u/Adam_GMAT_GRE

I have seen quite a few posts here from folks struggling with time management on the GMAT Quant section. It was definitely something I struggled with too during my GMAT prep, so I wanted to share a few things that helped me.

A bit of context - when I started GMAT prep, I was pretty out of touch with a lot of the high school / college math tested on the exam. I started around 8 months before most R1 deadlines, but because I was aiming for some Early Decision applications, I gave myself around 6 months to hit my target score. I spent the first 2-3 months on developing my familiarity with the content and the last 2-3 months on execution/test taking refinement. Towards the end of 6 months, I was consistently scoring 50/51 on the quant section and ended up with a final score of 780 (Q50/V47) on the classic GMAT. I also recently scored a Q89 on the GMAT focus official practice test.

I did go through a phase a couple of months before my exam when I was hovering in the Q46-48 range (equivalent to Q78-80) and I felt like I was hitting a plateau. One of the major issues was timing. I was doing okay on easy/medium and some hard questions, but a lot of hard questions consistently took me more than 2.5-3 min or sometimes even more than 4 min. This timing issue became particularly exposed in the first two official practices when a lot of the questions felt very much on the tougher side and were taking me really long to solve. Given my 50+ hrs/week full time job, I didn’t have infinite time to grind through questions and needed some major tactical changes to my approach.

Here are a few things that worked well for me:

Stricter time limits - This was a core component of my timing strategy - I challenged myself to solve most of the questions under 2 min during practice drills (or even 1.5 min if possible), even the hard ones. It didn’t always work out of course, but it really forced me to dig deep during review to find the hidden shortcuts and develop strategies that would help me get the answer faster (more on that below). My mindset shifted from “did I get it right?” to “did the get it right in the quickest way possible”

Finding cleaner solution paths - Early on, some of the hard questions were still taking too long. So, during review, I’d sometimes sit down with one question for 5-7 min + to find out if there is an alternate path - strategic use of answer choices, using odd-even number combinations and properties to solve integer based equations, using venn diagrams to solve probabilities, comparing answer choices, estimation, etc. I put in effort to come up with these myself (vs looking at the solution on GMAT Club for example), even if it took longer coz it helped me build the mental muscle to ensure I can execute on these tactics under pressure in the exam. I ended up making a list of these questions where I was able to find useful shortcuts, and I would review that list from time to time to keep some of these tactics at my fingertips and apply them more readily.

Setup for word problems - Even some of the easier word problems were taking me 2.5 + min. Word problems with long multi sentence setups were really frustrating because my accuracy was almost 100% but these consistently took me a long time. There were no freebies - unlike some of the other question types where if you know the trick you can solve it in 30 sec. I realized that my first read was a somewhat passive read - me trying to just understand the context of the word problem. I shifted to make it a bit more active - I used the first read to assign variables and write out any given relationships between the variables. The second read was then focused on understanding the key aspects of the problem and then I could dive right into solving the problem. This also made the second read much shorter and selective (sometimes even unnecessary) and helped me cut down my word problem speed by 30+ seconds.

Bailing strategies - When it comes to bailing, some people recommend bailing after spending 3-4 min on a question. I actually bailed earlier when I realized I was not getting close to the unlock point - the point where you know that you can solve it but just need to perform some more calculations. If I didn’t have a reasonable path by around 60–90 seconds, maybe 2 minutes max, I’d seriously consider making an educated guess and moving on. Either I reached the unlock fairly quickly, or the question was going to become a 5–6 minute time sink. Also, In the actual exam you can’t be too worried about your clock so I would practice this bailing tactic during my drills outside mocks to build that intuition. The exception to this bailing rule is if you’re near the end of the section and have a lot of time left. Then sure, maybe spend more time. In one of the mocks I was doing really well and getting most of the questions done in less than 1-1.5 min, and then I got a gnarly probabilities question around Q17-18 that took me 5+ min to solve. I ended up with a perfect score in that mock, but if it had happened in one of the earlier questions, I was going to bail.

Reviewing slow questions, not just wrong ones - This was a big one for me. If a question took me 3+ min, I’d still spend a good amount of time reviewing it and figuring out if there was a cleaner solution, was it a setup speed issue, did I recognize the unlock too late, was I slow with calculations, etc. This really helped me squeeze the juice out of the limited number of official questions and massively helped develop that pattern recognition

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of time management strategies. Fundamentally, if you get better, you get faster, and that takes practice. But these are the ones that benefitted me most in terms of improving overall execution efficiency once the content was in my grasp.

Happy to answer questions/follow ups!