GMAT Time Management

In this post I want to address one aspect of dealing with time management on the Verbal section of the GMAT: shaving time off of Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions. I recently tutored a couple of students who really benefitted from this advice so hopefully it can help other readers out there!

First, it’s probably good to first understand that there are 2 general ways to save time on either section of the test: global time management strategies and question-specific time management strategies. Global time management strategies deal with how to manage yourself across the entire section – in other words, choosing to selectively dump questions, allocating a little more time to the early questions, etc. I plan to write a post about these “big picture” time management strategies for the Verbal section so stay tuned for that (and I have already written a couple for the Quant section so feel free to check those out here and here). But in this post I am getting more at ways to shave time off individual questions, in this case Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension.

Here is the most important thing to understand: it’s hard to do well on RC or CR if you don’t really, really understand the passages (the “passages” in CR are really referred to as “stimuli” so I will use that nomenclature from here on out). What I have noticed with the people I have tutored (and what I intuitively know to be true for myself as well) is that it’s just really hard to read more quickly than you are capable of reading without experiencing a significant drop in comprehension. Now, just to be clear, there are definitely ways to read more effectively, on Reading Comprehension passages in particular. But that is really about becoming better at that skill and becoming faster just becomes a natural outgrowth of understanding HOW to read the passages more effectively.

However, if you genuinely need 3 minutes to read a Reading Comp passage or 1 minute to really process a Critical Reasoning stimulus, then forcing yourself to do it faster is likely going to cause you to so poorly understand what you just read that you will not only spend more time going through the answer choices, but also get more questions wrong. I know this to be true for myself as well. I scored a 780 on the GMAT and I am NOT a fast reader. If you forced me to read something more quickly that I am capable of processing it, I wouldn’t understand much of what I read. Believe me, I have tried!

Well then, how do you shave time off Critical Reasoning and Reading Comp then? It’s really all at the answer choices. Here’s the thing. If you really properly read a reading comp passage or critical reasoning stimulus, you should have a pretty good shot of answering the questions quickly, probably on an initial read through the answer choices. This may not be true for a detail question on Reading Comp since often on those questions you really do need to go back to the passage and reread what was written about the detail in question, but on most of the other questions you may be able to be pretty fast and only sacrifice a little bit in terms of accuracy.

The above is true in particular for Critical Reasoning. Let’s take a question from the Big 4 (this is the nomenclature I use for strengthen, weaken, assumption, and useful to evaluate questions, all of which are very, very similar). If you understand precisely (and I mean precisely) what the conclusion is, understand what that conclusion is based on, and have an idea of what a potential gap is between the evidence and the conclusion, you will very likely sense the right answer when you read it. As important or more important, you will probably sense what is wrong (especially what is outside the scope or irrelevant) right away. So you may be able to read pretty quickly through the answers and have a very good sense of what the right answer is.

Now, if you had the time you might want to read back through some of the answers again, then go back to the stimulus and reread it, etc. And this may ultimately yield a different answer. But if you really read the stimulus in the right way from the outset, you can often end up with the right answer even just on your initial read through the answers.

There is a very easy way to experiment with and practice this: start a timer, read the stimulus really carefully and effectively (I often read the stimulus 2 or even 3 times before I really understand it at the level that I need to), and then read through the answer choices and select your answer (trying to be pretty fast at the answer choices). Stop the clock and see how much time you spent. Then WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE CORRECT ANSWER, restart the clock and spend as much additional time as you want, rereading the answer choices, going back to the stimulus, etc. Then compare your answers and the time spent. I have done this experiment with many of the people I tutor and the result is usually that with significantly less time people tend to get roughly the same number of questions correct. Sometimes they change their answer from wrong to right, but other times they change it from right to wrong, and it usually more or less evens out. And most of the time people end up picking the same answer in the end anyway, again often with significantly less time.

A similar thing can be done with Reading Comp. I personally find that if I understand a reading comp passage really well (again there is a skill to reading the passages effectively that falls outside the scope of this post) I can answer most of the questions pretty quickly. On the actual test, to the extent that I have the time to do so, I would probably go pack to the passage to verify my answers in many cases, in part because when I am taking the GMAT I am aiming for a perfect score and don’t want to get a single question wrong. But if you asked me to just pick an answer and be pretty fast with it, I would pick the right answer almost every time without needing to spend a lot time. Even on detail questions when I would be most inclined to go back and find the relevant details, I can often sense the right answer because I remember the specifics just well enough and because I can sense in the wrong answers things that just don’t fit, have the wrong tone, etc.

And to repeat, this all comes because of a very good initial read of the passage – I just would not skimp there. So on a passage that has, say, 3 paragraphs, I might spend 2 or 3 minutes reading the passage. But if I needed to I could probably answer each of the questions in about 30 seconds. If there were 4 questions and if we include the time spent reading the passage, the total time spent would average out to about 1 minute per question (2-3 minutes for the passage and 2 minutes for the questions at 30 seconds per question). Now at only 30 seconds per question I might not get every question right, but that is pretty darn fast and represents a significant time savings without a huge loss in accuracy. So if you are running out of time on Verbal and need to shave some time off, this is one way to do it.

Part of the reason I was motivated to write this post is that I recently had an experience with a guy I tutored that really served to confirm these ideas for me. This particular student initially had issues with how he was approaching Verbal questions, but as we approached his test date, it was really all about time management. Given enough time, he would get Verbal questions right at an 80-90% clip, but on his first practice test after working with me, he did not do well on Verbal. Most tellingly, he described very vividly what others I have tutored have experienced: when he was doing RC and CR questions, he was so pressed for time and was therefore reading the passages and stimuli so quickly that he basically wasn’t comprehending anything, and everything we had worked on just went out the window. So I discussed the above strategies with him, had him practice them, and on the next practice test his Verbal score went from a 34 to a 44!!! That is a ridiculous jump and 44 is an absurdly high Verbal score.

Let me conclude by mentioning that what I am discussing in this post really fits with my larger, more general theory that time spent up front on things (both on the GMAT and in life in general, actually!!!) is time well spent in the long run. So on Problem Solving questions, I really try to get the people I tutor to stop knee-jerking into a path and spend more time thinking about the question and how best to approach it (or even whether to approach it at all or just dump it). On Data Sufficiency as well, I often find that the key for many people is what they take away from the question stem – people who rush through the question stem often either take more time in the end or get the question wrong.

It is a little counter-intuitive when you are in a rush to slow things down, especially when you are eager to get started answering or solving a question and you know that time is ticking. But the extra time spent up front understanding and strategizing often pays dividends in the long run, both in terms of getting a question right and in terms of the overall time you end up spending on the question.

It is a pretty well-accepted fact that on the GMAT the early questions are slightly more important than the late ones, especially on the Quantitative section (everything I have seen in all my years as a GMAT tutor has confirmed this and there have been some good experiments done by others on the GMATPrep tests that seem to confirm the theory pretty conclusively…feel free to follow the link to read those articles). In this post I hope to help clear up some of the often misunderstood implications of this idea and help you understand how to manage your time given the slightly disproportionate importance of the early questions.

The first thing to clear up is that there is nothing particularly special about the number 10 that makes it the clear demarcation point. Whenever I think about this concept it makes me think of a conversation I had with my wife about getting pregnant. She was nearing 35 and remarked that she needed to get pregnant before she turned 35 (she was 33 or 34 at the time) because she read that you have a greater risk of having a baby with birth defects when you are over 35. But like the first 10 question concept on the GMAT, it is best to think of it on a spectrum. It’s not like you are not at risk when you are 34 and then all of a sudden you are at a huge risk when you are 35. You are at a slightly greater risk at 35 than at 34 but at 34 you are at a greater risk than at 33 and so on. Why do experts use the number 35 then? The same reason that people say the first 10 questions on the GMAT – it’s a nice round number. So again, the best way to think about it is as a spectrum. The first question is probably a little more important than the second one and the second a little more important than the third and so on. Once you get to AROUND question 10 it probably ceases to be as important, but it is a spectrum – I would be a little more willing to go for it on question 7 than on question 9 and perhaps a little more willing on question 9 than question 11. But at around the question 10 mark it probably ceases to be important.

The second thing to clear up is that this is all a question of degree…again it is a spectrum and is not black and white. It is NOT true that you have to get the first 10 questions right to get a really high score (in fact most people who get really high scores do not get the first 10 right). And no single question really matters that much – not even question 1. I actually just tutored someone last week who got question 1 wrong and then got the next 12 or so right and then proceeded to get a lot more wrong throughout the rest of the test (probably about 13 wrong total) and got a 49. And I have tutored many, many people who have gotten 3 or 4 wrong in the first 10 and gotten 48 or 49. The early questions do seem to matter more and certainly if you dominate on the first 10 or 15 questions you are extremely likely to have a very high score, but again it is a matter of degree – those questions matter a little more and doing well on them will help, but it is not necessary to absolutely dominate on the early questions to get a high score.

Again the way I like to think of it is as a spectrum where the questions go from slightly greater importance to slightly less importance as you move from question 1 forward. People tend to overcompensate and spend WAY too much time on the early questions and then find themselves completely out of time later on the test and are then forced to guess on 10 or more questions. That generally will not lead to a high score. So what should you do? Well it depends a little on the level that you are at…

If you are not at a very high level on Quant then spending loads of extra time on the early questions is particularly ineffective. Here’s why: Assuming that you do get some of those really early questions right (like maybe 1 through 3 or 1 through 4) you are then going to be seeing very hard questions. If you are really not capable of answering those questions correctly then spending extra time on them is a foolish waste of time. There is no sense in getting yourself in front of 800 level questions and spending a lot of time on those questions if you are really at a 600 level. Even if you get some of those questions right you will probably be way behind on time and then you will eventually find yourself getting 600 level questions wrong later on in the test. At that point not only will you not get the equivalent of 800 on Quant but you probably won’t even get 600 Quant because the algorithm knows that even if you were able to get some 800 level questions right, anyone who is really at an 800 level would also get nearly all 600 level questions right.

If on the other hand you are at a pretty high level on Quant (let’s say you are scoring 40 or higher on Quant) then it probably does make sense to spend some extra time on those early questions. But only to a point!!! First of all, if the question is one that you just don’t think you can answer in a reasonable amount of time then it just isn’t worth it – guess and move on. Spending 5 minutes and then getting a question wrong is just about the worst thing you can possibly do on the GMAT. What I recommend is being A LITTLE more willing to spend time on those early questions and that extra willingness should progressively diminish as you approach the 10 question mark.

So for example, let’s say question 3 looks really hard but you think that you can probably answer it in 3 or 4 minutes. On question 3 I would probably go for it. If that same question appeared at question 23 and if I was already 5 minutes behind I would probably choose to guess and move on. That is how the particular placement of a question on the test may affect whether you try to answer it – at question 3 maybe you would go for it and at question 23 maybe you would not.

To take another example, however, if I was at question 7 and was thrown a really difficult question that I wasn’t sure I could answer I might choose to just guess and move on. It would depend on how likely I thought I was to get the question right, how long I thought it would take, and how far ahead or behind I was at that point. If I was 50/50 and thought it was going to take 4 minutes I probably wouldn’t do it (at question 7). If that same calculus presented itself on question 1, however, I might go for it. I might even go for it at question 7 if by some chance I was ahead a little on time, but if I was already behind I probably wouldn’t go for it.

So what we are talking about here is a SLIGHT willingness to spend more time on the early questions. You should NOT feel as though you need to get those first 10 right – that probably won’t happen anyway and trying to make it happen is likely to screw up the entire section. And again this strategy of spending a little more time on the early questions makes more sense for someone who is at a higher level. In either case remember that it never makes sense to spend a lot of time on questions that you are unlikely to get right. Instead find a way to guess cleverly – even if it is question 1.

One more thing I would like to add to round out this discussion. The strategy of spending a little extra time on the early questions depends on counterbalancing that by spending less time on the questions that follow. In my opinion you should probably not spend more than about 5 extra minutes on those first 10 questions. So if you should be at the 55 minute mark by the end of question 10, I would not want to be any further than the 50 minute mark at that point. It’s not that hard to make back those 5 minutes across the course of the rest of the section, but again you have to be aware of the need to do so and plan accordingly. If you “strategically dump” a few questions scattered through the rest of the section (say, for example, questions 13, 17, 25, and 31 just for argument sake) you should be totally fine. And if you were able to do it on what you knew to be very hard questions, questions that you would have been unlikely to get right anyway, all the better!

All of this takes some practice. Some people are able to perfect it pretty easily. Others need to take 4 or 5 practice tests before they understand how to strike the right balance. So be patient and give yourself some time to implement it properly. The key is to be aware that it is a balancing act and that you can’t go too far in spending extra time on those early questions!

In this post I would like to expound upon a theory of mine that gets at the slight differences in the scoring algorithm on the Quant and Verbal sections of the GMAT. In a previous post I commented on the fact that although on the Quant section the number of questions you get right has very little to do with the score you receive, on the Verbal section the number of questions right matters much more. I don’t think there is any official explanation for this phenomenon, but I have long had a theory that I think makes pretty good logical sense. Understanding the nuances of the algorithm can help you learn what exactly you need to do to achieve a high score on each section.

Quantitative questions, by nature, are completely unambiguous. If x equals 10, then x can’t also equal 15 (well ok it can in a quadratic equation and in some other special situations, but you get the point). Verbal questions, on the other hand, are by nature a little less black and white than Math questions. Of course GMAC writes questions that are technically unambiguous, but the problem is that it is tough to make a Verbal question really, really hard without crossing the line a little into ambiguity, so there tends to be a limit to how hard a Verbal question can realistically get. That problem does not exist on Quant. There is almost no limit to how hard the test writers can make a Math question and it will still be completely unambiguous, completely black and white.

This helps explain the differences in the algorithm on each section. On Quant, the questions can pretty much just keep getting harder and harder until nearly everyone would get the questions wrong. Really only at the very top reaches of the Quant section (say scores of 49-51) will people get less than 10 questions wrong. So for most people the differentiating factor in scores on the Quant section is just the level of difficulty of the questions that test takers are able to get right consistently. If your breaking point is 650, your score is 650 (or whatever that would correspond to on the 6-51 scale that the section is scored on). If your breaking point is 720, then your score is 720. The number of questions that you get wrong is not really a factor except, perhaps, in differentiating between people who get a 49 and 50 and 51.

But since there is more of a limit to how hard a Verbal question can get (again before it starts to drift over the line into “ambiguous/unfair question territory”), the number of questions right and wrong starts to become more of a differentiating factor. That’s because many test takers get up into the very hardest Verbal questions so at that point the main way for the algorithm to differentiate between a 38 Verbal and 40 Verbal or 42 Verbal and 45 Verbal is just by number of questions wrong. This is a bit of an oversimplification since the level of difficulty of the questions may vary a little so that would still be a factor in the score, but at the higher reaches of the Verbal scoring spectrum the score really becomes much more about number of questions wrong. And to be at a really high Verbal score (like 40+) you really can’t have many questions wrong. For a 40 you might have 8 or 10 wrong, but for a 44 or 45 you are probably talking about 5 or 6 wrong or even less and then for 47 Verbal or 49 Verbal you are looking at 1 or 2 wrong total!

There are a few implications to be drawn from this. First of all, since you are likely to get a lot of questions wrong on the Quant section, it really does not make sense to spend undue time on questions that you are likely to get wrong anyway. Furthermore, running out of time at the end of the Quant section is not that big a deal (assuming that you actually select answers to all of the questions to not incur the unanswered questions penalty). Again, you are going to get a lot of questions wrong anyway so coming to question 34 with 2 minutes left and having to make some educated guesses on the last 3 or 4 questions will not impact your score that significantly.

On the Verbal section, on the other hand, you need to be much more careful about time management and not put yourself in a position of having to guess on the last 3 or 4 questions. That will impact your score more detrimentally, especially if you were tracking toward a really high score. If you had only 5 questions wrong up until question 35 and then had to guess on 36 through 41 and got 5 of those last 6 wrong for a total of 10 wrong on the Verbal section, that would be a big deal and would lower your score significantly.

Another upshot is that you need to be a little more certain of your answers on Verbal questions than on Quant questions. Most people probably feel like the opposite is what often happens since the nature of Verbal questions is that they feel ambiguous, but of course they are not and you need to be that much more rigorous in the way you choose your answers to ensure that you limit the educated guessing to a bare minimum. You just can’t afford to get Verbal questions wrong with the same frequency that you can Quant questions. What that means, practically speaking, is that you can’t run out of time on the Verbal section and that you need to choose answers because you KNOW they are right, not because you THINK they are right. That is obviously easier said then done, but see my post on The Principle of No Ambiguity for some more insight on that idea.

Knowledge is power and on the GMAT having a better understanding of the scoring algorithm is the kind of knowledge that helps lead to a better score. In a future post I am going to come back to the issue of pacing strategies on the Quant section so stay tuned!

In a couple of previous posts I discussed some of the main reasons that people don’t see much of a score increase when preparing for the GMAT. In this post I will turn to yet another common cause of artificially low GMAT scores: poor time management!

Over the years I have tutored a number of students whose lower than desired GMAT scores have been almost entirely the result of poor time management. One girl in particular stands out. She came to me with a 560 score on the official test, but after I had my first session with her it was clear to me that she should be in the 700 range. Unfortunately she had no idea how to properly manage her time on the test, particularly on the Quant section, and the result was a score that was really well below her potential. I tutored her for about 6 weeks focusing almost entirely on time management and she managed to score a 710, which is probably the score she should have had in the first place had she known how to manage her time better!

First of all, one must have an understanding of how the scoring algorithm works on the GMAT. The exact algorithm is unknown and is undoubtedly far more complicated than I will be able to convey in this post, but there are some generalizations that can be made and an understanding of these general principals will go a long way toward achieving a better score.

Most people understand that the number of questions right is not the main determinant of a person’s score. Actually, at the higher levels of the Verbal section the number of questions right definitely does matter, so you need to be careful on Verbal not to put yourself too far behind because a string of wrong answers at the end of the test will definitely lower your score, especially if you were doing really well and tracking towards a very high score. But on Quant, most people get around half of the questions wrong and even people who score at the top end of the scale still get between 1/3 and ½ of the questions wrong. It is the level of difficulty of the questions that you are able to answer consistently right that really determines your score.

It is important to understand and really accept this fact – people whose score is artificially low because of poor time management often do not fully appreciate this fact and it is often the principal reason that their scores suffer. You can’t think of the GMAT the way you think about most tests (where, in order to score well, you need to get almost every question right). Because the questions will just keep getting harder and harder, it is a simple fact that at a certain point the questions will be too hard for most test takers and at that point it becomes foolish to waste time on questions that you are likely to get wrong anyway. This fact about the GMAT is one of the things that makes the GMAT so great, in my opinion. Just think of it – you know you are going to get about half of the questions wrong anyway, so it takes a lot of the pressure off on a questions-by-question basis. In my opinion this is much better than a test in which you need to get almost every single question right in order to do well (the GRE is actually an example of this and that is one reason that for some people the GMAT is a better test than the GRE).

Even if you believe that you are capable of answering all or most of the questions correctly, you need to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. If you can’t and if you try anyway, one of two things will probably happen (both bad): One is that you will spend a ton of time on the question and obviously if you do that too many times you will run out of time before you get to the end of the test. The other is that you will spend 2 minutes on the question, realize that you can’t answer it in a reasonable amount of time, and then make a guess, having now wasted 2 minutes. One of these scenarios is what plays out for most people who have time management issues.

The first step in correcting this is realizing that you will likely get ½ the questions wrong no matter what you do. So it doesn’t make sense to “go for it” on every question, especially if it’s a question that you recognize is hard and/or will take a long time to solve. My next post will cover strategic guessing and the different ways you can guess, both to save time and maximize your score, so stay tuned for that. A second consideration that will help is to realize that 2 minutes per question is just an average (75 minutes divided by 37 questions), but that does not mean that you should aim to spend 2 minutes on EVERY question. I wrote another post about this titled “The Myth of 2 Minutes Per Question” so I don’t want to rehash all that I wrote there, but basically it is fine to spend 3 or 4 minutes on some questions (if you are reasonably confident that you can get them right in that amount of time). If you couple that with some strategic “let-gos” (questions that you quickly dump once you realize that they are really hard or time consuming), you get a much better result than spending 2 minutes on every question since you can spend 3 or 4 minutes on some questions, thereby allowing you to get those right and much less than 2 minutes on other questions that you probably wouldn’t have had right even if you had spent 3 or 4 minutes!

One last thing I will mention and come back to in a later post: the early questions definitely matter a little bit more and warrant slightly greater attention. Again this topic deserves its own blog post, but it is a pretty accepted fact in the GMAT world that the first 5 or 10 questions on the test have a greater impact on your score (and all of my experience over the last 11 or 12 years tutoring people for the GMAT supports that). Now, some people go overboard with this and spend way too much time on the early questions and then completely run out of time way too early in the test. Basically what I advise my students is that you should be A LITTLE MORE WILLING to go for it on the early questions. So if you are close to an answer and you need an additional 30 seconds, I would take it. Or if it’s a question that you are not sure that you can answer but you think maybe you can or you anticipate that it will take a long time but that you can do it, then I would go for it if you are on question 2 or 3 or something like that. BUT, you should not feel like you have to get all of the early questions right – that is almost certainly not going to happen and aiming for that will almost certainly cause you to fall way, way behind. The other thing to throw in here is that the questions decrease in importance the further you move away from question 1, so you should be less and less willing to spend extra time as you move further into the test and by around question 10 it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Remember, time management is an issue for almost everyone who takes the test. I scored a 780 on the GMAT and even I have to push myself on both sections to make sure I finish on time. Even if you are slow in the way that you work, it just means that you need to learn how to be more selective in choosing which questions to really go for it on so that you have time to answer the ones that you really can answer. The flip side of that is that you obviously need to be willing to let go (quickly let go) of questions that are low percentage questions for you or that will clearly take a long time to answer. My next post will expand upon how exactly to judge when to skip a question and the different types of guessing that can be employed in order to save time and maximize your score. Stay tuned!

In a previous post I discussed the tendency that people have to “go on a hunch” on Data Sufficiency questions. This is a big no-no because DS questions are designed to punish people for making unwarranted assumptions. Generally speaking it is best to try to prove what you think to be true on Data Sufficiency. Nevertheless, there are some cases in which it would not be wise to go that far, cases in which it might be better to make a good educated guess rather than spend a lot of time proving out your hunches.

The Problem That Most People Have: Not Pushing the Statements Far Enough

The problem that most people have on Data Sufficiency is that they don’t realize how far they need to go to prove the statements to be sufficient or not sufficient. Test takers are often satisfied with thinking that a statement is sufficient or not sufficient even though they are not really that sure. But as I often tell the people that I tutor, when you are 80% sure on Data Sufficiency that really means that you have about a 50% chance of getting the question right. That is because the statements are designed to appear one way when in fact they are the opposite (i.e, they appear to be sufficient when in fact they are not). So generally speaking you should push the statements further until you reach near 100% certainty on your judgment (see my post about “going on a hunch” for more about how to “prove” the statements are what you think they are).

The Crucial Decision Point

Yet there are cases in which it might be better to not spend the time to reach that higher level of certainty. Essentially there are 2 factors that you need to consider when you are evaluating a statement and deciding how far to go. You need to weigh your level of certainty against the amount of time that it would take to reach a higher level of certainty. For example, if you are close to 100% certain that a statement is sufficient and if it would take another 2 minutes to prove that it is sufficient, it would probably be best to take the educated guess that you have and not spend the extra 2 minutes. If, on the other hand, you are 75% sure and it would only take an additional 30 seconds to be more certain, that is an easy decision: spend the extra 30 seconds.

An Example

Let me give some examples of both sides of that decision process. I am going to use a question that I used before in another post because it so perfectly illustrates how this decision making process should unfold. Consider the first example:

In the above question, the statements don’t appear to be sufficient individually at first glance. Statement 2 definitely cannot be sufficient because without knowing what k is there would be no way to know what the remainder is since essentially we would be free to add whatever we want to 3^22 and could therefore change the remainder. Therefore we can say with certainty that statement 2 cannot be sufficient. Most people look at statement 1 and think the same thing: if we don’t know anything about n, we cannot answer the question. There are 2 things, however, that should give you pause. First, n is related to the exponent and is not just a number that we are adding on to the 3^(4n+2) so it could be that there is some pattern in what results when you take 3 to different exponents. The other thing is that if you conclude that statement 1 is also not sufficient, you would end up at answer choice C, which seems suspiciously obvious in this case. Of course if we know the value of n and k we will be able to answer the question. That is almost certainly too straightforward for a Data Sufficiency question.

So at this point you would find yourself at an important decision point, one that presents itself on many DS questions. The answer could possibly be C, though that is unlikely. The only plausible alternative, given that we know that statement 2 is definitely not sufficient, is that the answer could be A. Now, here is where you need to think about the amount of time it would take to prove that statement 1 is sufficient or not and weigh that against how certain you are about what the answer is on this question. If you were really unsure and if you thought you could work out very quickly whether there is a pattern with statement 1 such that it would be sufficient, then it might be worth doing that. However, if you feel really confident that the answer cannot be C and that choice A is the only plausible alternative and if you further realize that it will take you a very long time to prove that statement 1 is sufficient, it would probably be better to just guess A and move on. The answer in the end is A.

Another Example

Lets take a look at another example, one that will illustrate the other way that this decision process can unfold. Again this is a question I have used in other posts:

Tom, Jane, and Sue each purchased a new house. The average (arithmetic mean) price of the three houses was $120,000. What was the median price of the three houses?
(1) The price of Tom’s house was $110,000
(2) The price of Jane’s house was $120,000

On this question most people blow through statements 1 and 2, believing them each to be not sufficient and then come to choice C. But again, just like the last question, choice C seems deceptively easy. Of course knowing 2 of the home prices and the average would be enough to calculate the third and therefore the median. Again we face this all important decision point. How certain are we and how long would it take to achieve a higher level of certainty? Well in this case it really doesn’t take too long to test out numbers and see if we can indeed get more than 1 median. On statement 1 we can, and so most people then assume that statement 2 is also not sufficient since it seems to provide the exact same type of evidence as statement 1.

But again, how certain are we and how long would it take to become more certain? Most people are pretty sure in this case that statement 2 is not sufficient, but again it would not take very long to test numbers to see if we can get 2 different medians. If it takes an extra 30 to 45 seconds to be completely certain, that is probably worth it. Consider that if you don’t spend that extra 30-45 seconds and get the question wrong then you have wasted much more than 30-45 seconds. So again, if you are not close to 100% certain and if it wouldn’t take that long to be more certain, it is worth spending the time. In this case you would be rewarded for pushing statement 2 because it actually is sufficient, much to most people’s surprise.

Conclusions

To summarize, it is important on the one hand to push the statements and try to arrive at an answer with a very high degree of certainty. “Thinking” that a statement is sufficient or not sufficient is just not enough on Data Sufficiency since things so often turn out to be contrary to expectation. That said, there is an important decision point that comes on every DS question when you must ask yourself, “how certain am I and how much time would it take to become significantly more certain?” If you are almost 100% certain and achieving a higher level of certainty would take a long time, it is probably best to go with your gut and move on. But if you are not nearly as certain and if it would not take that much time to achieve a higher level of certainty then you should probably spend the time to really prove what you think to be true.

Knowing how to guess well on GMAT Quant questions is a tremendously important factor on the test. Most people just don’t do it – they guess of course, but not well! But even if it is something that you are not doing it is a skill that can be acquired and practiced and this post will describe some of the ways to cultivate the ability to guess well on GMAT Quant questions.

First, let me describe the importance of strategic guessing. The GMAT algorithm obviously cannot differentiate between someone who really knows how to solve a problem and someone who is able to guess correctly. If on 10 700-level questions you were able to guess correctly on half, the algorithm would assume that 700 level questions are right at the limit of your ability even if you are actually only able to reliably answer 650 level questions and below. On my very first GMAT I was expecting a Quant score of about 46 but ended up with a score of 49 and I am certain that a big part of the reason I was able to score so high (at a time when I didn’t know that much about the test and how to answer many of the questions) is that I am very, very good at strategic guessing and I remember making some really good educated guesses on the test.

To detail all the ways in which you can make good educated guesses on GMAT Quant questions would require a lot of space so I will save that for some future posts (stay tuned), but I will give an example here just to show how effective it can be and then will spend the rest of the time discussing how one can practice strategic guessing, since it’s my opinion that most people never try to actively practice the technique (to their own detriment).

To begin with, it helps to understand that guessing on questions is obviously not about getting lucky. GMAT questions are designed so that strategic guessing is often made more possible – often several of the answers wouldn’t make logical sense so that one can often eliminate answers and make really good guesses. Why would the test maker allow for that? Because the GMAT is not a Math test; it’s a reasoning test and by allowing test takers to get the right answer using clever reasoning instead of complicated Math the test writers reward people for the kind of reasoning that the test seeks to measure. And it almost seems as though the harder the question, the more there was an effort put in by the GMAT writers to allow for strategic guessing. Take the below official GMAT question for example:

This is a pretty hard question, especially if you don’t know how to do it. But you can get the answer with some good old-fashioned reasoning and it might even be faster that way anyway. Just doing some quick calculating, train X is traveling 20mph and train Y is traveling 33 1/3 miles per hour. Therefore, the trains will meet closer to the side that train X is leaving from. Since the distance is 100 miles, train X will travel less than 50 miles and train Y will travel more than 50 miles by the time they meet. That already eliminates choices C, D, and E. Why would the GMAT writers allow for such an easy elimination? Well the fact that they put three answers that are all greater than 50 is deliberate – they are facilitating logical guessing, even encouraging it!

We can even go one step further. Given their different speeds, in 2 hours train Y will go 66 2/3 miles and train X will go 40 miles. So that means that by the time train X travels 40 miles, the trains will already have crossed. Therefore train X will travel less than 40 miles when they meet and the answer must be A. Again the insertion of 40 as an answer is deliberate to allow for the above kind of reasoning. And this question is but one example among many that demonstrate how strategic guessing is made more possible by the GMAT writers themselves.

So, how does one practice strategic guessing? Well the fact is that most people don’t even know that logical guessing is an important tool on the GMAT and even when they find that out (as my students obviously do) they don’t practice it. The first step is to realize that guessing is just a fact of the GMAT. Unless you are scoring 50 or 51 Quant, you are going to have to guess. So the question is, will you waste time on questions that you will likely be unable to answer and then make flustered panicked guesses or will you realize on some questions that it is not worth your while to solve the question and then proceed directly to logical, strategic guessing? Often you will find that when you choose to make a smart, educated guess you end up not guessing at all because guessing turns into eliminating all but one answer!

Once you accept that you will have to guess you can set about practicing the skill. Again it is beyond the scope of this post to discuss all the ways in which you can guess strategically (I will expand upon that in later posts), but you need to actually structure it into your studying. Most people, when they practice GMAT questions, say for example in the Official Guide, just try to answer every question without thinking about guessing. Of course trying to solve all of the questions is a good idea, but to mimic the test day experience, it is better to consider on every single question you do whether you could answer the question correctly and in a reasonable amount of time. This is part of the decision process that should happen on every question you see. If you have a high level of confidence and think that the question won’t take that long, you obviously go ahead and solve it. But if your confidence is not high and/or you think that it may take a very long time, then it would be foolish to dive in and try (at least on test day). Now when you are doing practice questions on your own, you’ll ultimately want to solve it, but why not first practice guessing on the questions that you think you might not be able to answer. After you guess you can try to solve the problem and then see if your guess was correct, but since letting go of questions and taking the time to make smart, educated guesses is part of the skill set that you need on the GMAT you might as well practice it as you prepare for the test. And frankly, you are not just practicing the art of guessing, you are forcing yourself to really think about the question and what to do with it before jumping in, an ability that is absolutely crucial to success on the GMAT.

What you will likely find, especially if you learn how to guess effectively and how to identify questions that are “low-percentage” questions for you, is that strategic guessing is often more likely to lead you to the right answer than sweating through a really hard problem and then making a flustered guess after you’ve realized that you wasted too much time. So as you work through the Official Guide or other official GMAT questions, take the time to assess whether, if you were to see that particular question on the GMAT, it would be wise to really attempt to answer the question or whether it would be better to make an educated guess and move on. Becoming a better and more strategic guesser is an often overlooked but critically important factor in achieving GMAT greatness so it makes sense to practice and cultivate that skill!

It never ceases to amaze me how few people use the official GMAT resources that are available. This is perhaps a credit to how good the major test prep companies have gotten at convincing people that their resources are an accurate representation of what is on the test. While third party resources can be very valuable for learning the content that appears on the GMAT or for learning how to more effectively approach questions, when it comes to doing practice questions or especially practice tests, there just is no substitute for using official GMAC-released practice questions and practice tests.

I have written about this in other blog posts, but I am not exaggerating when I say that probably 1 out of every 2 people who contact me for help with the GMAT has either never taken an official GMAT practice test or has not been using official GMAT questions to practice with (and these are people who HAVE been using other resources like those of ManhattanGMAT or Kaplan or one of the other test prep companies). I think what usually surprises me most in these encounters is that people don’t even seem to understand the difference! Often the reaction that I get is something to this effect: “You mean that ManhattanGMAT tests are not official tests?!”

Sometimes just getting people to start using official GMAC resources is enough to get them a significant score increase. In fact, sometimes just even having them take an official practice test is enough. Again a very common occurrence for me is a student who contacts me complaining that they have studied a lot but are still stuck at the 550 mark or 580 mark or something like that. When it becomes clear that all they have done is ManhattanGMAT tests I will often say, “well how do you know you are stuck at a 550 mark when you have never done an official test?” In many of these cases the person then goes and takes an official GMATPrep test and contacts me back to let me know that they scored in the mid-600’s or some score that was significantly higher than what they had been scoring on the ManhattanGMAT or Kaplan tests that they were taking.

Again I am not arguing that third party resources are useless. Even the practice tests can be useful when used for the correct purpose. But trying to give yourself an authentic test-taking experience or trying to gauge exactly what score you are at are not reasons to take a third party test!!! Test prep company materials are particularly good at teaching the content that serves as the foundation on the Quant and Verbal sections of the test and some resources are also good at providing insight into how to approach the questions more effectively. The official GMAC resources are not particularly good in those regards.

But once you have learned the core fundamentals and have begun to understand how to approach the questions you MUST, MUST move on to official questions and then official practice tests to ensure that you are practicing on the types of questions that will appear on the exam.

There are a couple of reasons this is so important. First of all, it is very difficult to write questions that really accurately reflect the questions on the actual exam and test prep companies typically do not have their absolute most experienced and knowledgeable people writing the questions. This is especially true for Verbal questions, which are so hard to write in a way that accurately reflects the logic of the questions on the actual test. If you write a sentence correction question that is too grammar focused and not logic and meaning focused enough then you have a question that really departs from the actual questions in a pretty significant way.

Another issue is the distribution of questions that you see. Often test prep companies focus too much on some question types and not enough on others. So you might be practicing on a lot of combinatorics and probability questions when these questions are not that well represented on the actual test (and even when they are, they are often very difficult questions that may be better to guess on anyway). This is especially true of 3rd party practice tests – if the distribution of different question types is not accurate to the test then the practice test is not a realistic representation of the test. What’s worse is that when you analyze your performance on the test you may walk away with the belief that you need to work on particular topics (like combinatorics and probability) when you are coming to that belief only because you saw an unrealistically disproportionate number of those questions.

And with the practice tests, level of difficulty is important too. If the questions on a non-official practice test are just too hard then you may run completely out of time and draw the conclusion that you have serious time management issues that you don’t actually have. And the score that the tests output may lead you to believe that you are doing much better or much worse than you actually are – test prep companies try their best to approximate the scoring algorithm of the actual GMAT, but no one knows exactly how the algorithm works so the scoring system on third party practice tests is bound to be at least a little bit inaccurate (and in some cases it can be wildly inaccurate).

The official guide books and the official GMATPrep tests, on the other hand, present real questions that appeared on previous GMATs (which means that the questions underwent a rigorous vetting process before they ever made it onto the exam). The distribution of questions, both in the books and on the tests, is a good representation of what appears on the actual GMAT. And the scoring algorithm on the GMATPrep tests is the actual scoring algorithm that is used on the GMAT.

So people, please, please use the official GMAT resources!!! Again it is fine and even helpful to use third party resources to help you master the foundational material and learn how to approach the questions more strategically and effectively. But when it comes to practice you MUST use official questions. And when it comes to taking practice tests and gauging your overall performance, you MUST use the official GMATPrep practice tests!

When preparing for the GMAT you will often hear people say that you should spend 2 minutes per question on Quant questions, yet this advice is misleading and I have seen it hurt many test takers. Of course with 62 minutes and 31 questions you do have on average 2 minutes per question, but that does not mean that should aim to spend 2 minutes on each question.

This flaw is usually based on 2 misunderstandings, in my opinion.

First of all, people have a misunderstanding of how many questions they need to get right on the Quant section in order to have a high Quant score. Now, if you are aiming for a 50 or 51 then indeed you need to have almost every question right. But if you are aiming for a 47 or 48, then you can probably have close to half of the questions wrong, provided of course that you are seeing hard questions throughout the section and getting many of those questions right as well. So when they think that they need to get virtually every question right, people tend to want to distribute their time equally across all questions. Again, this strategy is based on the flawed assumption that you need to get almost every question right. Given that most test takers are likely to get about half of the Quant questions wrong, including people at the top of the Quant scale, it obviously doesn’t make sense to spend undue time on questions that you are likely to get wrong anyway. One of the worst things that can happen on the test is to spend 5 minutes on a question and then get it wrong!

This leads to the second realization, which is that not all questions require an equal amount of time. First of all, some questions will be relatively easy and can be done in a minute or less (this is even true for high scorers….in my own GMAT attempts, one thing that was obvious to me was that I was definitely seeing some Quant questions that were not that hard). But other questions genuinely require more than 2 minutes and if you have an internal 2 minute timer going on every question, like many test takers do, you are never going to be able to answer some of those harder questions. So some questions are worth spending 3 or 4 minutes on, provided that you think you have a very good chance of answering them correctly with the extra time.

Now, what do you do if you need 3 or 4 minutes on a lot of questions but don’t have that many questions that you can answer in 1 minute or less. Well then you need to guess on a certain number of questions and the goal is to try to figure out when you see a question whether it is one that you are likely to be able to answer correctly in a reasonable amount of time or not. Consider this thought experiment: What if you were capable of answer most hard questions correctly but you needed more like 3 minutes on each question? Well if you limit yourself to 2 minutes per question you are going to get most of those questions wrong. If, theoretically, you could throw away every 3rd question very quickly and just spend 3 minutes on each of the other questions, you would get 2/3 of the questions correct and you would finish on time. Of course it takes some time to decide whether a question is worth your while or not and you are not always going to get the questions right that you don’t throw away, but on the flip side you may be able to guess really well on the one’s that you do throw away and get some of those right as well!

The point is that guessing is a part of the GMAT and should be part of your strategy, especially on the Quant section. Anecdotally, the first time I took my GMAT I got a 760, but I knew that I had time management issues, so I went into the test expecting to guess on at least 3 or 4 questions (not because I couldn’t answer them, necessarily, but because I knew that they would take me a long time and that I needed to make up time somewhere). So when I started to fall behind on time, I would go into what I call “Shark Mode.” I would basically hunt for an opportunity to let go of a question and guess in the interest of gaining back some time. So I would be on the lookout for a really hard question that I also thought I could make a pretty good educated guess on in a very short amount of time. It was really a shift in attitude such that guessing was not an act of defeat but an act of self-preservation. And if you consider that most GMATer probably don’t do this, you very likely give yourself a big advantage over other test takers when you do!

So if time management is an issue for you, as it is for most test takers, remember that some questions genuinely do require more than 2 minutes per question and part of being successful on the GMAT is knowing how to decide whether a question is worth your time (even if takes 3 or 4 minutes to solve) or whether it would be better to quickly let go of the question and make a quick, educated guess.