Time management is arguably one of the most critical aspects of preparation for the GMAT. The perils of the ticking clock on this adaptive exam are foreign to few.
In fact, I would even go so far as to say that time management is actually one of the things that the authors of the GMAT are actively testing. And if you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. Isn’t success in the business world dependent on one being able to prioritize among a myriad of tasks, focusing more energy on those that will ultimately yield a bigger return while pushing less urgent matters to the background?
The truth is that if you do this exam right, you should be feeling the crunch of the clock on at least one or both of the two main sections (Quant and Verbal), unless you are seriously knocking the test out of the park already, in which case you are unlikely to be reading this article.
Remember that an adaptive exam will continue to throw harder questions your way if you keep getting the questions right. At some point, the questions are likely to reach a level of difficulty that if you are not careful could seriously drain your time.
My over 20 years of experience teaching the GMAT has shown me that this happens more frequently for students on the Quant section than on the Verbal, probably for a few reasons: (1) the level of adaptiveness is “steeper” on the quant, that is there are more levels of questions that the test can adapt to (2) related to the first point you can and are almost expected to miss more questions on the Quant sections than on the Verbal to still be able to score well and (3) more people struggle with the Quant section of the GMAT than with the Verbal.
Quant vs. Verbal
Now of course there are notable exceptions, especially to that last point. If you are a non-native speaker who is already crushing the Quant but struggling with the Verbal, you’ll obviously find yourself with more timing issues on the Verbal.
Micro vs. Macro
When I broach the topic of time management with my students, I like to emphasize that there are two important aspects to time management: the Micro and the Macro. In this first Part of this two-part series we’ll focus on the Micro side of time management since good time management starts there.
The Micro involves how you manage your time on each and every question. Let’s start our discussion with Micro time management specifically on the Quant section. The Quant section of the GMAT is timed at 62 minutes for 31 questions, working out perfectly to an average allotment two minutes per question. Does that mean that you should spend as close to two minutes on each question as possible?
Not really. Remember that some “tasks” are more important than others, though perhaps not exactly in the way we might think. The adaptive algorithm of the GMAT effectively gives the test-taker two primary missions, in descending order of importance: (1) Do NOT miss any (or at least very few) easy/medium questions and (2) Get some of the difficult questions right (the more the merrier of course).
Easy/Medium vs. Hard Questions and Time Management
Now you might have had an idea about these two missions already, but the point here is how they relate to the Micro side of time management. Since you simply cannot afford to miss many if any of the easy/medium, if you need to spend some extra time to make that happen – so be it, get it done! Think of the easy/medium questions as the walls and roof of your home along with perhaps some of the basic furniture like a bed and table. Without these, you literally have no “roof over your head”.
Harder questions, on the other hand, are less important. They are the extra things that you put in your home, e.g. your television, your computer, your books, or your kitchenware. Sure they are important for quality of life, but if you have no home there’s no point in even talking about these other things. You don’t spend valuable time thinking about the size of your tv when you don’t have a bed on which to lay your head at night.
This analogy is reflected in the way the GMAT is actually scored. The mathematics of the algorithm are too complicated for this discussion, but in essence you are penalized more for missing an easy/medium question than you are for missing a hard one, while at the same time getting harder questions right gives you a bigger boost than does getting easy/medium questions right. The catch is that if you don’t reliably make it out of the easy/medium realm by getting almost all of those right, you won’t actually be able to even see enough of those harder questions let alone get them right.
So the point is not to spend two minutes or less on each question, but rather to have AWARENESS of how long you are spending, specifically to notice when you are passing the two minute boundary, choosing to do so only when it’s appropriate. When is it appropriate? Either when you know that you can’t afford to miss that question (more common) or when you have some extra time to spend and you want to splurge on that big screen tv (less common). Does that mean that you need to have a two minute buzzer that goes off in your head or that you should watch the clock in the upper right-hand corner of the screen like a hawk. The answer is more the previous than the latter, but even that’s not quite right.
1-Minute Awareness
The problem with sensing the two-minute threshold is that when that alarm goes off in your head, it will be too late to take the appropriate action. A better approach is to have what my former colleagues and I at Manhattan Prep used to call a 1-Minute Awareness. One minute is the halfway point to your threshold and is usually the point in a Quant question at which you should be contemplating whether you are on a good path towards solving: “Have I settled or are about to settle in on a workable strategy” OR “Is this question more of a lost cause?” At that point you can decide whether to proceed, adopt a different strategy, decide to strategically guess or even just run for the hills (i.e. randomly guess).
The benefit of having a sense of the passage of 1 minute is that you can check in again after another minute (now you’ll be at the 2 minute mark plus/minus) and see how things are going.
If no real progress has been made, think about a strategic guess or a pure bail.
If you are progressing, but not fast enough, feel out the difficulty of the question. Now it’s worth mentioning that all you have here is your subjective understanding of how hard that question is for you: if the question feels like an easy/medium one, strongly consider sticking it out and getting to an answer you feel good about (of course within a reasonable amount of time – going too far past the 3-minute threshold is ill-advised on most occasions); if, however, it feels hard, don’t sweat switching over to a strategic guessing framework or even just bailing if you have no clue.
Micro Time Management on the Verbal
Micro Time Management on the Verbal section of the GMAT is a little more complicated given the fact that the recommended time per question average varies by question type: 1 minute 20 seconds per Sentence Correction (SC) question, 2 minutes per Critical Reasoning (CR) question, 1-1.5 minutes per Reading Comprehension (RC) question + 2-3 minutes to read the passage. However, the 1-Minute Awareness technique can still be helpful here, giving the test-taker the sense of how much time is left to complete the SC, CR, or RC question.
Very often when there is a timing issue on the Verbal, however, tailored time-management techniques will be required to target the specific areas of weakness for that student. For example, if SC is taking a student on average more time per question to get right, he/she may not want to compromise that accuracy for the sake of time. If that same student has a relative weakness in CR or RC, he/she could choose to skip a couple of CR questions or even an RC passage that looks challenging (a more extreme measure) to free up time for SC, effectively raising the allotted average time per question for SC.
Calculations have to be made based on the student’s specific strengths (i.e. more accurate areas) and timing challenges, taking into consideration as well the breakdown of the Verbal in terms of frequency of question types (the Verbal section has a few more SC questions than CR, 13-14 vs. 10, respectively)
Practice Makes (Close to) Perfect
Given the importance of the 1-Minute Awareness to Micro Time Management, it is imperative that you practice this skill. Start by setting your smart phone’s timer to a 1-minute while you are doing problems one at a time. When the alarm (or buzzer if the sound bothers you) goes off, take time to consider your options as mentioned above. Reset the 1 minute timer as you proceed and pause again when you hit more or less the 2-minute mark to re-evaluate one final time. Do this for a week or so.
Then I suggest switching over to the stop-watch system for a week, again practicing one question at a time. This time you’ll look up at your phone when it feels like 1 minute has passed, and then again after it feels like another 1 minute has passed. Since you’ll have no alarm this time, here you are testing your own sense of the passage of time. If you find that you are way off go back to the timer mode until you feel more confident in your 1-Minute Awareness.
The final phase is to work on problems in sets (something we’ll discuss more in Part II of this series). There you still want to keep up the 1-Minute Awareness discipline so on occasion you should test yourself by using the stopwatch approach (rather than the normal timer). With the lapping feature, you can hit lap each time you check-in so that you can later compare your check-ins to the passage of 1 minute.