GMAT quant Speed

Hello, madgmat2019. Your problem is not uncommon, and even those who are quite strong at mathematics sometimes fail to see how to complete a question within 2 minutes. It is important to know when to cut your losses and make an educated guess, rather than potentially sacrifice accuracy and, well, questions to doggedly pursue one tough question that will likely eat up 3-4 minutes. Sure, you can do that, but in my experience as a tutor, people who end up performing better are those who strategically guess and apply their understanding to more accessible problems (not necessarily any easier than the one that was skipped). Along these lines, I advise students to observe a 20-second rule: if you have jotted down pieces of information from the problem but cannot see how to fit them together, and your pencil (or marker or writing implement) is not moving, after about 20 seconds, see if you can eliminate anything based on logic alone and then choose the most logical answer among the rest, hopefully just two or three answers. For instance, there was a tough multivariable problem as a question of the day recently, one that involved three variables, A, B, and C, which also had quadratics. If you have ever worked such a problem before in algebra, you know that with three equations, you can isolate one variable or another using the equations at hand and, with one value in hand, work backwards to solve the others. Since the problem in the QOTD series told us that each variable was positive, the logical question-solver would know that only one answer would be valid for each quadratic solution, the positive one. To be honest, I just reasoned that someone could figure out each variable, given statements 1 and 2 together, but that either one independently would fail for the same reason that such statements would fail in a simpler algebra problem with three variables: you need all three equations to isolate a variable. The question took about a minute, and according to data on that question, most students spent about 2 and a half minutes, I think, solving the question instead. The takeaway? Sometimes you do not have to solve a question, especially in certain DS questions, to answer what is being asked. You will not get bonus points for an elegant, step-by-step solution, I can assure you. Just get in, get out, and move on.

Of course, you can always strengthen your understanding of certain types of problems, whether your core knowledge is lacking (e.g., in certain types of number properties questions, or in combinatorics questions) or your test-specific technique is off, but by and large, it is better to focus on answering more questions comfortably than on making sure you get everything correct. I even had two students recently who took different official practice tests, missed the same number of questions, and walked away with scores that were 6 scaled points apart from each other. The student who fared poorer could not let go of the notion that in order to do well, every question needed to be correct; the latter student just did her best on each question, got some right, some wrong, and completed the test in the nick of time. The kicker? The one who earned the lower score answered more Hard questions correctly. Yes, I will say that again. Put another way, the student who answered more questions correctly at the Easy and Medium difficulty performed better than the one who got more Hard questions correct. The one student had burned out on the Hard stuff, the other had just forged ahead, all the time sticking to a plan of attack. Food for thought, to be sure.

In short: 1) strengthen your core knowledge of the mathematical concepts that appear on the test; 2) identify weaknesses especially and work harder on addressing any deficiencies; 3) let questions go after a short period of inactivity; 4) make sure you give yourself adequate time to complete the test, even if you have to guess on a couple.

Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew