over lunch and 2 hours a night. And about 4 hours a day on weekends. 
I've been studying since March 3rd. Currently using 2016 OG, Manhattan GMAT fundamentals and EMPOWERgmat

Initial GMAC test 460, but considering I have been out of school 10 years and have been working in government- I wasn't too worried about this score. 
all other CATs are Manhattan
CAT 1 620 Q39 V35 4/4/16
CAT 2 520 Q30 V31 4/26/16
CAT 3 510 Q 29 V31 5/22/16

I am currently scheduled to take the exam 7/9/16
I was hoping to apply to b-school in the fall.

thanks!

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi johnnaa,

The 620 had a considerably higher pair of Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores compared with the latter 2 CATs that followed, so I'd like to know a bit more about how you're taking your CATs (and which of those scores is the most accurate of your actual skill set):

1) Did you take the FULL CAT each time (with the Essay and IR sections)?
2) Did you take them at home?
3) Did you take them at the same time of day as your Official GMAT?
4) Did you ever do ANYTHING during your CATs that you couldn't do on Test Day (pause the CAT, skip sections, take longer breaks, etc.)? 
5) Did you ever take a CAT more than once?

And I have a few questions about this most recent CAT. How many questions did you get wrong...

1) Because of a silly/little mistake?
2) Because there was some math that you just didn't know how to do?
3) Because the question was too hard?

Thankfully, the GMAT is a consistent, predicable Exam, so you CAN train to score at a high level. We just need to make sure that you aren't making improper decisions while you study.

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

johnnaa · Answer

Rich, 
Thanks for helping me with this. I was actually plugging away on your website just a minute ago. 
All CATs were taken at home, same time of day and were full tests (essay and IR too). No unusually circumstances and each CAT was new to me.

On the verbal section, prior to running out of time I had 6 incorrect (equally RC, CR and SC). I was trending 700 level and was at 87% prior to running out of time.

On the quant I had 8 incorrect prior to running out of time. Of these 4 were silly mistakes and 6 were "difficult" material- (2 fell into both categories on my error sheet). Prior to running out of time I admittedly wasn't scoring that well- around 55%.

Again, I appreciate any insight and while I'm not the endorsement you're looking for, I'm not sure my score ever would have improved if not for your tutorials!

DmitryFarberMPrep · Answer

Hi there,

I have to disagree quite strongly with Rich on this one. Pacing issues absolutely do exist on their own, and getting better at the material will not necessarily solve them. Because the test is adaptive, as you get stronger the test gets harder. It's actually quite common for people to get worse at timing as their studies progress. Initially there are many questions you don't know how to handle. As you get more confident, you feel that you can solve a larger and larger proportion of the questions, and you end up falling behind the clock. This wreaks havoc on your score!

A few tips:

1) Make timing a part of your daily practice. Do your OG practice problems timed, ideally in small sets. Then when you go back to review (and you should review every problem), make sure to think about how you could have solved the problem more efficiently. You might also discover other ways to solve the problem that do *not* seem as efficient. Figuring out why one approach works and the other doesn't on a particular problem can be a huge part of your progress. You should also look at how you did on the timed set as a whole. Did you budget your time well? If you ran a little long on a problem, did it pay off? Were you able to make that time up? If you decided to guess and move on, was that problem as tough as it looked?

2) Accept that you are going to miss problems. A lot of problems. Even at high levels of performance, it's normal to miss 30%-40% of the quant problems. Don't be stubborn and hold on to problems that aren't going well. Learn to identify tough problems, or problems that aren't working out, and let them go (with a random guess or an educated one). Again, make this kind of decision-making part of your daily practice and review. If you are using Manhattan CATs, try going into a section and sorting it by time spent. You may find it enlightening! Most people find that their 3+ minute problems are mostly incorrect anyway, so it makes no sense to spend that time. Even if you are mostly getting those long problems right, chances are there's a long string of missed problems at the other end of the scale--problems you just didn't have time to solve, even though some of them were probably on the easy side!

3) Work efficiently. Are you writing too much down? Are you rushing into the answer choices or the DS statements before you really know what you're looking for? Are you doing a bunch of arithmetic when an estimate would do the job? Just like a manager looking to improve the operations of your company, look for little ways to make your process faster. It doesn't matter if you got the problem right or wrong--could you have done it more efficiently?

Perhaps most importantly . . .

4) Commit to never run out of time on a test again. I mean it. Never! This isn't a footrace. Timing is under your complete control. You decide when to move on and when to stay with a problem, so you can decide to avoid timeouts by moving on when needed. To this end, it may help to use a system of benchmarks to check in on time. The link below details the approach we typically recommend. Whatever method you use, the key is to *enforce* it. If you've fallen behind, catch back up by dropping a problem here and there. Don't tell yourself that you'll catch up later. You won't! If the benchmarks below aren't strict enough, you can take the extreme approach: write down the remaining time at the beginning of each problem, so that you know exactly when your two minutes are up! Most people don't need to go this far, but it's far better than crashing on time at the end of a section. Again, if you're using our CATs, you can see exactly how your score plummets as you miss that string of questions at the end. That is no way to perform up to your potential!

Good luck!

https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... tch-paper/

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi johnnaa,

Dmitri has gone about describing my point in more detail (he also described a number of the issues that cause pacing issues, so it's worth noting them). Silly/little mistakes tend to 'kill' Test Takers, so you have to put a greater emphasis on eliminating them from your work. As far as the 'hard' questions were concerned, the next question is how long you spent on each of them? If you are likely to get those questions wrong anyway, then you should TRIAGE them relatively quickly, save that time that you would have spent on those questions and use that time to focus on all of the other questions in the section. Oftentimes, Test Takers spend the most time on the toughest questions and end up having to rush through too many 'gettable' questions as a result.

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

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