Should all of my SC practice be timed?

Do chapterwise sets first. I found it helpful. I believe time is everything. You keep monitoring it always

Hi MarsMan,

Before I can offer you the specific advice that you’re looking for, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

Studies:
1) How did you score on each of your Official GMATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for each)?
2) How long did you study before each of your 2 attempts?
3) What study materials have you used over the course of all of your studies?
4) On what dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?

Goals:
5) What is your overall goal score?
6) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
7) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

While you might need to work on your SC skills, it's not clear whether that's the only thing you should be working on or not. As such, you might also choose to purchase the Enhanced Score Report for your 2nd GMAT. While the ESR doesn’t provide a lot of information, there are usually a few data points that we can use to define what went wrong on Test Day (and what you should work on to score higher). If you purchase the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you.

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

Thank you all! This is encouraging. I'll keep timing my SC.

EMPOWERgmatRichC

Studies:
1) How did you score on each of your Official GMATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for each)?
Q46 V36

2) How long did you study before each of your 2 attempts?
I have studied for around 100 hours.

3) What study materials have you used over the course of all of your studies?
MGMAT, Veritas Prep, OG 2018

4) On what dates did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?
Past CATs
(Diagnostic) Kaplan Q34 V32
Veritas Q46 V35
GMAT Practice 1 Q48 V35
GMAT Practice 2 Q49 V32

Goals:
5) What is your overall goal score?
Q49 V40

6) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
I will apply to start in 2021

7) What Schools are you planning to apply to?
Top schools are Stanford, Berkeley, Wharton, INSEAD

Hi MarsMan.

Most of your SC practice should be done untimed. People come to me time after time asking what they can do to increase their verbal scores, and often, a huge part of the reason why they are not seeing increases in their verbal scores is that they are doing all of their practice timed.

Your primary task is to learn to clearly define what makes choices incorrect or correct, and you won't have time to learn to clefine those things if you do all your practice timed. There is no point to getting questions incorrect on a timed basis. Your job is to get them correct, and if, at this point, your doing so takes more time than the test allots, then that's where you stand.

So, your best bet is to do your practice untimed and work on getting faster. You can certainly time how long it takes you to correctly answer the questions and seek ways to become more efficient and reduce the time it takes.

Can you get them correct in three minutes each on average? Then seek to get them correct in 2.5 minutes each on average. Keep working on them and get your time per question closer and closer to 1:20 to 1:30 per question.

Once you get closer to test day, it might make sense to do a lot of timed practice, but for now, just work on getting them correct as fast as you can.

Also, even after you have answered the questions, it can be super valuable to go back and further analyze the choices to see even more than you saw the first time. The better you are at seeing what there is to see, the faster you will go.

Hi MarsMan

First of all, I do have a timing issue with my SC(though other sections also played their role in increasing the time).
Here's my take. Will keep it to SC only.

From day one of my prep I thought RC is gong to take the most of my time during exam. But before starting I read few threads on gmatclub and almost all suggest that if RC sentence is not understood properly the passage can't be. So I started with Kaplan Verbal Guide(not promoting it) and slowly I gained confidence and since I am a non-native it was high. I referred to Thursdays with Ron's videos as well and tired practicing in that manner.

But on the test day I just froze and could not answer SC with any confidence which ultimately hampered other sections also since my first section was Verbal. Later, I checked what went wrong - an easy guess - that I was taking more than average time(Verbal) leave alone taking lesser time for SC. What I did wrong was that I didn't practice questions topic/chapter-wise as suggested by Ron as well. Learnt that developing a process/approach matters more then timing alone.

I am again on my journey towards bettering myself and started from basics again not to mention with discipline.

Hope I am making sense.

Interesting advice from Marty, I am one of those guys who says ALL practice should be timed. The reason I say that, is that I see a lot of people doing all of their practice untimed or they don't know when they should transition from untimed to timed and start timing themselves. Instead, they do everything untimed taking 5 mins per question and then get shocked why their verbal score requires a magnifying glass.

I don't disagree with Marty - you want to get your foothold setup, but you should not be doing it untimed for more than perhaps 30% or 20% of the time. Timing provides a few values: 1) Stress and 2) Realistic conditions.

Don't shelter yourself too long or otherwise, it will be like practicing boxing on easy opponents and then going to face Mike Tyson. Make sure you get beat up a little or a lot along the way, it will be a more fair fight at the end.

While, clearly, jumping from untimed practice to taking the GMAT could be a bit of a shocker that wouldn't work out very well, I can say that I personally have gotten great results with little timed practice. What I have done is seek to develop skills strong enough that the time constraints imposed by the test are virtually irrelevant.

My approach to answering practice questions has involved three levels of accomplishment:

Level 1: Know basically how to answer a question.

Level 2: Know how to answer a question and answer it correctly.

Level 3: Know how to answer a question, answer it correctly, and answer it within the amount of time one would want to allot to that type of question when taking the test.

So, the game isn't to see how I do within the allotted time. The game is to see how fast I can accomplish Level 2. If I get to Level 2 within the allotted time, then I'm at Level 3. If it takes more than the allotted time to get to Level 2 for a particular question or question type, then I work on going from Level 2 to Level 3, while maintaining Level 2.

A key reason for doing practice untimed is that there is an emotional component, a going through the fire type of component, to arriving at a correct answer. If you constantly practice timed, you don't give yourself opportunities to experience that going through the fire component. It's so valuable to see a question, and go from the stress of feeling as if you have no idea how to answer that question to figuring out a way to answer that question time after time for question after question. After a while, you become the resourceful, confident hacker that you have to be in order to rock the test. Timed practice lets you off the hook. You don't have to fight your way to the correct answer. Time's up anyway. When you practice untimed, you have no out. If you don't arrive at the correct answer, you don't because you haven't seen what you had to see, you haven't been careful enough, or you have given up.

All that said, in my training to hit my score goal, I did take 15 to 20 practice tests. So, I did, of course, get some timed constrained practice that way.