GMAT Pacing Strategy: Mastering GMAT Timing

Understanding GMAT exam timing strategy is key to getting a score that represents the best of your abilities, and many students who are good at the fundamental skills this exam is designed to test can still receive very disappointing results if they are not able to enact an optimal pacing strategy. I tell my students that until they learn to handle time, timing will set an upper limit on their score. After they master timing strategy, the limitations placed by poor timing will be lifted and content knowledge and efficient solving can start to show up in higher scores. This means that in order to see score improvements driven by work on content, it is essential to master timing. So don't put this off until the end! Timed work to internalize good timing habits and ways of working should be a core component of your studies from day one.

At TestCrackers, we've helped thousands of students succeed on the GMAT, and in the course of that have been able to identify common ways in which many people fundamentally get timing wrong and wind up hurting their performance, as well as the best ways to address these issues. I've outlined some of the keys to successful time management on the GMAT exam below.

GMAT Exam timing strategy as a set of errands

Bear with me for a moment: to understand timing on the GMAT Exam, I need to take you on a short detour. Imagine that you get off work at 7 pm and have to be home for your partner's birthday dinner at 8 pm. You have a list of things that you expect to complete on the way:

1. Buy extra large eggs and 2% milk
2. Get gas
3. Renew your driver's license
4. Return the car you rented
5. Buy your partner a birthday present

A typical GMAT-taker might do a really good job carefully buying the extra large eggs and 2% milk. They look for a good price on gas and fill up the tank, but then suddenly see the clock and realize they're behind. They rush to the DMV and stress out while the minutes tick away. Eventually they get frustrated as the clock strikes 8, and it suddenly hits them that they aren't going to get a lot of credit for buying the right eggs when they show up late, without a present, and with extra fees for late return of the rental.

In the same manner, you don't get a lot of credit for successfully completing questions at the beginning of the GMAT Exam if you eventually run out of time, get flustered and mess up the later parts.

GMAT Exam timing benchmarks as a set of errands with benchmarks

Not wanting to repeat these mistakes, many students try to adopt benchmarks. With quick mental math, our student calculates that 60 minutes to do five errands means 12 minutes per errand. The following year they take off determined to do better.

Eight minutes later, the eggs and milk are tossed into the passenger seat. Our student screeches into the gas station, cuts off an older lady, and fills up the tank. Ahead of schedule, and remembering that haste makes waste, they carefully park at the DMV and get in line for their license. The line is long, but they know they have some time to spare. #benchmarksuccess! 

The clock hits 7:30 pm. Still waiting in line, they read the receipt and notice that they bought diesel gas and oat milk. A sense of panic washes over them as they try to tell themselves that it isn't a big deal. They know that they're behind schedule now and their heart starts beating louder, but they've already invested so much in this line, and it does seem like the end is just around the corner. At any moment now it will be their turn. 

At 7:45, their number is called! But the man at the desk immediately asks for three documents demonstrating proof of identity. Our student only brought two, so tearing up the tag with their number and cursing audibly, they run out.

At 7:55 they scrape (just a little bit) into the gate on their way into the rental lot. Medium sized eggs fly everywhere. “Here's your car back you filthy animal” they yell as they fling the keys at the dumbstruck attendant. Sprinting now, they grab two dead flowers from a neighbor's lawn and collapse inside their front door at exactly 8:00 pm. After several deep breaths and a swig of oat milk, they manage to say “Happy Birthday love, I got you these” as they hand off the dead flowers. #benchmarksuccess?

The secret to GMAT Exam timing success

There are several key facts that could have avoided both the issues above and the corresponding problems on the actual GMAT exam. The vast majority of people taking the GMAT exam:

1. Do not have time to accurately complete all of the problems, and rather than accepting that, they try to fit in more than they realistically can, leading to careless errors, running out of time at the end, or both.
2. Will see several problems that they do not know how to solve, spend a disproportionate amount of time working on them, and often get them wrong anyway.
3. Are unaware that top GMAT Exam scores (for example, over 80 on quant) can be achieved with significant numbers of errors (8 or more), so long as those errors occur without wasting a lot of time and are spread evenly across the exam.
4. Focus excessive mental energy on timing during the test, rather than building habits during practice that make timing on test day automatic and that free up mental energy for solving tough problems.

Driver's license renewal simply isn't going to happen on this day, and neither are some of the GMAT Exam problems that you see. The sooner you realize that and devote the time that you might have wasted on a doomed attempt to more productive purposes, the better off you will be. And you can always circle back to try to renew that license (ie attempt the few toughest and most time consuming problems) if you have time at the end.

Imagine that you knew from the start that you weren't likely to complete all of the errands and knew that instead you just needed to do a good job on the ones that you had time for. You'd buy the right eggs, milk and gas. You'd look at the line at the DMV and calmly, immediately say “Not today, Satan.”  Then you'd return the rental, buy a gift, and show up at home on time.

5 rules for an optimal GMAT Exam pacing strategy

1. It's ok (and often even beneficial) to get hard questions wrong quickly; it is disastrous to take too long (over 3 minutes) on any question, regardless of whether you get it right or wrong.
2. Top scores are possible while skipping as many as 2 questions out of every 7, so long as you use that extra time (ideally "borrowed" from questions you were likely to miss anyway) to reduce careless mistakes due to rushing and to maintain a very high accuracy on those that you don't skip.
3. Don't speed up and slow down during the test, giving your passengers whiplash and destroying your carefully purchased eggs! There is one right speed for you to solve problems, and it is far below the scrambling, breakneck pace at which many students try to fly through every problem on the exam. Focus instead on maintaining a steady cadence at which you can keep your accuracy very high, and then "pay for it" using skips on problems that you suspect you may not correctly solve in 2:30 - 3:00 minutes.
4. The more you look at the clock or think about timing strategy during the test, the less mental energy you have to solve problems. The key to timing success on the GMAT is to internalize benchmarks and skipping strategy during practice, and then only look at the clock briefly at few checkpoints (your three benchmarks) to determine whether you need to make minor adjustments.
5. Speed with Accuracy comes from going on the most efficient route at a measured pace. You need to be heading in the right direction before you start running. Have you ever seen a little kid birthday party in which the children are blindfolded, spun around, and then need to hit a piñata? There is often at least one kid who takes off running in the completely wrong direction. Don't be that kid. Rather than rushing into work that might be unnecessary, inefficient, or straight-up wrong, carefully choose an efficient plan for setting up and solving a problem before you start doing any actual work.

Putting GMAT Exam pacing into practice: And what it means to skip

To practice this, you need to change how you perceive time during an exam or timed set. On the problem level, focus on using the first 15-30 seconds not for rushing into frantic transcription and calculation, but for determining whether you have a good plan to set up a familiar framework and solve the problem efficiently. If you do and are confident in your ability to solve it, go ahead and do so knowing that you have a good plan. But if you cannot see an efficient solution in under 30 seconds, and you haven't yet hit your targets for skips, you have a great opportunity to bank some time for later and move on (skip)! 

A lot of students will spend 30 seconds or even 1-2 minutes working on a problem and then realize that they are lost, and they'll tell me that they "skipped it". This is a common and dangerous mistake. A skip cannot be a problem that you try out and then give up on; it must be a problem that you say "no thanks" to before you've invested time in it. Consequently, a skip doesn't have a to a problem that you couldn't solve; instead, it just must be a problem that suspect might be more time consuming, challenging, or trickier than average.

A timed, adaptive exam is not the environment in which you want to take on a series of new challenges completely outside of your comfort zone; that is a great thing to work on outside of timed exams! A good GMAT Exam prep course or self-study session will teach you to quickly recognize efficient frameworks that can help increase the number of problems that you can solve and reduce the time that you spend doing so. But during the test, your goal should be to effectively employ the skills you've already honed, not to develop new ones on the spot.

Remember that you can review and change up to three answers per section. As a result, there is even more reason to recognize early indicators that some problems are more likely to be time consuming and/or lower accuracy for you and skip them aggressively, knowing that you can return to three of your skips at the end and tackle whichever ones seem most manageable on this second visit.

All of these is designed to allow you to maintain a measured but efficient pace. Rushing leads to unforced errors on problems that you know how to solve, and this is punished severely by the algorithm. Used effectively, skipping leads to significant time savings on questions that you were likely to miss anyway, that have limited impact on your score, and that you can always circle back and correctly answer if you do still have sufficient time after notching up all the potential wins from your stronger areas.

GMAT Exam Pacing Benchmarks

In the Quant Section, complete seven questions (5 solved and 2 skipped) every 13 minutes. Hitting this goal will leave 6 minutes at the end to review and solve up to 3 of the 6 skips. Use an error log to look for patterns in what types of quant problems take you longest to solve and offer below average accuracy: those are good options to skip.

For the Verbal Section, complete six questions (5 solved and 1 Critical Reasoning question skipped) every 10 minutes for the first 18 problems and then the remaining five problems (no skips) in the next 10 minutes. This leaves 5 minutes at the end to review and solve up to 3 of the 3 suggested skips. Again, use an error log to track your performance on different types of Critical Reasoning questions; those that take you longest and offer below average accuracy are good options to skip.

In the Data Insights section, complete seven questions (5-6 solved and 1-2 skipped) every 15 minutes. Note that this doesn't leave built in time to review and solve your skips. But if certain problems seem like they may throw you off track, we still recommend marking them and circling back at the end if you are able to complete the rest of the questions with time remaining. It is never a good idea to get stuck, spinning your wheels on one tricky problem and not making any progress.

The key for all sections is that learn what pace you need to work at to be accurate and how to hit the benchmarks through timed practice sets, and that adjustments when you' get off track must be made by skipping, not by rushing.

Work smarter, not just harder

Despite what you may hear on internet forums, there is no magic bullet for instant GMAT Exam success. The key to achieve your goal score is to focus on the following:

1. Improving time management to get more credit for the problems that you successfully solve.
2. Learning structures and frameworks that allow more accurate and efficient solutions.
3. Drilling good habits that enforce use of these strategies at an adequate and efficient pace, but never at the breakneck speed that tends to produce careless errors.

If you're willing to put in the work, and if you're smart about how you do it, you can improve your score significantly. Shoot me an email at seth@testcrackers.org and I'll be happy to share more details about pacing guidelines for the GMAT Exam and point you towards other helpful resources, whether you study on your own or with our courses and tutoring.